Martin Belam talk at ASLIB KIMNET Meeting

or "How To Talk The Hind Legs Off A Donkey" - I did go on a bit today.

Today I gave a talk about "Classification & Taxonomy Within BBC New Media" for the ASLIB KIMNET special interest group, at their May meeting - held at the Patent Office.

The first part of my presentation consisted of an updated 'greatest hits' version of several of my presentations, covering the majority of the projects I have worked on or paid attention to at the BBC.

It was nice to give the presentation with all the freshly minted new components of the bbc.co.uk brand in place. It was a painful process to go through my regular set of PowerPoint slides and realise that the majority of them had become obsolete. It took some time to update them all, and I was grateful to Tim for making sure I had a lot of the final pages and images available to me before they launched to the public.

The second part of the afternoon consisted of a Q&A, which demonstrated that I appear to have the politician's gift of avoiding answering a question if the answer is going to be "No", by instead talking around a subject for a very long time.

I also gave a quick-fire truncated version of a presentation entitled "Search Engines, Semantics & Social Software". It is a condensed version of the parts of the Infonortics Search Engine Meeting that I found interesting and worth taking back into the BBC. I was meant to deliver it internally a couple of weeks back, but suffered a major technological failure. Despite the assembled audience having a combined IQ of 1 quintillion+, we failed to get a projector to co-operate with my laptop, and I had to abandon the attempt. Today, at the KIMNET meeting I got to road-test a proportion of it, so at least I know now that some of the jokes work.

In due course the first presentation from today will be available on currybetdotnet, and the full meeting report with notes will be available from the members section of the KIMNET site.

My next external presentation will be on the 12th July 2004 as part of the Ark Group's "Optimising Search and Retrieval" conference. Internally I will be doing the full "Search Engines, Semantics & Social Software" caboodle in Bush House on Friday 28th May 2004 at 1pm.