I’m back the Bay Area after a trip to Boston for the WebmasterWorld PubCon, with a side trip to Ann Arbor, MI to see my parents. (I’d been hoping to fly SF->Boston->Detroit->SF, but it turned out to be cheaper and simpler (from an accounting perspective) to fly SF->Boston->SF, with a frolic-and-detour of Boston->Detroit->Boston in the middle. Company pays for the outer loop, I pay for the inner loop. Long, long travel day on Saturday.)
Highlights of the conference for me: the Gladwell talk (blogged earlier), the local search panel (with apparently ever-amusing Jake Baillie), and the various bring-your-own-site SEO clinics (link building, organic site reviews). Also and probably most of all the “thin-slicing search” panel with Gord Hotchkiss of eye-tracking study fame. I love this stuff, and hope we’ll see more of this kind of careful examination of how users use search, down to the millisecond.
The YPN party was fun, though I didn’t end up staying long. And then of course there’s the dinner that must remain nameless (and blogless), without any mention of desserts or Scotch, or of the fact that after-hours even the most competitive companies can have a friendly meal together. But you didn’t hear it from me.
Alas, my filial obligations kept me from the PubCon within PubCon, and so I remain with a lifetime PubCon attendance record of zero. So of course the main takeaway is: I gotta get out more. 🙂 I hope to be at SES in August (with the limitation of the conflicting spam workshop at SIGIR), and will definitely make it to the next Las Vegas PubCon (in November).
Tim Converse 