Stuart Crawford & I are on the ground and registered at the Toronto Search Engine Strategies conference.
Stuart has selected a series of alternate speakers sessions to participate in. It was relatively easy for us to choose the sessions that peeked our general interests. One of the reasons that Stuart and I are excellent business partners is our evolving core areas of practice. My focus has always been technical. Specifically around website layout, conversion and search optimization. Stuart has successfully built interest in several businesses, including Ulistic, by leveraging both face to face as well as online social opportunities.
There is no doubt that the roads are crossing between Social and Search and I am looking forward to exploring this over the next two days at the Toronto SES conference.
Here is the plan for today;
The keynote speaker today is Mr. Perter Morville, President, Semantic Studios.
10:15 – 11a the conference floor is open.
11a – 12p – the first session that I will attend, “21 Secrets of Top-Converting Websites”
1p – 2p – Information Architecture, Site Performance Tuning, & SEO
3:45 – 5p – Bringing SEO In-House: The Pros & Cons
Stuart, already in Toronto, and I will be attending the Search Engine Strategies conference June 10th and 11th. We have been invited to participate wearing our “press” passes and will be blogging through the event. We both consider this an honour and look forward to learning from our peers and sharing our thoughts with you as the Conference proceeds.
The SES Toronto event is in it’s 7th season. The longevity of this seminar is a reflection of the importance of search and how it has impacted business owners. Some industries have indeed become reliant on being found online and as competition has heated up over the past decade, so have the skill levels of search optimization practitioners. Being able to attend learning events like SES is one of the many keys that separates professionals from people who switch from selling “Franchised Workout Bootcamps” one day to being your Internet Marketing Consultant the next.
I am excited to be heading out to the airport in a short while to shoot off to the big city of Toronto. Many of you may not know, but I lived and worked in Toronto for two years after high school.
Stay tuned as Search Engine Strategies 2010 Conference & Expo is about to begin. See you there!
David A. West
Very often the simple things are the ones that work too. If you need to collaborate, keep track of things to do or manage projects then here are some web-based apps that are free or nearly free that you should have a look at.
Have you heard of Paste Interactive? These folks are doing some pretty nice work in the world of Software as a Service (Saas). They have produced several applications that are free for you to use (or nearly free). I found these guys several months ago and recently received an invitation to the beta of their newest app called “Paprika”
Paste’s primary apps include Jumpchart, Staction and now Paprika.
Jumpchart is an app that allows web designers to mock-up website content into an interactive interface that allows navigation and work flow, just like a real website. Clients and contributors can then access the moch-up and comment. Reasonable fees are applied as your account grows.
Staction is Paste’s response to group collaboration. Taking all that works from the world of Social Media sites like Twitter, tagging and keywords Staction positions itself to simplify your groups collaboration. Reasonable fees are applied as your account grows.
Paprika uses a simple text based system to keep track of all your tags, dates, and todos fast, and easy. While only in beta, I have to admit, I really like Paprika! After creating a “wiki” type page for a project or task list, you can easily navigate and find items. You can share each page (or project) with collaborators via a private web address. Paprika is free for now and is currently by invite only. I have a few invites in my inbox if you want to try it, comment below.
While the above apps are cool and clearly going to get traction, if not already, I really like this one little “subordinated” application. I say it is subordinate because the little link is tucked way down on the page of apps. http://pleasenotify.me/ Please Notify Me is a tiny little app, that really is quite brilliant. Brilliant because we all need it and because it’s just so darn simple.
Please Notify Me is a little form, no membership account required, where you simply send actionable items to anyone you wish. They will be notified of the actionable item by email. Hear’s the easter egg… they will be reminded daily and so will you! They will continue to receive reminders daily until they mark the item as completed. Really, who doesn’t need this? http://pleasenotify.me/
Visit the folks over at Paste and check them out. I subscribed to their blog in hopes to be the first to learn about the next innovations coming out of Paste!
Visit Paste today and see what they are up to – Paste Interactive
David West
Google’s annual developer conference is well underway and there are a number of predictions and announcements being made. These advancements in both Google product offerings as well as technology announcements.
Technology announcements / predictions such as the general adoption of HTML 5 over the coming months. HTML 5 is being developed as the new standard and will bring a ton of functionality to web developers including the ease to embed video in h264 format and the ability to build rich web applications that have access to the local PC’s storage and resources such as cameras. I am going to refrain from making bold predictions about HTML 5′s impact on the internet, but it seems that it is going to propel the move to the cloud faster than ever before.
Google Wave has dropped the need to be “invited” to join wave. This will hopefully mean greater adoption by users. Wave is reported to also be “much faster” to use now. Google has also added permission management and an extension gallery to wave. I haven’t seen the ability to use wave as a primary email tool yet though. When Wave can pull my regular email from non-wave users, then it may be more widely adopted. Until then, it’s rather a closed community.
One of the other product developments that Googlers are talking about is “Google Storage for Developers”. This is a cloud based service build on Google infrastructure that will give developers access to low cost cloud based storage space. It sounds very similar to Amazon Simple Storage 3, a widely adopted cloud based storage solutions for developers. These services tend to be exactly what they are sold as… “for developers” to develop applications and services that leverage the low cost cloud based storage. Twitter, for example, uses Amazon Simple Storage to host portions of the Twitter application. While cloud based storage solutions like these are not exactly consumer products, they become the foundation of some fairly powerful potential in terms of development of cloud based services that you may very well already be using.
Cheers,
David West
Our team over at Ulistic.com are launching our newest Workshop in a series of Internet Marketing related programs.
Join Stuart and I on June 23rd at the Blackfoot Inn where we will not only give you a powerfully tuned installation of WordPress, we are going to show you how to use it. But not just how to blog… how to make you blog a magnet for natural search traffic. Once you understand the power of the blog in terms of gaining it’s own following, we’ll teach you how to focus that attention to your marketing website.
Blogging for Business is June 23rd, 2010
8:30 am to 4:30 pm – Blackfoot Inn, SE Calgary, Alberta
Learn in a small group envirionment, seating is limited - Register today.
Did you know that blogs naturally attract visitors and that they almost do their own search engine optimization?
Learn about blogs and the applications that make them run. Learn why blogs are so effective at generation of targeted traffic. Learn how to cross optimize your blog and your marketing website to make the perform like a lead generating machine. Understand what syndication is and why it works…. go her to learn more about this Blogging Workshop in Calgary
Cheers,
David A. West
