Day 2 of ILM, my panel just finished, so my heart rate has settled back down to normal levels. I think I did OK, considering it was my first time, and I got in my digs on Google Base (with a little help from Tony Gentile) and plugged microformats/structured blogging/rdf, whatever, as long as it's at the edge of the network and owned by the user. The panel was little bit of a mismatch for me (which was mostly my fault, since local search, structured data, etc. mean different things to me than they do in the raw local search world), but I think it worked alright. Otherwise, this conference has been great, lots of very interesting topics and lots of good people.

On the Google Base note, at the end of the keynote this morning given by Shailesh Rao, the head of Google Local, a woman from the Newspaper Association asked a question, "Do you (Google) feel our pain (the newspapers)?". The answer was "We don't feel your pain, but we understand it." From her perspective, Google Base represents Google's first step into content ownership, as opposed to providing a means to find content, which directly competes with the newspapers business. I think its inevitable that these two bodies will come head to head, but I still think we need to make this data freely available. If structured data gets locked into Google Base, we lose the ability to do anything with that data.

The fact that I can monitor millions of blogs and respond within hours or minutes if they have problems with my service grew not out of a centralized service like Google, but out of data being freely available in open formats for folks like us to come along and do something with. My ability to monitor over 300 sites via my aggregator is due to open, structured data in RSS, which wasn't even originally intended to work that way, but since it was out there, new ways of using the data were created. Google Maps and the growth of the mashup we're started by individuals hacking the Maps API (and Google saw the value and opened up the data). If we lock up data in Google Base, we lose the potential data for innovation that has driven the Web renaisannce that we are in right now.

Anyway, back to the conference. There's been some other good thoughts that I want to add here, hopefully later when I get a chance.