There are some great benefits to this subtle change, especially in relation to analysis :

Quickly find your competitors most optimised links

An optimised link would generally contain great anchor text and point to the most valuable sub-page. They are often paid for. Simply do a pivottable adding Target, then Anchor text to the row labels, then Anchro text to values and you’ll have a nice summary of pages with anchor texts and counts – if you click on a number then you’ll see the links to that page with the given anchor text in a new worksheet. What you do with this date is of your call

Work out very quickly what products your competitor appears to be targeting

This can be done with a very simple pivot table, look at how many of their sub-pages have inbound links ; if they are doing SEO it indicates which products are important to them

Find your or your competitors most successful linkbaits

This one is a simple pivottable & sort – look for deep pages with a lot of inbound links. When I do this on Seomoz.org, I notice that the beginners guide to search engine optimisation, and the search ranking factors are amongst the most popular pieces of content. Unfortunately , due to the ways linkscape filters out links you’ll lose a lot of the natural links , but you should still have enough to see the actual pieces which earned the natural links to find them with a new search (either using linkscape or Yahoo!).

Honing in on your competitors lower grade activity

What on earth do I mean by this? well I’m referring to comment spam, article distribution & the like – again, due to low quality frequently being filtered out of linkscape (and indeed many tools) it’s often necessary to find the URL’s  and then move to yahoo to get the raw data (i.e. links).

You can hone in on this by exporting the linkscape data to csv, doing a pivottable, using nofollow as a filter (where nofollow has a ‘1′ in it), and target as both a row label and value – you should be able to identify sub-pages picking up a fair few nofollow links this way, which can trigger further investigation.

If you do identify a lot of these ‘noise’ links, then you can exclude this noise from your analysis when trying to work out the links that are really doing the damage.

An alternative way I’ve used to hone in such links is to do a similar thing using anchor text instead of target, isolating all nofollowed links with rich anchor texts – these are almost always spam. If you’re that way inclined you could even use these links to report your competitors, but given they aren’t paid for, Google is unlikely to care too much …..

If you’ve read this post wondering how on earth to do Pivottables, I recommend you read and listen to the distilled series on how to be an excel ninja .

While I think the ever increasing visibility being provided on links by Linkscape/Majestic is excellent, I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s becoming easier everyday for your competitors to imitate or scrutinise your link building techniques, meaning we have to work ever harder to create inimitable campaigns.

Before we go any further, can we clear up something… what’s all this Bothan business? Something to do with a former cricketer?

Ha, wondered when that would come up… Ok so when I first started learning SEO everyone had their avatar, and no-one really joined forums etc with their “real name” (yes I’m looking at evilgreenmonkey and rishil here!). So when I signed up to be a pro member at SEOmoz I thought, well Rob.. and Bothan came from a Star Wars race – the ones who steal the plans to the Death Star. Thus RobBothan suitably geeky I thought! So at some point I do need to move across to RobNicholson.

OK, next thing to clear up… what the hell is a “Digital Customer Experience Analyst”?

Well I won a competition to have the longest job title… no really it addresses the fact that I look at everything on the customer experience side at Easynet Connect – from SEO to Usability and how the CRM system deals with them.

Final thing to clarify, who are Easynet Connect? Aren’t they just Easynet (Sky’s ISP)? What’s the difference?

Easynet Connect is part of the Easynet Group, established in 1994 and now owned by BSkyB. Easynet Connect is one of the leading providers of quality connectivity and internet access for small to medium size businesses, such as leased lines, SDSL and 100Mbps Fibre.

With those things sorted out, tell us a bit about how you got into SEO.

Well it was in the days of optimizing per keyword, and I was running an ecommerce website. As part of the site launch we looked at expanding the marketing for it. As such the web design agency said “we’re learning about this thing called SEO – and it’s £500 per keyword per month” – at which point I started thinking l’d learn about it as we couldn’t afford the budget.. and got hooked! I still have that RFP lurking around somewhere! Since then I’ve moved across e-commerce, to enterprise level travel & government sites & now onto the B2B telecoms world.

