A quick post on several interesting conversations I’ve had over the last week or so and what they may mean for 2010.

First, a few updates -  I gave my predictions for next year (which will also appear, in shortened for at Entrepreneur.com, anyday) and  have a video  interview, taken last month, just appeared at Murray Newland’s blog – Marshall Sponder an interview – please check both of  them out.

Also, this blog has been down a lot – it’s a problem with the hosting provider, Dreamhost, and a buggy Virtual Server Kernel – which keeps crashing – due to memory leaks – I’ve given Dreamhost a few weeks to fix it – hopefully, my blog will not be down too much over that time).

I’ve noticed that next year, in many ways, is already here – and the trends seem to indicate an increase of Social Media activity – I can’t say for sure if that’s energy that surrounds me from my slideshare presentation and conferences I’ve attended, or if it’s the industry as a whole – either way, I welcome it.

One conversation was with Justin Langseth of Clarabridge who showed me a fairly through presentation of the capabilities of Clarabridge Textual Processing – and how it plays into Business Intelligence.  Clarabridge takes it’s Social Media data from Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, and the Semantic Processing capabilities are quite advanced – Clarabridge also has a large roster of clients and I hope to get a fully working demo I can play with based on a profile I can choose to set up in Alterian/Techrigy/SM2.  More, later, once I’ve set it up.

I also spoke with a few people at HotGrinds.com, a new monitoring platform that is based on Niche Verticals – such as Hotels and Pharma.   What’s interesting about HotGrinds – they have a taxonomy for each vertical and a web crawler that pulls data off the web and organizes it based on that taxonomy.   Pricing is fairly reasonable – I was trying to meet with the COO, Alkis Papadopoullos, while in Montreal when I was there last weekend – that meeting didn’t happen, but I’m sure it will happen sometime soon.

I also spoke with Nathan Gilliat, Philip Sheldrake, Stephen Debruyn and Luke Brynley-Jones – all about Social Media Measurement – various lists and projects which seem to overlap, and a trip to London in late March, as part of another conference Luke is presenting – which should be quite interesting.

Finally, when I was in Montreal last weekend viewing KeenKong.com – got a full post to write about that soon, I was also invited to Tara Hunt‘s house for a Karaoke party that was a lot of fun … sure you saw my tweets about it – and ran into Claude Malaison, who I met two years ago at LeWeb 07 – and got invited to present at his conferences in Montreal next May and possible later on in 2010.

So I think, it’s fair to say, based on Today – I can see myself in London in 2010, at least twice, and in Montreal, at least once – and possibly twice.  What else 2010 has in-store for Social Media – or me – we’ll see what the cat drags in.