Archives for February 2006

So I peeked in the pub around the corner; not many SEO faces were there. Then I heard that Scoble was in town and was looking to hang. So I rang him up and he came over to the conference hotel, and we talked (along with Jackson F. of self-publishing firm Lulu and later, Danny Sullivan) until after 2 a.m. Good stuff, which included watching Danny receive a horoscope on his new Microsoft SPOT Watch.

Scoble posts his cell phone number on his site, which is pretty dang accessible, and it was fun talking to him. So tonight I one-clicked a copy of Scoble’s Naked Conversations book.

So I get my conference bag, and immediately I did what I always do: look through the included material for spam sites. I found one spam company pretty quickly. 🙂

The conference has been a blast so far. Last night, I hung out with SEOs until 3:30 a.m. talking about search and the different spamfighting approaches of different search engines. Today, three of us Googlers showed up and shared lunch with several hundred folks (seating capacity looks like 500-600 people, and there was an overflow room). Barry and colleagues covered about 15 sessions today, but not our session, strangely enough. But Nathan Weinberg was there and writes about some of the questions. Vanessa Fox gave a live demo of Sitemaps using Google as an example, which was pretty sweet. If you’re not enrolled in Sitemaps yet, I highly recommend it.

Fun moments so far:
– Meeting someone who was wearing a pedometer because I had mentioned that I was trying to wear a pedometer. I knew that people listened to me about SEO, but didn’t expect anyone to listen about anything else. 🙂
– Walking around in NYC, I noticed that an LED ticker sign had crashed. Instead of displaying news, it was displaying the bottom of a PC screen. Here’s a three-foot icon:

I think that says “Free AOL & Unlimited” or something. 🙂

Okay, I’m going to see if I can pick any more SEOs’ brains tonight before heading to the “Pundits on Search” panel at 9 a.m. tomorrow. I’ve asked my colleagues to pull me away after 1 a.m. Let’s see if I find out anything useful if I drink Sprite while they drink vodka. 🙂