Webmaster World Pubcon Vegas review - Part One

20th November 2005

Returning from Webmaster World Pubcon 10, I started writing this while sitting on the plane, and I’ll make a note when I’m off the plane)

Reflecting on the conference, I’m actually a little disappointed in how things turned out. I guess I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I know it definitely wasn’t what I expected.

The keynote speaker, Robert Cringely from PBS was excellent. His perspective on the upcoming changes that would take place in the internet were fascinating.

In his talk, I discovered that SUN Microsystems was begun at Stanford University, as was Cisco Systems. SUN actually stands for Stanford University Network workstations, and Cisco arose out of a need for Mr. Cringely’s assistant to communicate with her husband (on a separate Stanford network) via email, so they invented a router.

According to him, Microsoft loses money on all of their non Windows or Office related divisions, including Xbox, which has lost over 4 Billion dollars since its rollout. If you believe him, they do it intentionally, with future plans to jettison those losing divisions when profits level off in Office and Windows. This plan will allow them to remain profitable as those overly profitable divisions decline. All that’s well and good, but how does it relate to search?

He also predicts that Google will ultimately win the battle for supremacy over Microsoft, and points to their recent acquisitions of land and unused cable and fiberoptics that he called, “dark fiber” lines as an effort to own the infrastructure, and effectively become the internet. He also pointed to recent efforts made to buy out AOL, and to possibly buy out Comcast. Fascinating. I was captivated.

The sessions seminars were run every two hours, with four sessions going at any given time. This led to some tough and sometimes incorrect decision making on my part, and a lot of good in formation that I missed out on. I left two seminars once they began due to the tedious process of looking at attendee websites for review, as they pertained to the session topics of PPC landing pages or genearal usability. In the future, I’d like to see the sites be reviewed be submitted days before the session, and have the panelists not completely wing it.

I decided to focus my attention on areas of weakness, so my first session was devoted to PPC management. While I feel I have a lot of experience handling pay per click accounts, these were heavy hitters that sounded on paper like they could vastly improve my knowledge. I left after 10 minutes, because the level of education was so elementary and sitting there was tedious. That made me appreciate the in depth Ultra Advanced classes at Search Engine Workshops I attended this year.

I instead walked in to the “Big site - Big brand - Big SEO” session, which was excellent. I’m glad I switched. They discussed ways to improve crawlability, avoid database pitfalls, displel myths and trends and talked about involving the companies PR department in link building and the website. That is so true. My own experience with even a few good sized companies has been that they don’t equate the web with the other forms of media, and they’re missing giant opportunities to capture market share from their neighborhoods to the world.

leaving plane -