Today was the first day of retirement for me. Well, not technically retirement. Don’t I wish! But it is my first day of doing independent consultancy.

My biggest client is also the company who I’ve been the biggest fan of during the past year. I discovered Lijit at Gnomedex last year. Their angle was what sold me.

Lijit is all about placing context around search. It can search across multiple points of contact – YouTube, Flickr, blogs, etc. Because it provides context, the Lijit Wijit provides a way for readers to search a site, all of the owners content or even all the content in the owners network of friends and contacts.

Because Lijit allows you to pull in all these contacts as well as points of content, it is able to provide a much more sane approach to search. Does this eliminate Google? No, not exactly. However, at the risk of sounding like Jason Calacanis, Google is filled with all kinds of irrelevant content as well as spam.

Take this for example. If you want to fix the problem of “too little virtual memory” on Windows, you can search Google for virtual memory, and get informational articles from Wikipedia, how virtual memory works, etc.

However, if you head on over to Ask Dave Taylor, the cyber “you’ve got questions, I’ve got answers” man, and search his site with the Lijit Wijit, you’ll find his post right away.

While this seems trivial, it’s pretty important to know that the information you get is authoritative and that you can trust it.

Enough pitching.

Now that I’ve begun work with Lijit, I wanted to share it with everyone who was concerned about what I’d be doing next. This is one of those things and I couldn’t be more excited.

Plus, now Micah Baldwin has been unseated as the #1 douchebag at Lijit – which is important.