Contrasting Pubcon and SXSW

Mar 282009
 

The dust has settled after my back to back Web conferences in Austin: WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon South, and South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, and I thought I’d take a minute to compare the two. I’ll start by saying that any such comparison is beyond apples & oranges… the two conferences are quite different in scale, objective, and many other ways. Given that, here are a few areas of contrast:

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Anonymous Reviews Headed for Extinction

Dec 042008
 

Fast Company has a good article on the growing use of user-generated content to provide guidance on restaurants, hotels, and just about everything else. The article focuses on the challenges faced by various review sites in balancing freedom of expression against the need to curtail bogus reviews generated by competitors or the firm itself:

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Twitter = Guayabera Shirt?

Nov 242008
 

A Motley Fool post about Twitter reminded me, of all things, of an ancient WSJ article about the popularity of guayabera shirts. I dimly recall that the article spent a long time discussing the comfort and business acceptability of the guayabera, but then closed with a punchline that went something like, “That’s all fine, but when the boss is looking around the conference table for someone to downsize, do you want to be the guy in the guayabera shirt?” My paraphrased version in relation to this Twitter headline was, “That’s all fine, but do you want to be the guy Twittering when the boss is deciding who gets a pink slip?” In fact, though, the article makes a few good points about potential business value in Twitter.

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Is Sphinn Being Sphammed?

Jul 202008
 

I’m a great believer in the power of communities to generate great information by crowdsourcing. I have to admit that I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time at Sphinn, a sort of Digg for SEOs/Webmasters. When I have stopped by, I’ve invariably found some links to cool content. Now, longtime member of the SEO community pageoneresults (aka Edward Lewis) has published data which purports to show that some Sphinn members are sabotaging the community for their own benefit:

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Matt Cutts and Blogging for Traffic

Dec 182007
 

Got a brand new website you want to promote? Wondering how to get traffic and improve Google rankings? Google’s webmaster Svengali Matt Cutts clued us in at the recent Pubcon in Las Vegas: start a blog. (You were expecting, maybe, “buy a bunch of links?” ;) ) Matt pointed out that WordPress was mostly pre-optimized for search engines – the latest versions reduce duplicate content issues, page structure, titles, etc., fit Google’s recommendations, and keyword URLs are easy to generate. We’ve been blog advocates for years, but Matt’s blunt recommendations was still a bit of a surprise. Let’s look at why adding a blog to a new (or even old) site can be a good idea.

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