Drinks For Links & Other SES Musings

At 2:19am on a Wednesday morning here in San Jose I sit to type a quick post on today's going-on at SES San Jose. As today was the day I spoke at my first SES conference (fortunately on a topic I know well - ranking across the three major search engines simultaneously) followed by a number of interesting sessions, networking and of course, the infamous Google Dance, I won't have time to write a long and thorough post on all the sessions however I should note that I have been taking notes and will be posting more information starting on Thursday regarding the sessions and at https://beanstalkim.com/ses/ (link no longer available) I will be posting more information on the session I spoke at. That said, there are a couple interesting quotes that I feel are worth staying up and extra few minutes to post. Everything else couldn't be done justice in the time I have before falling asleep. And here are the quotes:

Many of you may be wondering why the title includes the phrase "Drinks For Links". Veteran SEO and all-round good guy Andy Beal coined the phrase drinks for links (implying that drinks could be the payment for links to a website). He was of course speaking "tongue in cheek" however I found the phrase itself so amusing that here I must use the term "drinks for links" pointing his website in hopes that the strength of the link may in fact help him secure the phrase itself on his homepage.

Another great quote overheard here at SES San Jose was put forth by Google's Peter Norvig when referring to Web 2.0. In it he referred to Sturgeon's Law as it applies to Web 2.0. The origin of Sturgeon's Law as defined in wikipedia places Sturgeon in a panel discussion with an English Literature professor. The professor read a few selected passages of "purple prose" from popular science fiction works, and declared "90% of this Science Fiction is crap." Sturgeon replied "90% of everything is crap." After referencing the origin Norvig went on to say:

"90% of everything is crap and that's certainly true with Web 2.0."

While true it's still amusing. :) Unfortunately much of what I have been able to cover during the actual conference in the blog thus far has been "fluff". I can assure you all that I have been attending many sessions and will be posting information on these sessions and any important information from them on Thursday/Friday. The downside to attending the SES Conference is that I will need to be alert tomorrow to insure that I can best serve my clients with the information I've gathered and to serve you, the valued readers, who will get that main points of the sessions I've attended, you'll just have to wait a couple days for it (don't worry, it's worth it :) As a final note, best of luck to Andy. I hope you rank for the phrase "drinks for links". ;)