On your SEOmoz profile you say SEO is so fascinating you have bored people to death about it. Have there been any recent fatalities?

I’ve persuaded a British Olympic rowing team member to not use the internet… due to a discussion at a fancy dinner party revolving around “so what is SEO” – and I guess I scared them with the concepts of analytics everywhere & manipulation of data on the internet!

You helped organise a News Corp SEO conference last year with me. What did you get out of the session?

Well that was quite a conference – first off I became intimately involved in how global videoconferencing solutions work! Getting New York, Los Angeles, San Fransisco and London hooked up on a live HD video conference took some doing.

It was a great conference to learn from people like Drew Broomhall at the Times and yourself at LocateTV on subjects I’ve often not had the opportunity to look into – like enterprise level news SEO. I think it also pulled together the widespread SEO’s in Newscorp to allow us to chat on a more casual basis on tips and tactics – I’d recommend this to any large organistion!

You often tweet about Sandhurst Military Academy, what’s the connection?

I used to be in the TA at university, so I’ve a lot of friends who are now either in Sandhurst training or deployed with the British Army. Great guys and amazing talking with them, even though I’ve been know to discuss how the project management & presentation skills I’ve learned in my career are useful to them.

If you were a character in a Disney movie, which would you be?

Disney movie… Wall-e? hmm too easy… and not scary – I’d go for Maximilian from the first Disney movie not to have a U rating, the Black Hole – as most Disney robots are a little too cute and cuddly – and I’d want to be a bit of a scary robot (more fun ) (can you tell I’ve watched scifi films?)

Tea or coffee?

Coffee is essential in the mornings. I actually can’t function without it.

What advice do you have for other in-house SEOs?

I’d say patience is key for SEOs, get a full knowledge of your company from end-to-end, from customer service to the product teams – as you’ll find some surprising allies and ideas lurking around there with people keen to help out. Then really sort out your analytics so that you can measure and produce dashboards for your key stakeholders. Its no good saying “trust me” – they need to be shown proof & a plan to succeed. That’s one of the key first things to do, once you’ve done that yes you can look at the fun things in SEO – but you need to be getting the basics right and making sure elements like PR are providing the best input from the very beginning.

I guess one of the key things to establish as an in-house SEO is whether you’ll be on your own, or have a team with you, as then you can delegate tasks, such as analytics, to specific people. Otherwise if your on your own you’ll have to spend some time at the beginning automating or liasing within your company so that your time isn’t drained by regular tasks such as monthly reporting, or press release checking.

Additionally, manage your stakeholders well, I’ve often found conflict between marketing & dev teams can lead to unnecessary delays – and an in-house SEO is perfectly placed to be the go-between to help out those parties and add value to their projects. Those people, such as PR, might not understand SEO – but when you explain it helps them get more publicity they quickly become fans!

If you had a FlashForward to 6 months from now, what would you like to see?

6 months from now? Hopefully I’d see something I do love that FlashForward series (ST: Rob added the link, not me). What would I like to see, I’d like to see some more regulation in the SEO industry, both in regulating the search engines as well as the professionals in agencies & inhouse roles. I definitely feel that whilst our market is constantly shifting, from Social Media to new platforms such as mobiles and tablets – we’re a maturing industry and need to act like it. On that point, I think I’d also like to see a little less hysteria and negativity in both the UK start-up community and also in the SEO industry at large.

I guess I’d like to see on a personal side I’d like to see some B2B sales cycle research I’m doing completed, and my attempts to setup ChromeOS on Ubuntu on VMware on a mac…

Thanks Rob for a great SEO.BIO. If you aren’t already, you can get to know Rob even more by following him on Twitter.

It goes like this – somebody says something potentially controversial , we (as SEO’s) decide as a collective that we disagree with the author , everybody tweets about the post and people start typing their responses … and then somebody screams linkbait. We stop writing our responses, we don’t comment on the blog, we stop retweeting the link and we definitely don’t write a counter post citing it. The general thought is, because it might be a cunning linkbait ploy, we should all ignore it and let it go unchallenged. If we disagree with something, we definitely should make sure we do our part to bury it (or something like that).

