Several months ago, around the time that Mixx launched, I remember reading an article floating around on Sphinn entitled "The Importance of Being an Early Adopter." The article focused on Twitter, describing the tangible benefits for social media marketers of building their brand in a smaller community, a brand that will gain significant importance as the sphere of that particular site grows larger and larger. Largely without knowing it, David Brooks authored an incredibly insightful corollary to Mashable’s theory, encouraging me to put together a hodgepodge of thoughts I've meant to get down in writing for some time now. Read more [...]

Time and Location Tuesday September 9, 2008 Registration & Networking: 5:30 PM Program: 6:00 - 8:00 PM Hotel DeLuxe (729 SW 15th Ave. Portland, OR 97205) Food & beverages included. Our September Hot Seat event will feature a presentation on the "Ranking in Local Search Algorithms" from David Mihm, a noted expert on local search, who will then participate as one of our Hot Seat panelists and dole out advice for your site! NOTE - IF YOU OWN A LOCAL BUSINESS AND WANT TO KNOW HOW TO DO Read more [...]

"Traveling (…down the middle of the road…) soon became a bore so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I met more interesting people there."... Neil Young (earlier articles: Linkbait 2.0: The Soul of Linkbait, Linkbait 2.0: The Soul of Linkbait (Part 2) which will offer background to Part 3) What has transpired with my Marvin Gaye National Anthem article since I wrote Part 2? Apparently, my article will be quoted in the soon to be released sports book GameFace: The Read more [...]

Kevin Ryan was gracious enough to break away from his busy pre-SES conference schedule to answer a few questions for me. 1) Clearly there are some obvious "hot" sessions at SES San Jose (e.g. the Orion Panels); however, what hidden gems are there in the schedule that attendees might overlook? We love the "hot" sessions of course but the hidden gems always made the event for me when I was a delegate. I am very excited to be talking to Lee Siegel on Monday, his latest book Read more [...]

"All a user has to do to turn off personalized search is to add &pws=0 to the URL of a search query” Matt Cutts - SMX Advanced 2007 As easy as that was to repeat for every search, it looks like Google is finally listening to users, who would like to be able to know that their results are being altered from what others see, and would like an easy way to disable that. Shortly after personal search became "no longer optional", many different people have written about not liking it, and Read more [...]

I just want to let people know that I (along with Jennifer Osbourne and Charlene Jaszewski) will be blogging for Marty Weintraub’s AimClear Blog. Look there for top-notch SES San Jose coverage (and if you are at the show and see me, make sure to say hello).

Are you going to the SES (Search Engine Strategies) conference in San Jose? It's coming up August 18-22, and they've just agreed to move up the SEMpdx member discount level to 15%, and I've now updated the SEMpdx member discount page. Last year's SES San Jose was absolutely fantastic, as I covered in my SES 2007 Nuggets of Knowledge post, and so was the 2007 Google dance which everyone who attended SES was invited to. I also got to witness what still may be the best session I've ever seen, Read more [...]

C’mon folks…vote up Portland to get us another high quality conference. Take the poll here. Perhaps the Video Professor will do a session? Nah, the Video Professor ain’t a her :.)

Logging into Facebook this morning I was greeted by the face of Todd Mintz, hawking Canadian club whisky to me in the form of a sponsored advertisement. If it were not for me noticing the word "sponsored" on the right I would've thought it was a personal message from Todd, and clicked it. Just like the title of this blog post, blurring the line between a recommendation and blatant advertising is obviously going to continue to as a popular tactic, but in my opinion, it should only happen Read more [...]