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About the author: Matt Snider is the lead frontend engineer for Mint.com (now a part of Intuit), where he makes extensive use of YUI in the presentation layer. He is also the author of a popular blog on JavaScript. Matt contributed the YUI 2 Storage Utility to YUI and is an active community member; you can see his presentation from YUICONF 2009 on YUI Theater.

Natively, JavaScript has a very limited set of functions for working with numbers located on the global Math object. Mostly these functions are for working with exponents, trigonometry, and rounding. And while these functions are needed and efficient, the Math API has remained unchanged for years, and probably won’t be improved anytime in the near future. So it is up to the developers of JavaScript libraries to create and maintain a component for working with numbers.

The Number component in the YUI 3 Gallery, derived from work originally used on Mint.com, aims to fill in missing number-related functionality. It provides a light-weight set of static functions for working with numbers. The Number component weighs in at about 1.8kb after minification and before gzip; it’s supported by all A-grade browsers.

One of the features in Number that I use the most is the format() function, which injects a formatted number into a string by evaluating the format of the placeholder number in the string. (Note: This is similar to the formatting support Y.DataType.Number currently provides, but rolls up the separate configuration properties which Y.DataType.Number.format accepts into a single formatting pattern string.) The function works with all symbols, but it formats numbers according to the English standard. Here are a few example of how to use format() from its unit test:

var n = 1111.11, formatDollars = "$0,0.00'" // use comma and decimal when formatting formatPercent = "0.00%", // use decimal when formatting formatRound = "0,000", // use comma when formatting formatText = "Please add the $0,0.00 to my tab!"; Y.Assert.areEqual("$1,111.11", Y.Number.format(n, formatDollars)); Y.Assert.areEqual("1111.11%", Y.Number.format(n, formatPercent)); Y.Assert.areEqual("1,111", Y.Number.format(n, formatRound)); Y.Assert.areEqual("Please add the $1,111.11 to my tab!", Y.Number.format(n, formatText));

Other useful functions include:

• random(): provides an easy API for getting random whole numbers;
• isBetween()/isNotBetween(): simplifies the evaluation of number ranges;
• radian()/degrees(): when working with the Math trigonometry functions (such as Math.cos()), which expect radians instead of degrees, both radian() and degrees() are useful for converting values.

To use the Number allery component, first include the script:

<script src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/combo?3.0.0/build/yui/yui-min.js& gallery-2010.02.22-22/build/gallery-number/gallery-gallery-min.js"></script>

Then include 'gallery-number' in your use() function, to get the following functions:

YUI().use('gallery-number', function(Y) { Y.Number = { degrees(number), number(number, format), getPrecision(number), isNotBetween(number, number, number, boolean), isBetween(number, number, number, boolean), isPrime(number), radians(number), random(number, number), roundToPrecision(number, number) }; });

These functions were modeled after the native Math functions and, like the Math functions, the functions on Y.Number return NaN if the value provided is not a number. If you would like to contribute to the development of or require new features added to Number, please leave a message on the Forum.

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.  Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

To share your thoughts on this latest update, please visit the Site Explorer Suggestion Board.

Dan Rampton
Program Manager, Yahoo! Search

The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.

To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.


Google Apps Script has been available to Google Apps customers since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks.

To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.”

Check out the Google Docs blog for more information about Apps Script, and to learn about writing your own scripts, visit the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

I use Google Reader a lot — not only to stay on top of the news, but also to find interesting blog posts and articles. I’m always telling my friends about Google Reader, and while some of them love it, others don’t want to take the time to set it up. For those of you who fall into this second category, we’re announcing Google Reader Play, a new product that makes the best stuff in Reader more accessible for everyone. Reader Play is a new way to browse interesting stuff on the web, customized to the topics you’re interested in, with no setup required.


Items in Reader Play are presented one at a time, and images and videos are automatically enlarged to maximize the viewing experience. We use the technology behind Recommended Items in Reader to populate Reader Play with the most interesting content on the web. While you don’t need a Google account to use Reader Play, your experience will be personalized if you sign in. As you browse, you can let us know which items you enjoy by clicking the "like" button, and we'll use that info to show you other content we think you’ll enjoy.

