Boston Pubcon 2006

I take a red-eye flight out of SFO tonight and arrive in Boston tomorrow morning. Here’s where you can find me during the conference:

– 12:50 p.m. -1:50 p.m. on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006: I’ll be talking at a luncheon with other Googlers. We’ll discuss the latest webmaster features in Sitemaps, and there should be time for Q&A.
– 9 a.m. – 10 a.m. on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006: I’ll be on the Super Bloggers of Search panel. Sounds like we need SuperBlogger T-shirts, doesn’t it? πŸ™‚ Plenty more chances to ask questions.
– 11:35 a.m. – 12:50 p.m. on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006: I noticed someone listed me on an Organic Site Review panel. Hmm, first I’ve heard of doing that one, but it could be fun. Maybe they don’t want me sitting at the back of the room for the link-building or affiliate sessions. πŸ™‚
– 3:30 p.m. – 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006: It’s the Search Engine Super Session! I’m hoping for plenty of Q&A time.
– 1:30 p.m. – 4 p.m. on Thursday, April 20th, 2006: The classic Pubcon session, to be held at a real pub. This is always lots of fun. My plane leaves at about 5:50 pm Thursday night, so catch me before 4 pm or so.

I’m going casual for this conference (jeans plus a T-shirt or a polo). Life is too short to wear slacks and a button-down shirt at every conference. If you think a search engine rep has to be well-dressed before you can believe them, you’ll have to close your eyes and imagine while I’m talking. If you see me, please walk up and say hello and tell me what you like/don’t like about Google. I’m trying to talk to new and different people at each conference, and it worked really well at SES New York. I’d love to talk to a whole lot of new folks this time.

Update: I hate red-eye flights, because I can never sleep on planes. So I’m trying to prep by doing things that make me sleepy. So far, I’ve
– watched part of a entertainment special (“Where are child stars now?”) with a warm cat on my chest.
– ordered a few ribs, with a side order of mashed potatoes and french fries (red meat + carbs + carbs should put anyone to sleep)
– browsed through 2003 IRS tax regulations
– I’m even considering listening to StrikePoint. Hahaha! Just kidding. SEO humor. πŸ™‚

Can anyone else think of some sleep-inducing things?

34 Responses to Boston Pubcon 2006 (Leave a comment)

  1. Hello Matt before you leave, would you mind to ask the retired googlebot to come back to work for at least once a week to share his experience with the new one. Internet is getting out of date.

  2. Hi Matt,

    have a nice time on pubcon!
    Please have a look to the mysterious page dropping on many sites. Some sites lost over 95% of their indexed content, from 1mio to 15k.
    Please look for details:
    http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33893-3-10.htm

    Greetings,

    M.

  3. Hi Matt

    “f you think a search engine rep has to be well-dressed before you can believe them, you’ll have to close your eyes and imagine while I’m talking.”

    I mightbe sending Mr Cutts an email asking her to “influence” you just to not take that fancy T-Shirt of yours to Pubcon πŸ˜€

    Have a great conference.

  4. In my previous post..

    I meant sending an email to Mrs Cutts, of course πŸ™‚

  5. Harith, I’ll have you know that that’s a genuine WMW tie-dye T-shirt. It’s a collector’s item! πŸ™‚

  6. I won’t be in attendence, moved from Boston 2 years ago, but do have a Google question – is the PR update that started a couple of months ago over? PR seems to have been doing some crazy things lately.

    Eat lots of chowda!

  7. Matt, I hate to bombard you with the same question that everyone keeps throwing out there but ‘What the heck is going on with pages disappearing from the index?’

    Is it time to start editing our sites or should we continue to wait for the updates to end?

  8. I’ll try to look for you Matt as I’ll be at Webmasterworld also, covering the conference for Know More Media via my WebmetricsGuru.com blog.

    I’ve seen you around at several SES and Webmasterworld’s but haven’t talked with you since New Orleans (and that was just to ask you a question).

    Sounds like this will be a great Webmasterworld Pubcon anyway. I just got here today and the streets were full of runners – it was all I could do to get to the Hotel CommonWealth (which is located at Boston Market Stattion) …. once I got in I could not get out – the streets were mobbed.

    I accepted it and had a few beer’s and watched the crowds from inside the hotel.

  9. Welcome to my neck of the woods.

    If you need any tips on places to eat, or the best cab’s, or just about anything, just ask.

    I’ll have my sidekick on me and I may regret this but my AIM is SEOBrains

    I’ll be all over the place at webmasterworld.

    It’s a shame you are leaving so early on Thursday I am Djing at a big PUMA party Thursday Night, and I still have some places on the guest list.

    P.S. The offer still stands for a pair of free sneaker’s.
    P.S.S. I don’t think I saw you once at SES NYC, but I had more meetings that sleep in NYC.

  10. Got into Boston yesterday afternoon… I hope to bump into you at the conference!

  11. Hi Matt –

    Looking forward to saying seeing you …. tomorrow in Boston.

    I’ve been in Concord for the past few days with some friends enjoying the history – this morning they had a big reenactment of the “shot heard ’round the world” where skirmishes between Colonists and the British started the American Revolution.

    Joe

  12. man… wish i could make it!

  13. Bob Rains, I appreciate the offer, but just to avoid any conflict o’ interest I decline offers like that. Hope to see you there though!