The first thing I think we’re doing wrong is making the classic assumption that other people are like us – that they share our knowledge and motivations. I’d like to bet that the majority of people involved in publishing online don’t have a clue about linkbait. Maybe Techcrunch know about linkbait but the PCmag guy? Really? Even if he has heard of linkbait, I think our fear of being duped is likely greater than his desire to get our links.

But the problem is deeper than that – even when we know the other party might want the publicity should it stop us? Do we really let our fear of falling for linkbait override the need to put our side of the debate across? What if we really disagree with what was said? Is it OK to suffer ignorance as long as it doesn’t get found by others? A similar thought process is applied when justifying the decision to censor extreme political parties (better to let distasteful views go unchallenged than risk them even getting more attention). I don’t agree in either case.

Perhaps part of the problem lies in the word linkbait itself – when bait is used in fishing context, it’s being used as a way to fool the fish purely for the benefit of the fisherman – the fish is definitely not going to be having a good time if it takes the bait. What does a web publisher lose though from linking out? If anything we’re likely to gain from linking out to something that’s getting lots of other editorial links – and hopefully, if that post is ranking, your counter argument will be ranking alongside it.

Let’s think of it another way, if a BBC journalist contacted you about a white paper you published, and subsequently wrote an article informed by it, but didn’t link and then said “I can’t link to you …. I really disagree with what you say on page 2 and the last thing I want is to do is help you rank that… besides, you’re whitepaper is obviously a linkbait! I’m not falling for that” - surely you’d be up in arms? “Old media doesn’t get it”.

Let’s not fear linkbait even if we know its linkbait, and we don’t like the content. If the said linkbait  provokes us to respond, then that’s what I think we ought to do – linking is beneficial to all of us and we all rely on it. We wouldn’t want people to not link to us just because they disagreed with us, would we? If that happened we might have to agree with everybody, and that, for sure, would suck.

We’ve been having a discussion (a vaguely heated discussion)  after reading Rand’s excellent post on VC Funding about which is the better tool; Linkscape or Majestic SEO.

Personally I have not used Majestic much but I know a lot of people like it and I have heard many a positive comment on it. I have however been using Linkscape since it was first born and in conjunction with the other tools on the Moz it provides me with a comprehensive suite to complete most tasks.

However, I’m really interested to see what you, my esteemed peers in the SEO industry think.

• Which do you use?
• Has anyone used both?
• What are the respective strengths and weaknesses of each tool?

Please vote below and comment (or email me) with your thoughts – I’ve got a follow up post brewing and your input will be extremely useful.

Hold the phone! Revelations below.

Internet genius John Dvorak who writes for PC Magazine has written the things no other man dares to say. He alone is forging a path of enlightened truth through the eternal night of the internet.

Read on, if you dare…

Revelation #1
Search engines use tricks to rank websites, then SEOs reverse engineer these tricks to trick the search engines into ranking other sites which SEOs want to rank because they’re so tricky.
(source: Paragraph 2 of the mad ramblings of John Dvorak)

Revelation #2
There are no large SEO firms or agencies, the entire SEO industry is made up of shady individuals who consult for ‘a few’ companies and whisper (shadily) about their tricks in the background.
(source: Paragraph 3 of the mad ramblings of John Dvorak)

Revelation #3
All website selling something are controlled and/or influenced by SEOs. It could in no way, shape or form be an affiliate or genuine company. Fact.
(source: Paragraph 5 of the mad ramblings of John Dvorak)

Revelation #4
PC Magazine is one of the ‘few trusted’ sources for information on, well that doesn’t matter. anything. Coincidentally that is where this man writes – who would have thought?
(source: Paragraph 7 of the mad ramblings of John Dvorak)

Revelation #5
When you click a link and it takes you to another search engine results page you have been tricked. The number of instances of this event tell you how well ’search engine countermeasures’ are ‘doing’. Quite what they are doing and against whom is not specified.
(source: Paragraph 8 of the mad ramblings of John Dvorak)

Final Thought
SEOs are large and vague like fog – no one knows who they are but everyone is reading about SEO (somehow). So we need to er, get ready.

