Visser Labs

I am ecstatic, the bookings have been purchased and flight scheduled. Sarah - lead copywriter and information designer - and I are off on the 19th of March to this years Search Engine Room 2007 - SER2007 - conference in Sydney.

This will be my:

1. first conference ever
2. first business trip ever
3. first time in Sydney ever
4. first time being in a room with SEM ‘experts’ ever

It is set to be a fantastic few days - weekdays - absorbing all matter of SEO, SEM and general internet developments! If I’m lucky I’ll be the youngest at 18 19 years old and there is no way in hell I’m wearing a suit, let alone a tie!

A few guest speakers of immediate considerable interest in my field of web design and on-page SEO will be:

Ben Barren, Co-Founder, Feedcorp
I’m interested in this speaker as I can’t for the life of me find their company Feedcorp’s web site. Start-up? Perhaps too good for an online professional presence, who knows! The best reference I could find to this outfit was on their logo designers blog! Ben’s personal blog has quality content mashed with smutty random pictures from Hollywood, again, intrigued… hope I get to ask him about it.

Aaron D’Souza, Software Engineer – Search Quality, Google (US)
I feel dumb just trying to figure out this speakers background, if they allow recorders for only one speaker at this conference I will be recording this. Ego surfing for Aaron turns up a paper on The Bayesian backfitting relevance vector machine - I think it’s a ‘little’ over my head at this point - as well as an interesting personal blog; off the record Aaron used a cubicle beside Al Gore at work. Sweet…
Bruno Fiorentini, Chief Operating Officer, Yahoo!7
Reading through the hype on Yahoo!7’s Press Boom I get the feeling they’re sick of playing behind in the field of popular search engines. Yahoo’s major involvement in this years conference brings my expectation that they will be outlining future focus areas as well as some features to demonstrate. Yahoo Local Search - Beta in America, not in Australia… am I missing something? - was recently launched in Australia, my only reservation was how out of date their data set was, in my own company’s instance the company name, address and contact details have all changed since publication rendering the results useless! Are they using the 2004 public DTMS or earlier as their foundation?

Richard Kimber, Managing Director of Sales and Operations, SE Asia, Google
Richard took on the controls for Google’s Oceanic division in July of last year. Without a plog to speak of it makes it hard to figure out what to expect.

That’s a wrap up. I’ll be taking notes for all the presentations I can attend and serving them up. Go the mental sponge and coffees! All posts will be tagged under Search Engine Room.