On a serious note, are there plans from Google to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina? Like run public service ads for the redcross.org, make sure that people don’t donate to scammers by rpviding links to the “real” organizations, set up links to help family find survivors, set up a $ matching program and match the donations of the Google employees, etc.

I work for a high tech company near Google and my company will match all of our donations.

They are not kidding. I checked out the “Meet the Engineers” session and saw a swarm of people huddled around one Matt Cutts . The scene looked like the Lakers locker room with reporters crowded around Kobe after a 30 point game. It was unreal.

I got to the Googleplex before the busses arrived from the SJ Convention Center (those with cars parked at the Amphitheatre and were bussed in). It was right at 7pm and things had not picked up yet. I was walking around when I saw Matt on the third floor of Google, in a glass walkway linking a couple of Google buildings on his cellphone, gazing upon the unfolding spectacle. I could almost hear Matt’s inner monologue “Someday, this will all be mine!” But for the most part he and the other G engineers were on their best behavior.

I must say, they did tuck the “Meet the Google Engineers” away past the dance floor to make it a bit harder for them to find. I got there early, talked with Aaron whom I met in New Orleans and about 7:30pm or so is when the masses flooded the room. Paul was the one Google engineer who was holding the biggest court while Aaron had physically postioned himself between a couple of tables such that he only had about four or five people talking with him at that point.

The Karaoke was as bad as Karaoke can get at a company function. The big hit that someone figured out was to go to the security station and print out vistor badges where you could list your contact – turns out everyone who did this put on Larry and Sergey’s name. The security guards eventually caught on after awhile.

They must have kept the engineers and researchers locked up because about 70% of the Google employees were young women under 30. I kid you not. I believe they were all AdWords people. These women also had the good sense to avoid the SES attendees who were trying to make new “contacts”. Matt had to have been in the six sigma of older employees.

I’m looking forward to Google doing something at Webmaster World in Las Vegas in November.