We think Reader Play is a fun way to browse interesting items online that you wouldn’t find otherwise. We designed it especially for people who don’t want to spend time curating their own set of feeds — but folks who already use Reader can easily use it to read their feeds as well. Just click the feed settings menu on any feed in Reader and select “View in Reader Play.” We’re launching Reader Play as an experiment in Google Labs so that we can test it out, get feedback from you and then improve it as quickly as possible. Visit google.com/reader/play to give it a try, and let us know what you think!

Posted by Garrett Wu, Software Engineer

The Renaissance, Europe's period of cultural, political and scientific rebirth, began in Florence around 600 years ago. At Google we're interested in a (small “r”) renaissance of a different kind — a digital one. Since the launch of Google Books, we’ve been working with libraries and publishers around the globe to bring more of the world's books to more readers around the globe. Any school child should be able to access the works of Petrarch, Dante or Vico (or, if they're so inclined, Machiavelli). In the case of these more famous authors, this is already largely possible, but what about the work of Guglielmo il Giuggiola or Coluccio Salutati? We want all of the great literature and writings of Italy to be accessible to the general public.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage that will push this vision forward. Working with the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, we’ll digitize up to a million out-of-copyright works. The libraries will select the works to be digitized from their collections, which include a wealth of rare historical books, including scientific works, literature from the period of the founding of Italy and the works of Italy's most famous poets and writers. It marks the first time we’ve ever joined forces with Italian libraries, and the first time we've worked with a ministry of culture.

Around Europe and the rest of the world, we are effectively witnessing a digital renaissance, with an increasing number of organizations running ambitious and promising book digitization projects. We're not the only ones who have seen the need to bring the world's books into digital form. Digitization of books is a tremendous undertaking, requiring the joint effort of a great number of public and private stakeholders. For this reason, we’re supportive of many other efforts at digitization, such as the European Commission's Europeana. We want to see these books have the broadest reach possible — the books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana, of which the Florence Library is a contributing member, and other digital libraries. The more of the world's historical, cultural treasures we can bring online, the more we can unlock our shared heritage.

We believe today’s announcement is an important step, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. We envision a future in which people will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime. After all, Antonio Beccadelli and Anastasius Germonius — like Shakespeare and Cervantes — are part of our human cultural history.

Posted by Gino Mattiuzzo, Strategic Partner Development Manager, Italy

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)
If you're reading this, then you're probably on the Internet — via your laptop, your mobile phone or other handheld device, or maybe even through your television. But in 2010, millions of Americans still do not have access to the wealth of information made available on the Web. Even though the Internet was invented in the U.S. over 20 years ago, many Americans lag behind in both access to the Internet and speed of connections, which is why the Federal Communications Commission (or the FCC, the federal agency that oversees the U.S. communications industry) is launching its much-anticipated National Broadband Plan next Tuesday, to lay out its strategy for connecting all Americans to fast, affordable high-speed Internet.

After this plan is announced, you have the opportunity to interview FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, in the second of a series of in-person YouTube interviews with government leaders. (Our first, with U.S. President Barack Obama, took place last month.) Go to CitizenTube today to submit your video or text question via Google Moderator, and vote on your favorites; we'll bring a selection of the top-voted questions to Chairman Genachowski in our interview next Tuesday, March 16. The deadline for submission is Sunday night, March 14, at 11:59 p.m. PT.

To help structure our conversation with the Chairman, we've broken the interview down into seven topics. To learn more about what the FCC is doing in each area, click on the links for each topic below. Then submit your question on CitizenTube under one of the topic headings.

• Access and Affordability
• Mobile and Wireless
• Security and Privacy
• Digital Economy
• Internet in Schools
• Open Internet/Network Neutrality
• Others (learn more at Broadband.gov)

Access to the Internet has transformed almost every aspect of our economy and society. This is your chance to press the FCC on how the National Broadband Plan will work, and ask your questions about improving the Internet in America. We're looking forward to seeing your questions and hearing what the Chairman has to say.

