Archive: November, 2006

I think I have lived a bigger life in the past two weeks than I have at any other time in the three full decades I’ve called this planet home. Over the past fourteen days, I have traveled across the continent twice attending two of the most important annual search and online marketing conferences, ad:Tech and Pubcon. Though feeling both physically and mentally exhausted, I am also feeling exhilarated and inspired, left with the strong impression that the industry is only getting more interesting.

I have attended, spoken at and covered search marketing conferences for years. Previously, I attended as a working SEO, coming to the conventions from a practitioner’s perspective. That served to both focus and limit my experience at previous years. As my position in the search marketing industry is rapidly evolving at this time, I was (by invitation), able to sample at the tables of dozens of other businesses in online marketing, trying to get a sense of the directions the sector might be heading.

There are an awfully lot of smart people working in search and Internet marketing. In another time or place, many could easily be called rocket scientists. They have the intelligence, passion and dedication of true entrepreneurial innovators and, believe it or not, an altruistic attitude that really does want to better the world in which we live.

If last week’s excursion to New York City’s ad:Tech Conference was any indication, there is a world of growth happening in worlds of online advertising and media. This week’s adventure to WebmasterWorld’s annual PubCon in America’s adult playground of Las Vegas should show us a bit more on how we as online marketers are going to adapt and market to such growth.

Early tomorrow morning, the sun will rise over the neon of the Nevada desert and two or three thousand search engine marketers will do their level best to rise out of bed in time to listen to the opening keynote speech delivered by legendary venture capitalist and business developer Guy Kawasaki.

When Kawasaki is done speaking around 10:00AM, four days of search engine optimization and PPC management seminars begin featuring the voices and personalities of over 100 of the best-known search marketers in the world. If ad:Tech is about the deal, PubCon is about the technique.

Being there is often like the moving Being There. I have just returned from ad:Tech NYC and I have a head full of stories, adventure and drama. Tech conferences are 92-hour days with early morning cat-naps taking the place of a full night’s sleep. Forty winks delivered in four hours of blissful down time.

There were far too many experiences and far too many stories to write in this blog post, mainly because I am still exhausted from the trip back home. I finally arrived very early this morning after a 36-hour trip punctuated by an impromptu emergency stop-over in Bismark North Dakota and a broken Dash-10 at SeaTac.

I am trying to play catch-up before going to PubCon in Las Vegas next week. I hope to have a real posting tomorrow after I have caught up with some sleep.

Here’s someone with too much time on their hands. msfirefox. Strangely, the link works fine in MS IE7, but not in Firefox 2. An unnamed individual built a website imagining what life would be like with Microsoft running Firefox.

I love the catch phrase “It’s better now… Like seriously”, and the minimum required specs. The person takes opportunities to swipe at everyone; Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, every manufacturer of anti-virus software, you name it.

I’m not sure how long this site will survive.

There is a download feature available, and it does trigger an actual file transfer request. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll try it out. Anyone willing to give it a whirl, please let me know…