Pubcon 2008: On the way back
After 4 days in Las Vegas on pubcon, I was happy to leave this crazy place today for the Bay area, where I will stay for a day and catch up with some friends and merchants during Saturday (and I need to sleep before getting back on the plane for 11 hours).
The pubcon was good. About the same size like last year - but with some new twists. We (the speakers and webmasterworld members) are happy that the topics around SEO and internet marketing evolve and still attract a lot of new people to the conference.
A short roundup:
There were 3 days with sessions on different Internet marketing topics. I have been speaking and presenting in 3 different sessions on Wednesday and Thursday. Today was the classic Pubcon - basically a big good-bye party for the people and the last chance to shake some hands.
Google’s ever present Matt Cutts was hanging out with the crowd again and I complained to him that our CDbaby descriptions seem to trigger a duplicate content penalty while other of our pages rank good. This is technically understandable, but not how it should be. Anyhow - the classical pubcon was held at the “Hofbräuhaus” in Vegas, a typical German/Bavarian type of “Pub” (or at least what is supposed to be typical german).
I actually did not see too many of the sessions on these 3 days. Most of the time I was ending up in talks to other developers I know and to who I bumped in when I TRIED to get into a session. The hot topics are (still) link building and conversion. This has basically not changed much from last year.
Really great was Shawn Rorick from the Cirque du Soleil. He had a new idea about how to hold a keynote speech and not shake with the notes: put them on large paper 
The blendtec keynote speech also was great - “Will it blend?“ as a viral campaign actually pushed the revenue for that product up by 700% - quite a number and the guy from blentec was also just fun to listen to - he is a good speaker!
So - social media is a huge part of the online marketing world. We as “old school” SEOs just have to adopt and embrace it.
Some famous webmasters have been missing and I hope to catch up with some tomorrow in the Bay area. Next week we will start to implement some new ideas I have into tradebit and from Monday on, I will be back in Germany to join Martin on the keyboard with the development and to put more content out to the world.
