A snapshot of London Web

I had a pretty useful day of meetings yesterday with a client who was in town for a couple of days. He has a remit to test emerging media channels for marketing.

We spent the day with people and companies that are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing the development of the web. There is, I think, a lot of innovation going on in the UK and much of it is proving fruitful.

We met with Google to talk about what they're doing beyond search.

We spent some time with Katie Lee from Shiny Media . They're a group of Blogs that have posted some impressive figures with what has got to be an attractive audience to the right advertisers. There has been a lot of talk about how the internet 'democratises' publishing. Most of this talk is bumph but I think that Shiny are a great example of when it is true. With three permanent staff and freelance writers they've tracked 2.3m visitors in November. I wonder what ITV.com gets....

Euan Semple spent about an hour with us talking about some of his experiences with using social computing as Knowledge Management and Internal Communications solutions. He's not, as far as I can tell, a technology expert but, more importantly, has gained considerable experience at overcoming the barriers and identifying the opportunities that organisations are faced with when they seek to implement these tools.

Our final session was at the VNU UK offices in Soho. IT sites generally are responding bullishly to the way the internet is changing and VNU is no exception. They've been investing in video, developing new features, updating CMS, podcasts, etc... They're likely benefiting substantially from a couple of solid years of ad sales and also feeling the pressure to respond to changing platforms.

All in all, it was a good day. A nice cross-section, by no means exhaustive, of a booming industry that is adapting quickly.