I’ve just returned from helping out Alex Murray at ripe give a talk about digital design at an apple conference in Oslo. It was an interesting event, mainly targeted towards the press and media, but there was also a talk from AKQU, which was interesting and a talk from Microsoft about the future of ’search’ on the web.

I must say, I did find the search talk to be very interesting. Search is touted to be the next bug thing as far as user interaction is concerned as a search has very targeted outcomes for the user, and is the most direct form of understanding the users needs. The concept of pages being built on the fly (using shadow pages to rank in google) is becoming more widespread, especially in the media and newspaper sectors. The whole idea of having the option to be directed to a targeted page, based on you as a user and specifically tour search data is very exciting. AKQU were also showing some interesting work at the conference, the work they did for Fiat ‘eco-drive’ and work they did recently with nike. It must nice to work with big budget clients !