Still don’t believe that the internet is just one big tricksy lie made by search engines tricked by SEOs? Then you are what some people might call mentally retarded.

Rather than list some arbitrary things you should do, see, lick or try in 2010 I’m going to arbitrarily list some lists that I think you should read about 2010 that will enrich your life, that will make you more physically attractive and make you an SEO Voodoo Priest like that guy from Predator 2.

So without further ado, here is my list of top lists about 2010:

SEO LIST ONE:
Mystic Rand rubs his crystals balls and predicts what he thinks will happen in SEO in the big one-oh. Here are his 8 Predictions For SEO in 2010 – will they be true? Bets are still being taken – contact me for details!

SEO LIST TWO:
Over at Holistic Search Pete Young stalks a woman on a beach, as well as compiling a list of Ten People You Should Be Following in 2010. I know you didn’t want to make everyone else look bad which is why I’m not on this list. Right Pete?

Pete?

Ahem.

SEO LIST THREE:
If you couldn’t be bothered to come up with your own, check out this great list of 20 SEO Resolutions for 2010 from SEOptimise. That’s 1.67 resolutions a month – he’s a maniac!

So now that you’ve read those lists you feel better right?

Powerful?

Almost… superhuman…

Happy New Year!

“Good thing about twitter is people know who you are and can recommend you – everything you say and believe in is out there for them to see ” @Rishil

There is no getting away from it, we all love twitter. It allows us to engage with people who may never have spoken to us before, we can listen in to the conversations happening in social spheres that are not our own, and we can connect with people all over the world, with different interests and backgrounds, all from one interface. But what happens when you are not just one person online How do you bring all of the facets of your personality together.

It’s not an easy decision to make, and all the worse in that it’s a decision we generally make when we’re just starting out, and not one that’s easily changed once we have started to build contacts and a reputation. Even worse is when a company is involved, if you tweet as part of your company, and your identity is tied up with that, what happens then when you leave?

How many twitter accounts do I need anyway?

Of course this doesn’t just apply to twitter, but it is the easiest medium to demonstrate it in. It’s an age old question, and one that resulted in me being better known online as Yoshimi than I am as Sarah. Many moons ago when I first started on AOL chat rooms, I was known as SECsy (a name amazingl,y suggested by my mother, when I was only 14. SEC were my initials & the internet wasn’t exactly popular then so I don’t think either her or I considered the danger associated with such a name) Later it was changed to Sassy2306 (my birthday if you want to buy me a gift) and finally, when I started joining forums, I settled on Yoshimi. Slowly over time I stopped visiting the places where I had used other names and Yoshimi became me. Whether I was on my favourite Knitting community, or chatting about Rats, or the GTD system, suddenly I was Yoshimi everywhere I went.

By the time I joined twitter. Yoshimi was already taken, so I chose Yoshimiknits as a username, and opened a second account Freckle_red to use for SEO related tweeting. Unfortunately though I was already starting to become known in SEO as Yoshimi, and I was definitely known in the rest of my life as Yoshimi. It didn’t take long for me to realise that having 2 accounts wasn’t going to work, I was me, not SEO me and Knitting me & rat fancying me, just the one, Yoshimi, aka Sarah.

Recently I started to look at how other people on Twitter solve this issue, and decided that there are 4 distinct types of twit

1. The Split Personality

These people have two or more accounts, one for every facet of their personality. There is very little cross over between the two, in fact you might even be hard pushed to connect them. They use all of the latest gadgets and gizmos to manage their multiple personas, and make sure that they never tweet the wrong thing from the wrong account.

This doesn’t include managing a company account as well as your own, although if you’ve ever tried to do that for any length of time you may be able to imagine the immense amount of pressure these people put themselves under. The great thing about this approach is that you can be sure never to offend anyone with dirty joke, or bore anyone with a tweet that isn’t relevant to them. But on the other hand your followers will see you as flat, you become one dimensional, a person without depth that letting people see the other sides of your personality brings.

If you want to keep all your personas separate, be sure to bring a little from all of them into each account, and don’t expect to be able to build more than 1 “big” personality, unless of course you want to make maintaining your twitter accounts a full time job.