  14. Have a great time Matt, and everyone else who is going as well. I wish I could be there (got sooo much to learn!)

    As an aside, here’s hoping this datacenter doesn’t become default – http://72.14.207.99/ – searches done with “quotes around them” bring up results with the words anywhere on the page πŸ™‚

  15. Toby, got an example query handy? I’ll ask someone about it.

  16. RE: “genuine WMW tie-dye T-shirt. It’s a collector’s item!”

    Yes, it is. Yourself and Greg Brady have only 2 left in existence πŸ™‚

  17. You should have spent the time on the flight designing a favicon for your site. I have to hunt down your blog in my bookmarks using the name of the blog – not a fancy graphic

    Shame on you for not having one πŸ˜‰

    Maybe a competition could be run ?

  18. In reply to Matt…

    How about:

    “the cat ate my feelings”

    That should work. Quite an unusual phrase but all those words are sure to be scattered on one page on a quite a few websites, no?

  19. Things that put you to sleep? You could do my job.. That always works for me!

  20. I’ve always used Jane Austen novels to cure insomnia.

  21. Hi Matt

    With reference to the phrase search strangeness in the 72 dcs.

    It is also true on searches with hyphens (Which I guess sort of make it a phrase) – Noticed this when doing an allinurl:widget-domain.com search – the words widget and domain and .com could appear anywhere in the url rather than just as “widget-domain.com”

  22. I’m the same way. I usually don’t even bother trying to sleep on planes. One time, I did a lot of stuff to make me sleepy before a 13 hour flight to Tokyo. Then I couldn’t sleep on the plane, and so when I arrived I felt like garbage.

  23. Matt, just tune in (to Strikepoint) and I’ll personally make sure you won’t get any sleep! πŸ™‚

    – Mikkel
    Strikepoint co-host

  24. Take some sleeping pills!!! πŸ™‚ Just kidding!!! πŸ™‚

  25. Hi Matt,

    Heh. Instead of counting sheep, you could try counting the millions of dying websites that Big Daddy is systematically wiping from the Google index on a daily basis! It must of wiped out a few billion by now. More than enough to get the ol’ eyelids drooping.

    Don’t suppose you could have a word with someone about the latest big daddy bug? The one that is wiping thousands of pages from the index every day, and preventing any of the newly crawled pages from making it into the index. You must of heard if it. It’s all over all of the boards. On second thoughts, Google diary is really cool and I hear you guys are thinking of a travel portal. It’s all so exciting, I can barely be bothered with pesky old web search anymore.

  26. Pratheep,

    “Take some sleeping pills!!!”

    Mat will never do it. Now he has a life chance to drink sprite and listen to the guys telling him “war stories” while they enjoy their Vodka.

    I.e They talk and Inigo listen and write notes πŸ˜€

  27. Okay, fine. I’ll clearly have to give away my WMW T-shirt to some deserving soul. The ironic thing is that I never wear tie-dye otherwise.

    Toby, thanks for that. I’ll ask around and hope to hear back when I get back from the conference. Stephen, a hyphenated search is just another way to write a quoted search. So [“matt cutts roolz”] and [matt-cutts-roolz] are identical searches.

    Mikkel, I have been tuning in, and it’s all “We don’t spam the search engines, we just put the spam up on our webservers and then get lots of links to spam. It’s the engines’ fault for picking up our content.” πŸ˜‰

    Harith, I’m pretty straight-edge, but I have been known to imbibe from time to time. I just avoid doing it at search engine conferences. πŸ™‚

  28. Hi Matt,

    >>Can anyone else think of some sleep-inducing things?

    Have you tried Brain Wave Generator? You can hack your mind in order to get a new state.

    So… http://www.bwgen.com

    Thats all!

  29. Matt, we are really just singing the second verse of the song the engines started, that goes something like: “Blame it all on the webmaster” (it really takes a funky beat t fully appreciate it) – and not to forget, having a lot of fun doing it. After all, Strikepoint is the only show on WebmasterRadio that got honored with the EXPLICIT label on iTunes πŸ™‚

  30. Hey Matt,
    Don’t know if this is the right place to post this or not, but we would really like your comments on http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33893.htm
    this issue. We got lots of confused webmasters at WW waiting for some kind of response from Google.

    Thanks.

  31. Side note (probably too late to matter this time, but for next time):

    Matt, if you want a sleep-inducer, this one is guaranteed to put your lights out: Public Access Television. Has anyone ever watched the crap on the community cable channel, seriously? In Toronto, we have one guy who gets on for an hour and he talks about stamps. Nothing but stamps. And to make it worse, he does it in a Ben Stein voice.

    THEY’RE FREAKIN’ STAMPS!!!! You lick the back, stick ’em to an envelope, and mail the letter. What else is there to them?

    Looks like they solved the quote issue too.

  32. (Matt Cutts website favicon idea)

    How about something tie-dye? Or Matt in his tie-dye shirt, if it comes out well enough in a 16×16 graphic (doubtful)?

    I like the tie-dye idea … hope it’s not too late for someone to notice a new comment in this post …

  33. In my own home town and I couldn’t make it… I wish I didn’t have to work 60+ hours per week… oh well, there’s always next time. πŸ™‚

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