Archive: April, 2007

I spent the past week in San Francisco attending the ad|tech SF07 conference. Billed as “The Event for Interactive Marketers”, ad|tech is among the largest and most influential online advertising shows anywhere. ad|tech is serious business. The show presents a heavier atmosphere than Search Engine Strategies, WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon, Affiliate Summit, or other search marketing focused shows do.

As professionally structured as the ad|tech conferences are, being at any tech conferences is a lesson in adapting to the ebb and flow of events unfolding in chaos.

When you are at these types of shows, you have to learn as much as possible in a very short period of time. That involves asking a lot of questions, networking with anyone who is either interested or is interesting, and handing out boxes of business cards. While learning should also involve going to specific lecture and panel sessions, time is a terribly limited commodity and for my sponsors’ money, the most interesting tidbits are found far away from the PowerPoint presentations.

So what do you think would happen if lots of webmasters, bloggers and other assorted online ner’do’well’s like myself decided to help Stephen Colbert be named the Greatest Living American? Mr. Colbert figures that if Google says he is the Greatest Living American then it must be truthy enough to be true. At this point, every American and every Americaphile should be asking themselves, “What could we possibly do to help Mr. Colbert achieve his goal?” This is better than messing with that guy’s placement on Idol.

As we all know, American political and public relations campaigns are all about the money. It takes money to get noticed in the cacophony of our modern media culture. Since we are webmasters, we probably don’t have enough money to spare to make much of a difference but we do have something even more valuable than money, at least more valuable online. We have links, and being good webmasters, we can do pretty much anything we want with them provided we are willing to invest the time and effort in using them properly.

It is mid-April and here on Southern Vancouver Island, this is the short space of time linking the rainy period and the dry period into some sense of the seasons. That’s what got me thinking about linking, that and the fact I am hosting a telepanal of link-building experts as part of the second Metamend BrainJam on Friday afternoon.

Links are not normally thought of as an interesting topic to think about but this week especially, lots of other people in the search engine and SEO sectors are thinking heavily about links. Aside from the fact many of us have just returned from SES NY, (nice pub crawl eh Glenn?), and links were a major subject of discussion there, an extra amount of attention has been paid to links recently, especially paid links.

Matt Cutts, Google’s Quality Czar, recently asked webmasters and Google users to report any and all paid links by noting them on their own pages or by contacting Google to inform them when they are found on others. Predictably, this has the SEO community buzzing, especially those with businesses, blogs or websites that depend on paid links.

This is going to have to be a short entry. It is Monday and I am in New York City for the Search Engine Strategies Conference. It’s funny but, even though this is my umpteenth SES, it is still exciting and invigorating.

I hope to have lots of great information to share in this space in the coming days and will likely make a few extra blog posts as the week goes on.

The conference actually opens tomorrow but tonight I am attending the Internet Marketer’s of New York charity party for Ronald McDonald House. That party follows the cocktail reception being thrown by Hitwise which follows Hitwise Universtiy, a SEO training session being thrown at 3PM today. (did I mention the real action starts tomorrow?)

This being my only “day off”, I am off to do what any smart youngish Canadian would do in New York, GAWK AT STUFF. I have been in this city several times in the past few years and have never had time to go sight-seeing.  I have a few spare hours before my first meetings (and the Hitwise events).