Dave McClure and Jeff Clavier are putting together Vertical Leap, a vertical search conference. The event is being run through SDForum. And of course I just recently let my SDForum membership lapse because I haven’t been as interested in their events as I have been in the free stuff. If getting folks like Dave and Jeff involved is a general trend and not an isolated coincidence I’ll have to renew my membership.

BayCHI put on a fantastic panel on search last month, and there’s been a lot of interesting activity going on. Working at Feedster has made me even more aware of search advances than I was before, and some of the services like jobs.feedster.com are exactly inline with what I expect the discussion to be about. Stuff like structured blogging and microformats to enter into the conversation at some point. I’ve heard pretty good arguments on both sides of the explicit vs. implicit metadata debate. I guess I really don’t care which side wins out, or if it just ends up a draw. But folks who would like to experiment with the stuff as normal users don’t really have a way to, and I would like to be able to answer the questions Elle has without having to make crap up. Apparently the tools and services are going to start growing support soon, I can’t wait to see what falls out. I really don’t want to have to implement a structured blogging parsing engine here at home, but I do have an editor window open already….