2. The Secret Diarist

3. The Parrot

Parrots can’t quite decide whether they are two people or one. The don’t have enough to say for two people, but aren’t ready to commit to either persona. They have people following both of their accounts, and seeing each tweet twice, as they struggle to make the decision over which account they should use and whether everyone will follow them to it when the finally commit.

Worse still, the longer they leave it the more followers each account gets and the harder the move becomes. Best advice to Parrots, make the decision now. It’s like ripping off a sticking plaster, the sooner you do it the better it will feel.

4. The Dudes

You remember the Dude, he let it all hang out. He didn’t care what anyone thought of him, or if he was wearing the wrong outfit for the venue. He just wanted to be the dude, and you either liked it, or you didn’t go bowling. Dudes have just one account, and from there hey will tweet about everything from the whether, to their blog, from work to  baby puke. They are well rounded people with lives apart from social media, SEO and ROI. They don’t exist to keep their followers happy, or to make sure that every tweet is really interesting, they’re just there to tweet and say what’s on their minds.

Of course this does mean that you only want to read one out of every 50 tweets from them, but hey, the dude abides.

Photo Credits

oudeschool (main image)

saltatempo (split personality)

fortinbras (Secret Diarist)

artolog (Parrot)

IS THE HUMAN RIGHTS ACT IMPREGNATING THE ROYAL FAMILY?

and

ARE PAEDOPHILES MOLESTING DRIVERS?

While giggling away to myself and wondering just how many hours I was going to end up wasting on this gizmo, I realised that despite the utter ridiculousness of the headlines, I wanted to read them, and in my head was a voice reading them out with a sense of urgency, as if, unless I acted straight away, I too would be the victim of driver paedophilia!

And it dawned on me, the daily mail, for all their faults, do one thing better than most of us, they have the formula for the perfect headline. Whether you see it and want to start kicking anyone who isn’t you out of the country, or see it and want to lock up the stupid and ignorant (weirdly everyone who reads the daily mail immediately starts hating someone, daily mail readers read it and hate everyone who isn’t a daily mail reader. Everyone else reads it and starts hating daily mail readers. It’s quite amazing to watch) you know as soon as you see one of their headlines,  it’s time for a good fight!

So I’ve decided, from now on, wherever I can, I am going to ask myself

“Would this get published in the daily mail?”

You can expect some amazing hyperbole from here on in!

Just a quick one to tell you about a change for me. It’s with both sadness and great excitement I can now tell you about my pending move from Leeds to pastures new.

I’ve decided to leave my current position here to take a new Job @ Gravytrain working with LeedsSEO favourite Hannah_bo_banna , in Hampton Hill, SW London. I’m obviously really excited about my new role, where I’ll be looking after Gravytrain’s SEO clients.

Although up until recently I was quite settled in the North, having lived here all my life, I decided it was time for a change – my personal circumstances have changed a fair bit recently and most of my family now live down south. I’m moving to a nice flat in Twickenham in a couple of weeks, which, given I currently live in Barnsley, is likely to be a little bit different

There’s nothing really wrong with my current Job, I just fancied moving somewhere busier and working agency side again. Obviously working for somebody as cool as Hannah was a major pull too!

I don’t know many people in the South West London (or London overall) yet, so if you live around there feel free to drop me a line on twitter.

I’ll still be blogging for LeedsSEO (yes yes I know, I’ve been quiet recently, but worry not – I have several killer posts in progress), and hopefully still making the occasional event up here too.
Catch y’all around,

Matthew

First up was Kevin Rose from Digg. He had a bunch of tips for gaining popularity:

• When building features find ways that they can increase the users self-worth or stroke their ego using emotional and visible rewards (leaderboards, highlighting profiles against top contributions)
• Stop over building features, pick 2-3 things to focus on and always ask yourself “is there anything I can take away from this feature?”
• Stop thinking you understand your users – learn from what they’re actually doing on your site. Decide on what you’re going to build and build it (avoid analysis paralysis). Keep iterating.
• When launching features think about using invite-only systems to deliberately limit the number of people. Hand out invites to influential bloggers/press and see the buzz build.
• Connect with your community: start a podcast, throw launch parties and quarterly/yearly events.
• Look for a hook to get people involved (e.g. with Farmville on Facebook they send notifications – three of you friends helped you out – repay the favour).

