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.
WebmasterWorld is one of the two big conferences with really advanced SEO information and it starts Tuesday.
About 1000 people will gather in Las Vegas for info, conferencing, and interaction with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and ASK folks. Many of the best internet marketing folks in the world are here, and it’s always a fun time.
I’m looking forward to it!
One of the most frustrating things “Verification” sites do is make bogus and ridiculous assumptions about websites and offer pathways to remove them if you pony up cash.
When I read about Compete over at Battelle’s I tried it and noted that one of my 10 year old travel sites with a long history and good contact information had a Compete.com “warning”. Naturally this pissed me off but I assumed a server change last year may have been the problem.
I felt better when Matt Cutts , whose name appears on no less than the Google Patent documents, pointed out that Compete is questioning his blog’s veracity (see snapshot below).
Adding opportunistic insult to injury, the Compete explanations imply (indirectly) that a legitimate site can get rid of the warning by subscribing to a website service called GeoTrust. Prices seem to vary depending on the site, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there is a relationship here, making compete look somewhat more like an extortion racket than a good new online resource.
SnapShot |
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Use caution in providing any personal information or downloading software on mattcutts.com. |
Numbers coming in from print media circulation numbers are starting to suggest that print media as we’ve come to know it is in trouble. Despite this Google’s about to start selling newspaper advertising. I suspect this is more to increasingly corner the advertising market than because Google is bullish on the future of newspapers.
Despite John Battelle‘s concerns about Google’s algorithms and print ads, I think mathematical analysis of advertising is a very good thing to do all of the time. I may be taking him a bit out of the broader context since he’s always advocated the value of online ads but here’s what he said today that bugged me:
>>> Ads for a specific, community driven audience need to be part of a conversation, not an algorithm >>>
Sheesh! What “need” is John talking about? Although this may be true from the publisher/sales perspective it’s not at all true for a smart advertiser who will want maximum ROI on the advertising dollar.
Historically, advertisers have been too mathematically incompetent and manipulated by sales BS to make good ad decisions. This is all changing (slower than it should, but changing nonetheless) thanks to PPC efficiency plus superior analytical tools, both provided by Google at low cost.
Newspapers and magazines should be very, very worried, because even dense advertisers will finally start to see that most print ad campaigns have negative ROIs* The print media industry has been built on overpriced ads and low paid authors, and things are going to get much, much worse.
* This has been my view for some time based on some of my own studies, but obviously ROI can depend on your definition of “return”. I’m defining it as direct sales rather than some sort of branding “lift” which is a confusing and questionable method for determination of return on advertising investments, but one that is increasingly used because, IMHO, it tends to support the status quo of massive advertising waste on foolish print advertising campaigns run by expensive advertising agencies.
More on this from Dan Blank
Like many frothing at the mouth online analysts and social networking ravers, Pete Cashmore suggests that Zuckerberg is right to act like he’s in no rush to sell Facebook, but this is silly. Zuckerberg is playing high stakes poker and he has a LOT to lose – certainly hundreds of millions if Facebook hits any major snags or if some newer and hipper online community takes root. I suspect he knows this but is loving the game, and I certainly admire this young whippersnapper for that and for creating such a magnificent web community. Magnificent, but only “worth” a fraction of the 1+ billion Cashmore suggests Facebook is now worth as an independent business.
But then what do I know, I traded my Apple for WCOM back in the day.
I do think Google will now scarf them up as part of their “empty the lake of big fish” marketing strategy, and I predict they’ll pay about 1.1 billion, but this is the luck of timing by Zuckerman, not a market based assessment of the value of Facebook as an independent entity, which everybody seems to be wildly overestimating. YouTube’s the same situation, where it’s value is not in streaming 100,000,000 crappy videos per day, rather in the fact that it helps Google, now awash in high valued stock, consolidate their position as the key online advertising leader.
The funny thing is that the *same rationales* used in 1999 are rearing their silly heads again, and only a handful of investors are noticing this. Unlike 1999 there are now many *real companies* out there with moderately long and profitable online histories, but ironically they appear to be very undervalued compared to the more speculative plays.
Washington Post piece suggests Myspace may be in trouble as teens migrate from there to Facebook, which until a month ago was a college socializing website but now covers the globe. I’m not sure Facebook will be the endpoint though. Seems to me that the ‘need’ for a social network separate from the internet network is a transitional thing. What we’ll see eventually are socializing applications/gadgets/routines that will collect information from everybody’s online activities and disperse the info in ways over which we will have a fair amount of control.
For example as I write this blog entry (or do anything online) I should be able to click a button and have all the content dump into all my other web “spaces”. (This actually happens at Facebook already and kudos to them for the blog import feature).
Seems that any writing I want to make public should be placed in any and all appropriate places and be completely searchable from many search engines within minutes. We are a long way from that but I see social networks as a transitional form, not a final form, of online socializing, content creation, and content distribution.
Complicating the commercial analysis of the migration is the fact that users of Myspace are getting older, and probably are less likely to shift once they have established themselves on a social network.
However, it would seem to me that the most profound aspect of social networking has not really surfaced yet and that’s the fact that people will become increasingly frustrated with the fact that their Myspace / Facebook web pages and web views are primarily and overwhelmingly benefiting those companies rather than the content producers.
Heavy online users often don’t even realize that simply surfing around online and composing new and original content is a key component of all those juicy ad dollars flowing to many in the food chain like Google and Myspace and Facebook, but not to the owner of a Facebook or Myspace page.
Google’s doing a great job and putting out some good stuff such as customized search. Earnings for Q3 were better than expected, but that should already be reflected in the stock price.
Since Google already has a huge portion of all internet searches, and given that they just spent 1.6 billion for YouTube with marginal current revenues, and given that we are in a very uncertain time where online revenues could go down or other companies could spring onto the search scene with something great almost overnight and threaten their dominance ….
What exactly is driving this stock price through the roof? It kind of smells like 1999 to me, but what do I know?
Joe Duck 