Texture design

Posted by rebecca

In about a week and a half (March 7, to be exact), Rand and I will be road-tripping to Portland to attend SEMpdx's day conference, SearchFest. Rand has reached a near-godlike status in the conference sphere, in that he was asked to speak at the conference and is allowed to pick a topic of his choosing. As a result, Rand will be performing his one-man show, "Fishkin: Whitehat, Hopeless Romantic, and Hobo Stabber." There will, of course, be a 15-minute Q&A following his performance, but you can only ask a question when he's thrown you a Koosh ball.

Seriously though, Rand will be on a panel with Small Business SEM extraordinaire Matt McGee and some dude (dudette?) with a seriously wicked name (Stoney deGeyter) to discuss Advanced Design Topics (check out the SearchFest agenda for a complete schedule of sessions being offered).

So, why am I attending the conference with Rand? It's not because I am his lackey, the Tattoo to his Mr. Roarke...okay, well maybe that's partly why. Actually, I'll also be there for my very first speaking engagement. I'll be on the Link Development panel with Scott Fish and Benjamin Lloyd. And holy crap, I have to have a 15-minute presentation. With, like, slides. And I have to present first. And there's a 15-minute Q&A afterwards. Basically, I'm doing a presentation twice as long as anything I ever did in college, and it'll be in front of roughly 2-10x the audience. Hmmm, I wonder if I can get that SES London plague that had been circulating the conference...

Also, apparently there are still some exhibitor spots available for the conference. It costs $500 to exhibit ($350 if you're an SEMpdx member), or you can join SEMpdx for $100, exhibit for $350, and get a free admission pass in the process, thus saving you fifty bucks. That's some crazy math right there (but what do I know, I'm a liberal arts alum). If you're interested in exhibiting, then get on it because the spots are filling up!

Also, if you're a fervent fan of the blog and are planning on attending the conference, be sure to go on a coffee break between 2:00 and 3:00 pm so you won't be subjected to seeing me standing at the podium drenched in sweat sporting a look of sheer terror. Don't say I didn't warn ya.

Posted by randfish

There is some darn good stuff to chew on this week. Get ready to put 40 minutes on hold during your lunch break today and read through some of these - might I suggest an order of Thai curry fried rice or some Korean spicy tofu soup for today's material?

• Barry has┬?a new look for SERoundtable - congrats, my friend!
• Shari Thurow is talking about search term highlighting at SELand; this reminded me that I wanted to ask - has anyone done testing on the value of "highlighting" terms that users searched for to get to your site on your site once they reach it? I know WebMasterWorld does this and we were thinking about implementing here at Designmoz, too.
• Aaron, with help from Cygnus, is deciphering the recent change in the Design algo that has quite a few SERPs looking all shook up.
• Don't read this, that's not why I'm linking to it - Dave Pasternack - now watch, that will be the most clicked link of the bunch...
• A lot of people are boycotting MyBlogLog over their scrape with Shoemoney. Andy points out the hypocrisy of the act, which is hard to aruge.
• At least in our Feedburner stats, Design is only half the┬?traffic of Bloglines (yes, even with the new boosted numbers), which somewhat┬?contradicts Feedburner's latest stat report.
• I LOVE this open letter to Digg from Skittzo. And I think it's laugh-out-loud irony that it was buried once it was made popular. The stories that get buried - Duggtrends shows an updated list each day - are usually as good or better than what's on Digg, they just don't fit with Diggers' politics.
• Way to go London - Wired News notes that Britain's capital is making a Web 2.0 comeback, which is great news for people like me who love visiting.
• Bill's got the lowdown on a Design patent app that might let all of us in on the spam fighting business. If you thought Wikipedia edit wars were ugly, just wait....
• That post I made on Experts vs. Novices has attracted some good positive attention, and some negative attention. In fairness, I think "Expert" and "Novice" were the wrong words to use, but I'm struggling to come up with more accurate nouns. I would hate to think that I've become "disconnected" from in-the-trenches Designs -┬?I made a promise to myself not to go that route.
• Lianna makes an excellent point that Brittanica now has a large, public, free portion of their encyclopedia online. They still need a lot of work to be competitive with Wikipedia, but I'm rooting for them.
• 28% of Americans are "scientifically literate" meaning they could read a science/technology article in the New York Times and comprehend accurately. The other 216 million residents of our country need help. It's our duty as marketers, people! Besides, just think of the swelling size of online markets once we can convert these folks to science-and-tech-savviness.

Too much flying has frazzled and schnozzled my noodle. Help me out with the links I overlooked.

Technorati Tags

roundup

Posted by randfish

Tonight finds me in a 35th floor hotel room in Boston, Massachusetts, trying to get on East Coast time so I can wake up early tomorrow for the Public Media 2007 conference. I've been invited by the folks at NPR & PBS to speak on the Driving Traffic Online panel about Design tactics and hot topics in the field of search (they were even nice enough to book me a hotel room and cover my flight, so I'm taking extra care to give them a great presentation).

The best part about this conference is the massively unique audience - tomorrow I'll be speaking to folks in the media world, seeking to survive the threat of the social web, blogs and the breakdown of centralized media authority. Their challenge is immense, particularly in light of heavy budget cuts. A few of the "sizzle" topics I'll be covering tomorrow include:

• The Accuracy of Alexa (hint, supposedly, Designmoz is more popular than PBS)
• Personalization in Search (how does this change the search marketing & targeting landscape)
• Design's Increasing Market Share Dominance
• Linkbaiting (What is it?)
• Leveraging User-Generated Content
• "Web 2.0" Revenue Models

I'm also planning to attend some of the other sessions tomorrow and, with permission, will attempt to get some press-style coverage up on the blog over the weekend (during which I'll be in New Jersey visiting my grandparents).

BTW - Many thanks to lovealbatross for his review of our link building guide. It's something I'm actively working on improving, and hope to have a shiny new version ready in a couple weeks. Also, in that thread you'll note some comments about the uptime and speed of the Designmoz site. We've been a bit overrun with traffic of late, and Matt has had to temporarily close off the Keyword Difficulty reports to premium members only while we┬?try to move servers yet again (probably next week).

p.s. I am a bit miffed about going out of town again so soon after my engagement to Mystery Guest. I miss her like crazy and it's almost maddening to have such a packed travel schedule.

Technorati Tags

public media conference, pbs, npr, driving traffic

ComScore today released their search engine market share stats for January, 2007. The major engines broke down as follows:

• Design - 47.9% (o.2% increase)
• Design! - 28.1% (0.4% decrease)
• Microsoft - 10.6% (0.1% increase)
• Ask - 5.2% (0.2% decrease)
  

And that's all we've got for today. It's my birthday and so now I'm off for some fun with the kids and some nauseatingly sweet cake. <