Also Kevin gave some good answers to questions asked from the audience:

• Dealing with people trying to game the system: Be careful about banning people – don’t do it visually – some users might do stuff that looks like gaming without realising – create a user on-boarding process that takes them through positive steps to help them understand what then need to do.
• Did Digg ever pay for marketing? Digg never did, everything was basically word of mouth, they never paid for traditional advertising, PPC, etc.
• What’s next with Digg? Digg will doing less on just the homepage and also looking at promoting the other vertical landing pages.

Video of Kevin’s presentation:

Taking your Site from One to One Million Users by Kevin Rose from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Mike McDerment from Freshbooks gave some advice on “socks and underwear” (boring but essential) things you should be doing to analyse your site.

• You need to understand the funnel of how your users convert. This is not always simple if you run sites with different options, such as freemium (give users a free account then encourage them to upgrade). The conversion to paying user could take many months.
• For tracking users you need to ensure that your marketing information (referrer, keyword, landing page, etc) is stored with the user’s account. This way you can see how different marketing strategies convert over a period of time.
• Build a simple reporting interface that allows your marketing team to run simple ad-hoc queries across the user data so, as a developer, you are not constantly bugged with requests.

David Prager from Revision3 described three steps to building a great web app:

• Get niche – find the absolute core of your demographic and build around that community (apparently “niche” is really pronounced “nitch” – who knew?)
• Get rich – create the best quality and depth of content on your niche
• Go mainstream – take your niche and find new communities

An example of this was a specialist rock-climbing site that creating great content around that subject and then branched out to other extreme sports. Digg also did the same thing with tech news and then expanding into other verticals like entertainment.

Osama Bedier from Paypal discussed the way in which legacy infrastructure hurts innovation. He gave a wonderful example of why the space shuttle (one of the most advanced forms of transport) has limitations based on legacy infrastructure. Although I can’t entirely remember it all, essentially the space shuttle is limited in terms of the distance it can fly by the amount of fuel it can hold in it’s solid rocket boosters. The solid rocket boosters are built in Utah and are transported by train to the space centre in Florida by train. On the journey, the train must fit through a narrow tunnel that is just big enough to fit the width of the tracks (and hence the solid rock boosters can be no bigger than this). The width of the tracks is 4 foot 8.4 inches.

The reason the tracks are this width is because the American railroads we built using the same equipment to build railways in England. The railways were built the same width as tramways, which in turn were build to fit the grooves created by wagon wheels in dirt tracks. The distance between wagon wheels dates back to Roman war chariots pulled by horses. The wheels on those chariots were positioned to essentially be the width of two horses arses. And so, the reason why the shuttle cannot fly long distances into space is due to the width of two horses arses.

Osama also described an analogy of the internet being a little like electricity, in that for a very long time electricity was limited by the fact that appliances had to fit light fitting (as lighting was the first killer application for electricity). Many appliances failed to be safe until the socket (and switch) was invented so you could easily unplug. His point was that to enable innovation you need to remove friction. Coming from PayPal his main point was “cash is dead” and we need to move to entirely electronic payment systems. There are some barriers to this, such as allowing money to move in real-time (not days) and allow for micro-payments to work efficiently. This is the aim of PayPal moving forward and why they have launched their PayPalX platform to open up their API for using in innovation.