Posted by Steve Grove, Head of News and Politics, YouTube

(Cross-posted with the YouTube Biz Blog)

Mobile phones are rapidly becoming essential tools for surfing the web, connecting with friends, and sharing and watching video online, and we're seeing these effects at YouTube. The YouTube mobile site is more popular than ever: site traffic grew by over 160% in 2009, and now millions of people all over the world are streaming tens of millions of videos every day on their mobile phones. The mobile space moves fast, so we've been working hard to roll out new features and functionality quickly, especially as more and more people adopt YouTube-capable phones.

The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers. So today, we're launching ads on the home, search and browse pages of the American and Japanese YouTube mobile websites (m.youtube.com from your mobile browser). This is a great way for advertisers to reach YouTube viewers across multiple platforms. In fact, at launch YouTube will immediately provide one of the largest audiences for a mobile ad campaign anywhere on the mobile web. And because YouTube mobile attracts early adopters, the site can deliver to advertisers a coveted demographic of tech savvy trendsetters. We've already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube's mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of "District 9") and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.



Our first tests of YouTube mobile ads — with brands ranging from L'Oreal to Land Rover — showed strong results related to click-throughs, user experience and brand awareness, and we've learned a lot in the months since then. As a result, ads on the YouTube mobile website will be banner ads sold on a full-day basis (like with the YouTube homepage on the web), making a mobile buy an easy and valuable addition to any YouTube campaign. For example, today Mazda is running a homepage ad on YouTube.com, and extended their campaign to run ads on our mobile site as well.

If you're interested in learning more, reach out to your YouTube or Google sales rep, or visit youtube.com/advertise.

Posted by Taylor Cascino, Strategic Partner Development Manager

  

Since its emergence, the digital photography market has gradually supplanted the traditional one. APN and digital SLR cameras entered our lives, and some people announced the death of silver-based images. This is not all lie, and yet old-fashioned images have been particularly popular in the past few years. All we do seem to do now is try to recreate the atmosphere of those bygone times anyway. Blurry, distorted and over-saturated images are not just a fad anymore. People have became familiar with the style and even consider it a full-fledged photographic genre.

And this is where toy cameras play a role. These devices, made entirely of plastic, including often the lens itself, are not only toys. Sure, they cost next to nothing and have no controls to speak of, but this is what people like about them: they create unpredictable pictures, with equally unpredictable vintage effects. Once you understand this, the rest is a beautiful game. Take them anywhere, anytime, and photograph whatever you like.

Whenever I meet someone who finds out that I work on the directions team for Google Maps, the first question I'm asked is often "So when's Google Maps going to add biking directions?" We're big biking fans too, so we've been itching to give you a concrete answer. I don't want to keep the good news a secret any longer, so the answer is: right now!

Today we've added biking directions and extensive bike trail data to Google Maps for the U.S. My team has been keeping close tabs on all the public support for biking directions that’s been steadily coming in, but we knew that when we added the feature, we wanted to do it right: we wanted to include as much bike trail data as possible, provide efficient routes, allow riders to customize their trip, make use of bike lanes, calculate rider-friendly routes that avoid big hills and customize the look of the map for cycling to encourage folks to hop on their bikes. So that's exactly what we've done.

Let's say you want to bike to work, or maybe you want to drive less and spend more time outdoors. Biking directions can help you find a convenient and efficient route that makes use of dedicated bike trails or lanes and avoids hills whenever possible. To find biking directions, select "Bicycling" from the drop-down menu when you do a directions search:


So, how does it work? Well, I'm based in Seattle, along with the rest of the biking directions team. The city is notoriously hilly, but also has some great trails and a strong cycling community. Let's say I'm trying to get from Golden Gardens to a friend's house in Montlake:


This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. If I decide that I want to stop at Woodland Park Zoo along the way, I can click on the blue path and drag it to my desired route — just like with driving directions — and we'll still customize the journey for cycling suitability. Over on the Lat Long Blog, you can read more about all the unique tweaks and calculations factored into our routing algorithm.

