Search 2.0 is about Discovery; Conversation Spaces not Name Spaces

I’m often not taken back by a Fortune story mainly because they focus on the mainstream but this story has some key gems that are squarely in the new search equation for Web 2.0.  Buried in the culture and recommendation angle is the real gem in this story…

The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of discovery….Discovery is when something wonderful that you didn’t know existed, or didn’t know how to ask for, finds you……

But there is no go-to discovery engine – yet. Building a personalized discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today. It’s no easy feat, but if a company can pull it off and make the formula portable so it works on your mobile phone – well, such a tool could change not just marketing, but all of commerce.

At PodTech.net we are developing tons and will be aggregating as much content as possible and we think about the discovery piece all the time.  With RSS and new engines that will be the new ‘pagerank’ will look at conversation spaces not just namespaces… this new model will promote an ‘open discovery’ network.  You will see more about Open Discovery and RSS based media being totally open and build for high velocity distribution.  I watch Google and I see that they get this notion of new search.  The question is can they get there with such a dependancy on search???

Techdirt has a post and others will chime in on Techmeme.