The Demo 2006 conference is all about social media this week. Among the interesting products/technologies I’ve seen so far:

Riya – Based on pattern maching software, Riya will search your photos and find people and things based on sample images you provide. It can then tag those photos in bulk. So if you want to search a 1,000-image folder of images for photos of your three-year-old, you submit a few photos of the tot to the recognition engine and it then tries to find every instance of that image that it can. You can then tag those images all at once.

The company sees the service as being useful to photographers who want to have their images discovered on the Web and potentially to be paid for them. It would be great for freelance photographers who want to sell their work but aren’t in all the right search engines. Free client, advertising supported.

Blurb Book Smart – Coolest product I’ve seen today. This service lets you organize photos and text to produce a book through a commercial book-publishing service. I wasn’t aware of how big the self-publishing industry is but there are a lot of service providers who will create bound volumes for you. Blurb’s software lets you drag and drop photos and text into a template and then send that to a publisher. You can publish a single volume for as little as $30 from some providers.

Think of the potential for this technology for small businesses. What if, just before going in to renew a contract, you could create a coffee table book of the work you’ve done for the client in the past year and bring copies to the meeting? This software tries to make that easy.

Zingee – Web site publishing for people who don’t want to create web sites. Specify files to share and create a link on the Zingee website. The file is then available to anyone you want to share it with. It’s like an index of peer-to-peer content.

TagWorld – This company wants to host your blog, photos, videos, MP3 files and bookmarks. They give you a gig of storage and a bunch of templates you can use to create multimedia websites on the fly using these elements. You can also pull in images and sounds from some other sites, like Flickr. It’s a consumer app, kind of a MySpace on steroids. The problem is that they want to host all this content and I wonder how much interest people have in maintaining multiple blogs and photo albums. This market is getting crowded. You can create some very neat integrated websites, though.

Gravee – User-powered search. It’s a search engine but users can vote on search results and add them to personal bookmark files. Supposedly, the quality of search results improves over time because real people are constantly improving it. Self-funded company with a very interesting idea.

Kaboodle – This venture tries to do what Epinions failed to do, which is to harness the power of a social network to help people choose products. You can snip items from web sites you’ve visited and organize them into pages that can be commented upon by other users. The time may finally be right for this idea.

More to come…