So I come to these things with the best of intentions to live blog the hell out of the event, and then… I often realize I'd rather talk and listen and engage, let it percolate, and blog later. But for now I can offer a bit of what I've seen and a bit of what everyone is seeing at tagcamp. It's a bit like the summer camp I never had… 'cept better. ...

danah turned me on to Tagcamp, the folksonomists' answer to Barcamp and Foocamp. It's going to be happening Friday, October 28, 2005 - Saturday, October 29, 2005 in Palo Alto, CA at CommerceNet (map). I'm gonna be there — let's talk about tags, baby! Put your name on the wiki if you'll be attending! ...

Haven't seen any confirmation or anything other than the standard "we can't comment" since the rumours of Google flirting with Riya started flying. Riya (nee Ojos) uses face recognition technology to help autotag your photo collection. I got a demo of Riya from the uber-fun Tara Hunt at Tagcamp and was pretty impressed — you train the software simply by tagging a few photos of someone, and it then automagically finds other photos of that person and autotags them. It's not perfect yet, but it did make an impressive number of correct matches, even identifying photos where the person's face was turned or in shadow, etc. Of course I'm going to complain that it's Windows-only (and IE6 only, even, blech!)... which makes it a perfect candidate for the Goog, who loves to stick it to Mac users. ;) Riya plans Firefox and Mac support in the future, so I'm complaining now while the complaining is good. Anywho — you know how rumours are, and we may still not know anything even after Riya's launch ...

Got a ping from the Rollyo peeps about some new feature additions and thought I would use this as an excuse to finally post about it. My favorite new feature is the ability to put a Rollyo searchbox on your site/blog. As with handy little badges, I dig this kind of value-add for the small blog owner. However, one of the other new features brings up one of my big beefs with Rollyo — they've added the ability to import your browser bookmarks to make a Searchroll — cool for folks who still use bookmarks — but for the love of god, why can't I import OPML? My other big beef is that I can't sort my search results by date or… by anything. This makes it a lot less useful to me. Overall, though, I dig the idea. The idea is social search, but I think the appeal is wider than that — it's a good local search tool, whereby you can specify the scope of the search to this particular subset of sites, and save that subset for future searches (oh, one more beef — 25 ...