We've also added information about bike trails, lanes and recommended roads directly onto the map. This can help you get a better sense of your route, or let you find trails nearby for a recreational ride. When you're zoomed into a city, click on the "More" button at the top of the map to turn on the "Bicycling” layer. You'll see three types of lines appear on the map:

• Dark green indicates a dedicated bike-only trail;
• Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
• Dashed green indicates roads that are designated as preferred for bicycling, but without dedicated lanes

Thanks primarily to our partnership with the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, we now have more than 12,000 miles of trails included in biking directions and outlined directly on the map. We also have data on bike lanes and recommended streets for 150 cities across the country. We'll continue to add new trail information and encourage riders to send feedback (biking directions is in beta, after all) and route information for inclusion via the “Report a Problem” tool. When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.

We know that many of you have been anxiously awaiting this feature, so head over to http://maps.google.com/biking to try it for yourself and then hop on your bike!

Posted by Shannon Guymon, Product Manager

Posted by jennita

Note: This post will make you smile, possibly even laugh. It won't however teach you much about SEO. You've been warned.

Last week I attended SMX West in Santa Clara, California and took a couple flip video cameras along. I thought it would be fun to do "man on the street" interviews, somewhat along the lines of Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" episodes on The Tonight Show. Another great idea I had was to employ the help of Dana Lookadoo from Yo! Yo! SEO to help with the interviews. Little did I know she'd be so great at it (ok, I lie. I knew she'd do much better than I would!). She did so well in fact that our video editor, none other than my (awesome) husband Rudy Lopez, mainly only used Dana's interviews. A rockstar in the making!

Rather than keeping you from this awesome video any further... I present to you: SEOmoz "Man on Street" - A Who's Who in Search Marketing.

Thanks to all our great participants!

Matt McGee, Search Engine Land and SmallBusinessSEM.com Curtis R. Curtis, Universal Business Listing Ross Dunn, Step Forth Marketing Ian Lurie, Portent Interactive Steve (sorry - didn't get his full name or company. If you know him, let me know!) Shannon Poole, Bruce Clay, Inc Greg Finn, 10e20 Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land Virginia Nussey, Bruce Clay, Inc Bruce Clay, Bruce Clay, Inc David Szetela, Clix Marketing (didn't make it in the video, but suffered through it and deserves props!) Jill Whalen, High Rankings (again, she didn't make it in but did endure my questions!) Matt Cutts, Google

  Favorite SEOs to follow on Twitter These are the SEOs that were mentioned in the video:  
Michael Gray - @graywolf (2 votes) Danny Sullivan - @dannysullivan (2 votes) Aaron Wall - @aaronwall (2 votes) Fantomaster - @fantomaster Matt Cutts - @mattcutts Dana Lookadoo - @lookadoo  

I also had great intentions of getting several Whiteboard Friday's with some of the speakers. Unfortunately I ended up just toting a mini whiteboard around with me all week instead. I'm sure I looked like quite the winner with my whiteboard in hand. I wonder if people think all mozzers are required to carry a whiteboard around just in case they get the urge to record a Whiteboard Friday. heh.

Thanks for watching along! I hope you had as much fun watching, as we had putting it together. Again a HUGE thanks to Dana Lookadoo and Rudy Lopez for all their help.

 

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The Google Apps Marketplace, announced this evening at Campfire One, allows you to publish applications which integrate with Google Apps and sell them to more than 2 million businesses. Listing your integrated cloud app on the Google Apps Marketplace enables it to have seamless OpenID-based single sign-on with Google Apps, OAuth-authorized access to Google Apps data and makes it easy for customers to access your application from Google Apps' universal navigation bar.

There are three simple steps for a Google Apps Marketplace application:
1) Have or create a cloud application and host it on the platform of your choice
2) Integrate your cloud app with Google Apps using available APIs
3) Create a manifest file describing your application and list it for sale on the Marketplace

The Google Apps Marketplace launched with more than 50 applications from companies like Intuit and Atlassian, with more coming soon from companies like NetSuite and SuccessFactors. We hope you'll join them by integrating with Google Apps and selling your applications on the Google Apps Marketplace to our more than 25 million users and 2 million businesses.

For more information on the Google Apps Marketplace, please see our post on the new Google Apps Developer blog. You can also dive into the details of how to sell your application in the Google Apps Marketplace by visiting our Developer Programs site and technical documentation. And if you'll be at Google I/O this year, you can learn first-hand from the team in the Google Apps sessions on May 19-20 in San Francisco.

