Here’s a great post from Scott about SES San Jose. The Portland SEM community is growing fast and I wish I could get up there more often and attend some meetings and hang with my fellow Oregon techno peeples, but Portland is almost as far away from me as Silicon Valley, the undisputed capital of … well … most of the really neat stuff happening online these days. In fact my frequent trips to Silicon Valley may be skewing my perception of how fast things are changing. For example very few people I know here in Oregon, and few of my hundreds of close relatives back east are on Facebook or Flickr. It’s even tough to get people to join Flickr so they can see pix of themselves I’ve taken. Ludditism is no longer the problem for most people, rather it’s just silly human stubbornness about technology.

In any case I do want to plug Scott and the SEM PDX conference coming up in March of 2008 –“SearchFest 2008”.

Here is the blurb from the SEM PDX mail I just got:

SEMpdx Presents Searchfest 2008
When: Monday, March 10, 2008
Where: Portland Zoo
Format: All Day Event with Dual Tracks

Confirmed Speakers (to date):
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Matt McGee, Marchex / Small Business SEM
Jeff Pruitt, SEMPO / ICrossing
Stoney deGeyter, Pole Position Marketing
John Andrews, Competitive Webmastering / Master of Sphinn
Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
Paul Colligan, The Affiliate Guy
Dan Harbison, Portland Trailblazers / Iamatrailblazersfan.com

More top speakers to be announced soon. Stay tuned!