Dear Wrists,

Please don’t make me take you in for therapy again. I know I abused you, but promise I’ll treat you better next time. The insurance won’t pay for any more visits to that nice hand therapist that you like so much. I won’t stop liveblogging, but will share what I learned liveblogging my first conference with other liveblogging newbies.

Prepare before the conference

Laptop Batteries

A spare battery is great to have, as you won’t always have easy access to power. I lucked out, and found a second battery for $5 at a local electronics fleamarket. It doesn’t have the full capacity of a new battery, but I also didn’t spend $130.

In last weeks post wrote I that Local Search is predicted to be the killer app for mobile phones based on a Juniper Research report predicting that Local search is to account for 43% of cumulative mobile search advertising revenues between 2008 and 2013.

Hot off the heels of this study comes a new Nielson Mobile report showing a growing number of mobile phone subscribers worldwide are taking online social networking to the pubs, streets and subways!

The Nielsen Mobile report show that the U.K. leads Europe in mobile social networking with the U.S. showing similar numbers.

Last week I wrote about how the SEO industry is growing up. Tremendous growth and low barriers to entry are / will attract many new entrants to the market.

But with formal SEO training not yet available on mass (i.e. taught in colleges), this growth is going to leave us with a talent shortage.

Essentially, large companies who want to get into this business are going to be forced to buy their way in.

In order to prepare your shop to possibly benefit from this increased M&A activity, it is helpful to have a sense of what factors will make you attractive to a perspective purchaser.

The Algorithm is Human is a series of post explaining search engine behaviour from a plain and simple human point of view.

Ever had this happen to you?

As you take a cup out of the cupboard another one falls.

Or, just as you put your mug on the table, out of the corner of your eye you see the sugar pot falling.

You see it happen and act immediately!

source: Geek And Poke

Image - CasualChatters.com

Retail therapy helps us to feel so much better when things don’t go our way, and it would seem that the same is true for large corporations with lots and lots and lots of big bucks!

Image Courtesy - lemetrosexuel.com

Since Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! didn’t seem to turn out, they have found themselves with all this money for acquisition available and a designer outfit that appears to be unavailable at this time. Like any savvy fashionista, they’ve decided it was time to head to the mall for some serious retail therapy to make themselves feel better about not getting what they’ve been holding all that lovely money for. LO AND BEHOLD! Like spying the first Abercrombie & Fitch store L.A. (and a demographic to match), Microsoft has decided to head on over to� facebook and see what fits.

Ever wanted to become a power Digger? Come on now … sure you have.

Here’s how to start.

Its a well known fact that Digg trusts content from some sites more than others. Why not … the larger sites are obviously more conservative and more sensitive to public scrutiny. Such sites are much less likely to publish rubbish for fear of reprisals, lost confidence, and reputation management fiascos. As I talked about in my post last week 4 Pillars of Social Media Algorithms - Trust x4, Digg rewards sites it trusts by permitting them to go hot at lower votes counts than those it trusts less. Makes sense right?

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According to a new Juniper Research report, 1.3 billion mobile users are expected to use local mobile search services by 2013. While the trends bode well for for the mobile search industry (agencies and marketers alike) the report goes on to caution that these numbers are based on good a user experience.

Those who have been in the industry since the late 90’s have seen huge changes in SEO. The industry has really matured. But in the grand scheme of things, if you were to plot SEO on a product life cycle chart you would see that the industry is still in its’ infancy.

Except that we’re poised for some serious growth.

SEO - Introduction Stage - Starting about 1998
Companies who were around in the introduction stage often had to build product awareness and develop a market for SEO.

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Previously: Relevance (2)

Instead of painstakingly grabbing the absolute best matches for your query to then rank those with infinite precision, one time saving strategy has search engines go for “close enough”.

Painstaking Precision

Given all the time, money and resources in the world, here’s what we’d normally do.

Word by word you go through a search. You look in your documents and see which has word one…. word two… word three…. You get the picture.