Check out the Campfire One announcement on YouTube:


By Ryan Boyd, Google Apps Marketplace Team

Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.

We've found that when businesses begin to experience the benefits of cloud computing, they want more. We're often asked when we'll offer a wider variety of business applications — from accounting and project management to travel planning and human resources management. But we certainly can't and won't do it all, and there are hundreds of business applications for which we have no particular expertise.

In recent years, many talented software providers have embraced the cloud and delivered a diverse set of features capable of powering almost any business. But too often, customers who adopt applications from multiple vendors end up with a fractured experience, where each particular application exists in its own silo. Users are often forced to create and remember multiple passwords, cut and paste data between applications, and jump between multiple interfaces just to complete a simple task.

Today, we're making it easier for these users and software providers to do business in the cloud with a new online store for integrated business applications. The Google Apps Marketplace allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps. More than 50 companies are now selling applications across a range of businesses, including:

• Intuit Online Payroll: A small business application that offers business owners a new way to efficiently run payroll, pay taxes and let employees check paystubs all within one integrated online office environment.
• Manymoon: The company's free work and project management application for Google Apps makes it simple for businesses and teams to organize and share information including tasks, projects, documents, status updates and links with co-workers, customers and partners.
• Professional Services Connect (PS Connect): This new cloud-based offering coming soon from Appirio, pulls contextually relevant information on people, projects, customers and transactions from a user's domain and surfaces it directly inside a Gmail message so services professionals can make more informed, real-time decisions.
• JIRA Studio: A hosted software development suite from Atlassian enables software developers to flow naturally between Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and other design and development tools in order to better track and manage project issues and workflow.

Once installed to a company's domain, these third-party applications work like native Google applications. With administrator approval, they may interact with calendar, email, document and/or contact data to increase productivity. Administrators can manage the applications from the familiar Google Apps control panel, and employees can open them from within Google Apps. With OpenID integration, Google Apps users can access the other applications without signing in separately to each. The Google Apps Marketplace eliminates the worry about software updates, keeping track of different passwords and manual syncing and sharing of data, thereby increasing business productivity and lessening frustrations for users and IT administrators alike. That's the power of the cloud.



For more information on the benefits of the Google Apps Marketplace to businesses, check out our Enterprise Blog post. Developers interested in learning how to integrate with Google Apps can check out our post on the Google Code Blog. Or, you can explore the Google Apps Marketplace directly at http://google.com/appsmarketplace.

Finally, we'll be diving deeper into application development for the enterprise at Google I/O on May 19-20. We hope to see you there!

Posted by Chris Vander Mey, Product Manager, Google Apps Marketplace

Those of you that have been paying attention to the Django release roadmap will have noticed that the original estimated release date for Django 1.2 final has passed, but we haven't actually made a final release.

Although Django's release cycle is generally date-based, we also try to keep our release dates flexible to account for bugfixing time. At the beginning of the development sprints at PyCon a few weeks ago, over 300 tickets were still open on the Django 1.2 milestone. Now it's down to 120 (we've been clearing out, on average, about ten tickets a day), but that's still a lot more than we're comfortable shipping; as a result, we're pushing back the final 1.2 release a bit.

Some of the tickets still open for 1.2 are documentation or translation updates; these will be dealt with before the final 1.2 release. Others are minor bugs or edge cases which are difficult to trigger or unlikely to cause serious problems in actual deployment; these tickets will likely be bumped to a pure-bugfix release in the 1.2 series, or to 1.3 as warranted.

Over the next couple of days, the Django core team will be reviewing all of the currently-open tickets, and identifying those which:

reveal a significant flaw in a feature added during the 1.2 cycle, or

have the potential to cause data loss or other serious consequences in actual deployment.

Tickets which don't meet these criteria may be removed from the 1.2 milestone, or may simply be left out of the final release. We won't forget about these issues -- they'll still be in Trac, and they will be addressed -- but bugfix work prior to the 1.2 release will focus in major issues fitting the criteria above.

