Here’s a list of sources of Pubcon information (aka the WebmasterWorld Conference) going on *right now* in Las Vegas. If you know of one not here please post it in the comments or email jhunkins@gmail.com
SEO Roundtable Excellent coverage – how can you type so FAST Barry??
It’s lunch but they seem to have run out of … lunches. Hoping more are on the way? [NOPE! Though this is probably not Yahoo’s fault]
The Yahoo team is running a demo of YPN but the typing is barely visible here in the middle of the big room. They need a large font PowerPoint demo with just a handful of slides that clearly show the product, which I think is probably really good.
As a Yahoo shareholder I hope they refine this presentation. Hire Guy Kawasaki to evangelize! This conference room is now home to about 1000 key people who are *exactly* the type of first adopter folks Yahoo should be working their asses off to steal away from Adwords and Adsense. Don’t explain PPC to this group, tell them why Panama will be different/better than Google offerings!
If it’s NOT going to be better, than just work to get bought by Microsoft so shareholders like me, who think Yahoo should be the next big thing in PPC.
Holy crap – here’s the “Early Reservation Page URL!”. You are Yahoo for god’s sake – couldn’t you have used something like “Yahoo.com/earlyres/”!
http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/newsponsoredsearch/invite/
Sorry but it’s impossible to keep up with all the news here at WebmasterWorld. For better coverage read Barry Schwartz SEO Roundtable who always does an amazing job covering the sessions here – looked like he had a team of bloggers helping this year.
Amanda Watlington PhD blogger and second lifer
Todd Malicoat The SMM Toolbox
I’ve heard several talks by Todd and he’s one of the few SEOs I’ve met that combines excellent communication skills with a deep knowledge of the latest SEO concepts. Very nice guy as well.
Best of the Web: Greg Hartnett
recommends the study of *networks* via books Nexus and … which discuss the mechanics of what Malcolm Gladwell calls the “Tipping Point”. Recommends using user communities like Flickr to drive interested users to your site. Join groups
Google Video – his son’s little “hocky fight” humorous clip of 1 minute downloaded almost a *million* times. (But how much traffic to his URL?)
RE: Digg info he recommends:
Pronett Advertising
WolfHowl
Here at Webmaster World Pubcon in Las Vegas:
Gred Niland introduced the feedmaster formerly of Technorati and Microsoft –
Niall Kennedy who discussed some technical aspects.
Rick from Feedburner:
Feedburner sends 25 million feeds per day and this is just the beginning. With IE7 RSS feed reader integrated, RSS will explode to mainstream [yes! a critical point!]. Auto discovery must be well-configured.
Feed publishing is diversifying. More podcasters than radio stations.
MEME sites like Techmeme.com are processing the RSS more deeply, looking at linking relationships. Add links if you want to be ‘seen’ at Techmeme. Edgeio as another example of RSS facilitating info movement. Sphere.
Owen Byrne – Digg co-founder: We were not the Guy Kawasaki “sweet spot” startup of Standford PhD students jumping the curve, rather Kevin Rose Screensavers hackin’ dude and Owen webmaster from Nova Scotia.
Owen question: How are people using Digg for marketing? Owen: “Digg this buttons”, “good content” is the best way to get on front page. Also, participating in the community will help.
Kevin’s inspirations: Wisdom of crowds – user driven news. Could not break into Slashdot – frustrating.
Paris Hilton Cell phone scandal spiked Digg into the big time Feb 2005. Major optimization ensued. July 2005 – seed money. July 2006 -more capitalization?
500k ACTIVE contributing users. 20 million monthly uniques(!). [Wow, that’s sure higher than other reports, but Owen’s got the logs so I doubt he’d mislead on this. I had a chance to ask him about this after and he’s very confident (obviously) of the number. I also asked why Comscore’s numbers diverge so greatly from Digg’s but promised I wouldn’t quote his answer – sorry.
My (Joe’s) personal view of Comscore is that they are starting to suffer greatly from measuring things like RSS and gadget activity. We are certainly close to needed new metrics to take gadgets, pops, and scripting activity into account as well as what Scoble calls “engagement”, which is hard to measure but an important notion of how users react to websites.
Rick at TOPIX.net – local is the last mile on the internet. Connecting local to the big corporate sites and companies is where a lot of money is going. RSS feeds are 1/3 of clicks through the service. 20 million story clicks to sites per month. USE Rss to increase distribution. Add comments.
Brett Tabke’s introducing the Webmasterworld 2006 conference and first keynote from Guy Kawasaki of Apple Evangelism, Entrepreneurial, Venture Capital, and “Art of the Start” fame.
His presentation is “The Art of Innovation”.
Despite the Medford to SFO delay that kicked me to the next SFO to LAS flight, here I am in Las Vegas having arrived about 3 hours later than planned. The Best Western Mardi Gras is turning out to be a super value – I paid about 45 per night for a room that’s huge and clean with a big kitchen. The hotel is one of the closest to the Convention Center which I’ll be able to walk to in about 10 minutes and, most importantly, there’s free WIFI that was not even advertised as an amenity. I should put together a WIFI guide to Las Vegas. I think the major strip hotels charge a lot. Last year at the Hilton I think WIFI was an extra 9.95 per day where the Imperial Palace, if I remember right, has a one time 9.95 fee regardless of length of stay.
Tomorrow WebmasterWorld 2006 begins with a Guy Kawasaki Keynote.
Note to Orbitz: If the plane is on the ground and 2 hours away you can be pretty sure it won’t make it on time.
My Orbitz “plane is late” note came in about 8 minutes ago – approximately 15 minutes after scheduled departure but approximately 2 hours *after* somebody could have been certain the plane would be at least 2 hours late since it’s leaving from SFO and has not left yet. I don’t like to complain a lot about this type of thing, feeling it falls under my “Tell it to the Donner Party” category, but I am looking forward to a world where I could get the ‘late flight’ note within minutes of the time when it is certain that the flight will be late.
Sure is nice to have the WIFI going here at Medford Airport since my plane just got delayed by over 2 hours. I’ll need to redo the SFO to LAS connection but hopefully there are many flights and I was getting in pretty early anyway. Connectivity is somewhat flaky – not sure why but it’s been problematic all along, but it’s still good to have it and get a bit of work (or chess!) done while I sit here.
I’m getting mentally geared up for the coming week of Webmaster World. I’m hoping to blog the sessions I attend in some detail although the laptop has been acting up a bit and there’s no time to fix it now. If I’m really energetic I’ll post pix at Flickr same day.
Last week’s widgets conference in Silicon Valley would have been fun to attend but I’d just returned to Oregon from Startup Camp and my mom is already giving me a hard time about the Las Vegas trip tomorrow. I give her credit though for asking what does this trip add to your company’s bottom line? The obvious answer “Free microbrews and fried wings at the Google engineer event” won’t impress her, but there are some tough jobs that just need to be done!
However I think Widgets (aka Gadgets) are clearly where the web is going, and perhaps more interesting is that fact that I don’t think this is well understood by many “internet outsiders” yet, and poorly understood by many internet insiders.
The impact of Gadgets This will start to become clearer as Vista environments merge the browser, desktop, internet, and applications using gadgets for navigation, information, and advertising. Standard page view and website metrics will break down quickly and we’ll see that publishers will seek to promote even more cluttered, busy, and interactive gadget filled computer screens in an effort to boost revenues. The future isn’t pretty, but’s it’s sure going to be interesting.
I also need to add Niall Kennedy to the blogroll – he’s one of those folks you really need to pay attention to if you want to see where thing are going to be in a few years.
Joe Duck 