The Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose starts next Monday, and I’m looking forward to attending, and to meeting up with old friends, making some new friends, learning what’s new in the industry, and sharing some ideas with others.
I’ll be speaking on Monday morning on the topic of Universal Search, at 11:00am, along side Greg Jarboe and Sherwood Stranieri, with Erik Collier of Ask.com, David Bailey of Google, and Tim Mayer of Yahoo as Q&A speakers in the session. While I have a presentation prepared for the event, if there’s something in particular about Universal Search and blended search results that you want to hear, let me know.
I had the chance last year to join Loren Baker, David Zuls, and Carsten Cumbrowski for a lunch at a San Jose Mexican eatery, The Taqueria, and hopefully will get the chance to meet a few people there for a meal sometime during this conference – if you like Mexican food, it’s definitely a great stopping point.
If you are going to be in San Jose next week, and would like to meet, let me know. I’ll be arriving late this Friday night, and am thinking of running out to BarCampBlock on Saturday morning.
If you aren’t going to be attending SES, but have your sights set on WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon in December (4th – 7th), I will be speaking during the session “SEO 101 – The Timeless and Classic Hits” with Bruce Clay and Ash Nallawalla. Just what is SEO 101 these days? We’ll be exploring that during our presentation.
It would be so great to get involved with both those events, Bill. However I have a busy three months coming up so it won’t be possible. I’m sure you’ll have some great times there, so let us know how things go. I’m sure you will. 🙂
I always wanted to goto one of these conferences. Would love to meet you, and the other big names in Search that may be there. I’m just so busy all the time with my own stuff that its nearly impossible to make time to learn more. Goodluck with your presentation.
Hey Bill –
Looking forward to seeing you out west next week. Danielle and I get in on Sunday and will be there through Thursday night.
See you at San Jose Bill!
@ John,
There are a lot of good reasons to attend a conference like SES, including the contacts that you can make, and people that you can meet. It can be worth making the time.
@ Barry,
I’m going to have to find a conference being held out your way, so that I can meet you in person one of these days.
@ Chris
Looking forward to seeing you and Danielle, too.
@ Shor
Definitely looking forward to seeing you at the conference. Have to make certain that we get a chance to talk some.
I’m pretty excited about the barcampblock, but barcamp Nashville looks like it is going to be a lot of fun, too.
I was fortunate last year that WordCamp2005 was the weekend before the San Jose SES. I’m looking at the timing of barcampblock as just as fortuitous.
Will see you at SES I hope.
I will be there as well.
Coincidentally, I will be leaving the day after BarCamp Nashville.
See you there.
-John
I wish I were going this year!
It’s like a family reunion or at least a gathering of the tribe. Getting the chance to spend some time with you, Loren, Carsten & many other GREAT folks is always the main event for me.
BTW – The Mexican food in Hawaii SUCKS.
I wish that you were going to be here, too.
So far, I can’t say that I’ve had bad Mexican food in the San Jose/San Francisco area. It might be like trying to find bad Pizza in New York City – possible, but really hard to do.
Hopefully we’ll see you at Pubcon or one of the other conferences coming up.
Hey Bill,
Damn… I forgot on Thursday to go to that Mexican place. Too bad that it was closed on Wednesday evening. I missed out on it.. mmh.. next time.
Now we know that it is only open until 5pm… I was heading out on Thurday around 1:00pm and was not even thinking about lunch.. I got hungry while I was driving back to Fresno..
Did you go on Thursday?
Hi Carsten,
It was really good seeing you in San Jose.
I regret that I didn’t make it for Mexican food. We do know better now for next year. It was really disappointing to get there and see the sign saying that they close after 5:00pm.
Hey Bill, yep, it was good to see you too, it was fun, even though you flaked out on me a few times 🙂
The talk about the Mexican place made me hungry, or more precise, enhanced my appetite hehe.
Well, we know now and a few others that care know now too hehe. There will be a next time for sure.
How does the German saying go? “Vorfreude ist die schoenste Freude”, which means roughly translated to English: “pleasant anticipation is the best pleasure”
I myself didn’t make it to SES buy my homies are keeping track for me. Where are the advanced conferences? If I hear that I need text around my videos one more time I’m going to scream. Cheers!
Hi Erik,
One source that might be helpful to you in finding conferences that might capture your attention is Confabb.
There are a number of conferences that focus upon academic and industry approaches to search, human computer interaction, data mining, and the semantic web, such as the following:
Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
http://www.wsdm2009.org/
The 18th International World Wide Web Conference
http://www2009.org/
CHI 2009
http://www.chi2009.org/
European Semantic Web Conference 2009
http://www.eswc2009.org/
These don’t focus upon a marketing perspective to search, but you may find them interesting, regardless.
Thanks for that Bill! I wasn’t aware of those conferences. It wasn’t my intention to bash SES as I learned quite a lot my first time there. For networking and a general good time it’s a great place to be. When you live and breathe SEO however it can be tough to find much that is new there. With all the great blogs out there LIKE YOURS, there’s plenty of ground breaking information at my fingertips.
Thanks!
Hi Erik,
I didn’t think that you were bashing SES in any way. There are a lot of conferences that have different focuses, that you might find pretty interesting, though.
The WWW2010 is tentatively scheduled to be held in Raleigh, North Carolina, which would make it domestic trip. It’s still over a year away, but it might be a good one to think about.
Thanks for your kind words about my blog.
I was wondering who the heck is responding to a blog post from over one year ago. Hehe. Well SES SJ is just happening and this post is about SES SJ from LAST year. It probably still ranks for SES San Jose though hehe.
Bill, add to your list of resources to find industry events this page on my resources site (I thought that you knew about it 🙁 )
http://www.cumbrowski.com/CarstenC/NewsAndEvents.asp
It also refers to other resources and calendars with internet marketing events, in case that I missed one or if you like them better than me (if you do, send me a mail and tell me WHY please 🙂 )
Cheers!
Carsten
Hi Carsten,
That is a nice calendar of events – I should have referred to it. Thanks.
I tried to list a number of conferences that looked at search from a different perspective given what Erik wrote about advanced conferences – the world of classrooms and peer reviewed papers and search engineers. Not so much marketing conferences, but rather conferences that look at search from the eyes of a usability professional or an information retrieval practitioner, for instance.