We're sensitive to the fact that during the Django 1.2 release cycle, we haven't paid as much attention to bugs and smaller features as we have done during previous releases. To address this, we're considering making Django 1.3 a "feature light" release -- that is, we will spend more time focussing on little features and long standing bugs, rather than adding lots of big features like we have done with Django 1.2. Once 1.2 lands, we'll have some more details about our exact plans for the 1.3 cycle.

Until then, we'll be posting here every few days to give you a status update, letting you know how many tickets remain, any problems we foresee, and to provide an updated estimate of the 1.2 final delivery date.

So: there are 120 tickets remaining, but quite a few of these of these will be bumped from the final release. It's difficult to know exactly how much work is left before we do the final ticket cull, but our first-cut revised estimate is for an RC1 release around March 22, with a final release around March 29. This is, for those of you who were following along during the early parts of the 1.2 cycle, roughly consistent with extra time added to the release schedule for the 1.2 alpha and beta milestones.

As always, any assistance preparing, reviewing or testing patches is most welcome; the more help we get, the sooner we can release. If you want to help out, check out the 1.2 todo list, find something that sounds interesting and dig in!

Posted by randfish

WARNING: Get ready to read with this one. There aren't a ton of fun graphics or quick bullet points, but I do promise that if you read through, you'll feel much more knowledgeable about the topic, and likely get more value from organizing, speaking or attending an event.

Over the past 6 years, I've attended nearly 100 conferences on search, online marketing, startups and technology. I've given presentations or sat on panels at nearly all of them. I've organized our own SEOmoz seminars here in Seattle and in London, built panels for a variety of other conference series and sat in the audience for many hundreds of sessions. Oddly, in the past 3 months, I've had more discussions about the conference format and the optimization of the experience than I can ever recall in previous years.

I don't know whether it's me thinking about the problem more or just stumbling into conversations that center around conference strategy and business models, but like Twitter and conversion rate optimization, it's been finding its way into the nooks and crannies of every lunch, dinner, casual coffee or post-session beer.

Wow... Even Google Trends says this is a hot topic.

I consider the organizers of conferences like SMX, SES, Pubcon & many overseas events (RIMC, SMX Sydney, the SMX/SES shows in the UK & Europe, etc.) to be both good friends and good people. This blog post is in no way meant to denigrate or cast aspersions at their intents or achievements (which have been remarkable - SEO itself has gained tremendous legitimacy because of their efforts). Quite the opposite - it's meant to highlight some of the reasons why things we, as conference goers and speakers, complain about continue and why it's hard to change the status quo. I'm also going to try putting forward some ideas at the end of the post that I have seen work well and would love to see more of (or more experimentation with) in the future.

Competing Incentives

On one side, we have conference & event organizers. They have businesses to maintain, revenue and profits to grow and pressures from owners/investors/boards to meet certain goals. They have to please advertisers.

On the other, we have attendees (and, to a lesser extent, speakers) who want to learn, have an enjoyable experience and get personal and professional value from the event(s). Most attendees are not paying themselves - this is a business expense they need to justify and hence, managers and C-level types hold the pursestrings.

In the subsections below, I'll try to walk through the competing incentives and goals of these two parties and why they make the conference experience so tough to perfect.

Venues, Locations & Timing

This is one of the easiest dichotomies to describe. In one corner, we have the organizers, who are optimizing on cost. In the other, we've got attendees, who want the best experience (particularly if they're traveling). Not surprisingly, every organizer wants to hold their event at the best possible time in the most optimal location. That means, at least here in the US, winter events in warm weather climates like southern California, Las Vegas, Florida and Hawaii, summer events in mild climates like the Pacific Northwest or the Bay Area and events in extreme climates like the Northeast and Midwest in Fall/Spring.

Economics dictates that supply for these optimal locations at optimal times will be low because demand is high. This also means that prices will rise accordingly. Organizers know it's hard to pass those costs on to attendees. Once a conference's price has been set for a few years, fluctuating dramatically is challenging.