Chris Abad from Spymaster (the Twitter game that invited you and your friends to start conspiracy theories and interrogate captured agents). The application around two weeks to build (one week to plan, one to execute). They had great success in building buzz around the application (the first TechCrunch article was written within an hour of launching the closed beta). The things that worked for them where

• Build a great product
• Build a passionate community of raving fans
• Empower your users to market for you (they used the #spymaster hashtag along with a link to play the game)
• Incentivise your users to market for you – notification preferences (tweets) – recruit you friend – take non-playing people and turn them into players to give you more power
• Find key viral channels to maximise exposure – choose things that get attention – tag it with your brand so people know it’s you and trend
• Target influential people when you launch

Aza Raskin from Mozilla described their vision of browsers:

• You Centric – The browser knows who you are, it can be an identity broker, for example let the browser authorise payment
• Social – your friends are too important for any one company own it – the browser could store all you friends scrapped from twitter, facebook, etc and then know which networks to use when you want to communicate with them
• Secure – as the web gets more and more sophisticated the barrier between what we store on desktop and what we store on the web. Traditional web applications are prevented from accessing local resources such as your hard drive. To allow barriers to be broken down we need security.
• Make the web revolve around you – one of the big problems Firefox faces is that of two many toolbars. Tasks are disjointed (to translate a section of a page takes many actions to achieve). Browsers should become task-centric and allow you to use natural language to achieve the task you want to do (here he demo’ed some cool tech allowing you to select some text and type “translate to English” and it replaced the text inline). Your train of thought is key – the technology should allow you to think about what you want to do, not how to do it.

Video or Aza Raskin

You-Centric: The Future of Browsing from Carsonified on Vimeo.

Here are some slightly more techy snippets that I enjoyed:

• Dustin Diaz – Twitter
  • jQuery is like cocaine – one line can get you hooked
  • A framework is something that frames the way you work – if you use one make sure you pick one the allows you to work the way you want to
• Chris Lea
  • Scalability and efficiency are different things. Pretty much every app eventually becomes I/O bound (CPU,DB,Disk,Network,etc). A scalable system is a system where overcoming I/O obstacles can be expressed in financial terms. An efficient system is one where the costs of scaling are considered small. Working on scaling problems is almost always beneficial. Working on efficiency is sometimes beneficial.
• Addison  Berry – Lullabot
  • On the ethos of open source: Code is just a tool. Products are the things that make money. Sony uses Drupal and puts their code back into the open source community – they don’t sell code, they sell music.
  • Also a lot of things about making good sh*t but not monkey sh*t, just crazy sh*t and how you need to kick ass or she’ll kick your ass.
• Francisco Tolmasky – 280 North
  • The line between desktop apps and web apps is blurring. Take a look at 280 Slides which is built using the Cappuccino web framework. And with 280 Atlas (released 15th Nov) you can build the applications using a really great interface builder and run them on the web or on the desktop.

  Video of Francisco’s presentation

  Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications by Francisco Tolmasky from Carsonified on Vimeo.

• Robin Christopherson
  • 19.4% of US population have a disability. Adults with disabilities spending twice as much time online as adults without disabilities (25 hours compared to 10).
  • He gave a demo of how bad Facebook is from an accessibility point of view. Try using a screen-reader such as NVDA on your site to make sure you aren’t making the same blunders.
  • HTML5 offers some nice accessibility features, in particular the new <video> tag (which allows for plugin-less video embedding) can support fully screen-reader capable subtitles and audio description.
• Chris Thorpe – Guardian
  • The Guardian have launched some interesting applications they often require rapid development and have peak demand around a particular topic (for example http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/). A big CMS good for big stuff but very slow to implement new things. This is where cloud computing comes in: they deployed on Amazon EC2 using Django framework with only 1 week dev, 2 days of design and 1 day of a sysadmin. They have also used Google App Engine to deploy similar applications.
• Bruce Lawson – Opera
  • If you want to style (using CSS) the new HTML5 <header>, <nav>, <article>, <footer> in Internet Explorer you currently have to use JavaScript document.createElement(‘header’), etc – WTF!

  Bruce’s presentation on video:

  The Future of HTML5 by Bruce Lawson from Carsonified on Vimeo.

• Simon Warldey
  • Simon gave a really entertaining talk about the future of cloud computing using over 100 slides. As the presentation is so visual so here is the video:

    The Future of the Cloud by Simon Wardley from Carsonified on Vimeo.

    I advise you to find an opportunity to see him speak sometime.

• Dave McClure
  • Had a great quote with reference to your web site: “Some sucks. Find it. Kill it.”

Anyways, that’s all from me. In the words of Ryan Carson…  preciate it.