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Hello from Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto!

Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto logo

Fred Marckini shaking hands with the crowd after his keynote at SES Toronto
Fredrick Marckini.

I’m sitting in the press room of the Search Engine Strategies 2008 Toronto conference as I write this. I’m here on a press pass arranged for me by Byron Gordon of SEO-PR and in exchange, I’ll be publishing blog entries from the conference over the next couple of days.

Fredrick Marckini’s Opening Keynote

The opening keynote by Fredrick Marckini, Chief Global Search Officer of Isobar, was quite good. For a guy like me — I’ve been more concerned about application development and technical evangelism than search engine marketing — it was a pretty good introduction to the search engine marketing and trends to watch for. Not only did Marckini present a lot of useful information (especially to an SEM newbie like me), but he presented with style and humor and kept the audience engaged — not an easy thing first thing in the morning.

I took copious notes and once I’ve formatted them, I’ll post them here.

The Best Thing in the Goodie Bag

It’s not a tech conference unless there’s a goodie bag, and this one is no exception. I always find uses for them, and the ones for this conference are pretty decent:

SES goodie bag
The goodie bag at SES Toronto.

They’re trying to making this conference a little more green, so they’ve kept the paper contents of the goodie bag quite lean, limited to the conference agenda magazine, a few sheets of administrivial paper and the best thing, the book Meatball Sundae, written by my favourite marketing guru, Seth Godin:

\"Meatball Sundae\" by Seth Godin
The best thing in the goodie bag: Meatball Sundae, by Seth Godin.

I’m looking forward to reading it.

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“O Brave New World That Has Such Hardware In It!”

I absolutely love old computer books…

Old book: \"The New World of Computers\", featuring a late-\'60s or \'70s-era mainframe
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

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How Map/Reduce/Filter Can Rock Your World

Better late than never: C# 3.0 will feature map, reduce and filter, and Dare “Carnage4Life” Obasanjo explains how to rock these features. He concludes the article with “If your programming language doesn’t support lambda functions or have map/reduce/filter functions built in, you just might be a Blub Programmer who is missing out on being more productive because your programming language doesn’t support ‘esoteric’ or ‘weird’ features,” which sounds kind of weird in an article about C#, a language that could only be Blubbier if its name were BlubLang or Blub#. I suspect I’ve woken up in some upside-down parallel universe again!

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50 Python Modules for all Needs

50 Modules for all Needs is an entry at CatsWhoCode.com that lists 50 Python modules, at least some of which should prove useful to you.

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Most Google Users Ignore Everything After the First Three Results

I would’ve thought that they ignore everything after the first page, but ReputationDefender says that according to a Cornell University Study [PDF], most Google users ignore everything after the first three results.

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Evans Data Survey: Less Than 1 in 10 Developers Writing Apps for Vista

c|net cites an Evans Data report: “A recent report from Evans Data shows fewer than one in 10 software developers writing applications for Windows Vista this year. Eight percent. This is perhaps made even worse by the corresponding data that shows 49 percent of developers writing applications for Windows XP.” Here’s VentureBeat’s take on this report.

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10 WordPress Plugins Everyone Should Have

The 10 WordPress Plugins Everyone Should Have listed by Webmasters by Design are: WP Google Analytics, FeedBurner FeedSmith, WP-Polls, WP-PostRatings, WP-PostViews, Sociable, Google Sitemaps Generator, CForms, Search-Highlighter and All in One SEO Pack.