The Summit has begun -- at least the more serious part after last night's beach-side cocktail reception here at Captiva Island. And MediaPost's Ken Fadner is filling in a packed room about some famous residents of what technically is no longer an island due to shifting sands.

I arrived late last night and ran into David Atlas at the front desk.  We both looked at each other with exhaustion after 10 hours of flights, connections and local travel.  Man is this a hike from the airport!  I think I took 5 wrong turns and in a state where it only goes North and South, that's hard to do... I think I'm going blind and can't read the tiny signs... probably from reading too many emails with 8pt type at 4am. The event kicks off tonight and from what the registration tells us we have over 150 …

Today's session on the future of search really reflected the tone of the entire conference. Our world is changing. For search marketers, our domain is no longer just search. As you'll see when I publish out my final buzz-o-meter on Wed. the 28th, most of the conversation was about topics that can/should be classified as much broader than search. Accordingly, we had some fun on the Search Insider panel today suggesting alternate names for the Search Insider Summit come 2013, including the plain ole Insider Summit and the Neurological Insider Summit (a nod to Gord's push to get us …

"Marketing, analytics, and technology will be sharing a cube and singing kumbaya." -- James Lamberti of comScore on his vision for 2013. "Omniture is like the Hotel California. Data checks in but doesn't check out." -- Craig Macdonald of Covario lamenting the fact that companies invest so much in web analytics tools but don't use the data. "Humans are the common denominator." -- Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro underscoring the importance of understanding what makes people tick and infusing those insights into your approach to search and marketing in general.

Our breakout session featured a spirited discussion around the topic of integration and convergence. The group quickly outlined 5 challenges/keys to success: 1. Data integration 2. People integration (both on the agency side and internally at corporations) 3. Metric integration 4. Incentive integration (across LOBs, agencies, etc.) 5. Message integration So how do you prioritize among these? Certainly, they can't all be magically integrated overnight. James Lamberti from comScore pointed out that there are 2 ways to approach integration and convergence. You can look at it thru the consumer lens and make sure that your target audience has …

David Berkowitz of 360i painted the scene of the 2013 Search Insider Summit at a sunny golf, resort in Antarctica. He then asked panelists to weigh in on what they're seeing at that time. Matt Greitzer of Avenue A/Razorfish kicked it off with the observation that search will be ubiquitous. People will be searching in many more places for many more reasons. Craig Macdonald of Covario chimed in that MSFT will still be trying to buy Yahoo. He added that attribution modeling will be the key to success. By 2013, Craig thinks the value of all activity before …

Unfortunately, I had to depart the conference a little early this year. Tonight''s events will include a cocktail party, sunset cruise and BBQ - Probably the most fun night of the entire event! I am counting on Aaron to blog about it in full detail, so I can feel like I was still there. Regardless of whether you read these postings because you did attend or couldn''t attend, it should be clear that the networking between agencies, platforms and clients is unmatchable. Thank you to everyone that works so hard to make it happen!

"[Jerry] Yang reacted like [Steve] Ballmer gave Yahoo a diganosis of chronic foot fungus."

In the Social Search breakout session, Marshall Clark of Organic predicted that the big search engines will incorporate social connections into the algorithms to improve relevancy. He pointed to StumbleUpon as an example of that trend in action.

The Mobile Search breakout session led by Dan Perry of Cars.com raised this important question. Is mobile just WAP sites or is it any web experience that lives outside the computer? The latter, of course, includes apps on mobile devices, "regular" websites that live on iPhones, etc.