Thanks to the members of the iFOCOS Search Working Group who gathered for a kickoff meeting last week (April 24, 2007) in Santa Clara, California (and thanks to Neil Budde and crew at Yahoo! for hosting the meeting). Thanks, as well, to Dabble founder Mary Hodder, who couldn’t make it to the meeting but will be participating and contributing to its next steps.

What are the next steps? We’ll see. The working group is compiling notes for a situation brief and recommendations. The discussion seemed to be leading toward some research topics and an appetite to build something - a proof-of-concept to demonstrate content management best practices essential for “webby” search-friendly publishing - including native integration of web standards, links, search protocols, social bookmarking and ping services.

That’s the search engine optimization and social marketing optimization goodness built in to sites like Wikipedia and into millions of blogs - and yet is somehow missing or more difficult to implement in many “enterprise” web sites that would benefit most from them. Can anyone say: Wordpress? Typepad?

Stay tuned.