What many may not realize is some of the additional, behind-the-scenes inputs. For example, conference venues like to book 12-18 months in advance (sometimes more for very large/expensive/high demand events/locations). They require down payments and guarantees, since re-booking a space if an event cancels 3 or even 6 months ahead often proves impossible. In addition, advertisers, speakers, exhibitors and conference goers themselves get accustomed to certain events at certain times in specific places. Changing an established event always carries risk.

Next time you wonder why SES has a show in Chicago in December and New York in March or why RIMC hits Reykjavik in winter, remember that costs, momentum and contracts make those very hard things to change. If we were all willing to fly to Anchorage in January, you can bet the costs would be rock bottom.

Attendance Level

This one isn't quite as clear cut. For some attendees, an intimate, small show experience is ideal. You get one-on-one time with the speakers, more opportunity for Q+A, a less stressful environment and, typically, easier times with everything from getting good food to booking hotels to scheduling meetings with other conference-goers/speakers. However...

The incentives are frequently the reverse for both speakers (who want large crowds so they can justify the travel expense and preparation time) and for organizers (who have a tough time charging enough to a small group to make up for what a larger base could bring). Organizers also want to signal that their event is "a big deal" and high attendance numbers is one of the best ways to do this.

So why not go for huge venues and trim the costs down to minimal levels I hear you ask? Good question.

The obvious answer is profit margins, but it's not the whole reason. Advertisers, sponsors, exhibitors and even speakers want to be in front of "qualified" audiences. An audience of web marketers paying $100 to go to a show is hard to pitch as a compelling and potentially lucrative base to these groups. However, if tickets are $1,800 and 5,000 people show up, every speaker and sponsor in the world wants to make their voice heard and presence known to that group. Even the big industry players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. will be willing to lose their top notch talent for a week to get in front of the audience, mingle with the crowd and network with the best and brightest.

Some attendees are also more excited by large events. They provide greater opportunities to meet a high quantity of peers and help lend credibility to the value and importance of the event. They also tend to draw big name speakers and presenters, which means a perception of greater value from the learning aspects of the conference.

Of course, this is all balanced by the availability and affordability of venues. SMX Advanced happens in Seattle and for each of the past 2 years, it's been completely sold out. The organizers could go to a larger facility, but Seattle doesn't have many that support in excess of 2,000 people without dramatically raising the costs (and likely lowering quality). It can also be a positive signal to consistently sell out a show - every SEOmoz seminar we've thrown has sold out weeks before the event and this means more early bookings, greater consistency in attendance and revenue and an easier time planning (to be fair, SEOmoz's seminars are a small fraction of the size - 150-250 attendees - of large conferences like Pubcon, SES, SMX or even OMS).

Speakers

Things get more contentious and thorny around the issue of speakers. Attendees and organizers alike can agree that in a perfect world, only speakers who consistently earn top ratings and attract large followings would present. Sadly, in virtually every industry, these individuals comprise only a handful of players. Google's Matt Cutts and Avinash Kaushik are likely among them as is Danny Sullivan of Third Door and Seth Godin. However, I'm hard pressed to name many more that would attract paying audiences simply with their presence.

There's also a large group of phenomenal speakers like Greg Boser, Dave Naylor, Vanessa Fox, Jessica Bowman, Marshall Simmonds and the like who are excellent presenters, incredibly valuable to the audience, and, together with other positive signals, are likely to draw in paying attendees. This is where the trouble starts, though. These individuals didn't necessarily start out as remarkable presenters. In fact, I've personally seen speakers I'd consider "rock stars" today many years back and the same couldn't always be said of them. It takes a trial-and-error, weeding-out process to determine who's going to be great, and that means you need to try out new names and faces as an organizer.

Finally, you've got groups of new or nearly-new speakers, some of whom may be diamonds in the rough and others who may be complete duds. Organizers have little information to base this on other than their CV, a pitch form and possibly recommendations from previous events. Tragically, even great online writers/bloggers/personalities sometimes turn out to be less-than-amazing when placed in front of hot lights, a restless audience and 15 minutes of Powerpoint.

Organizers complain to me all the time about the necessity of finding the new stars, getting those diamonds-in-the-rough enough experience to shine and providing a diversity of speakers. Many technology conferences face the constant problem of gender imbalance and I'm certainly not immune to it. Last year, between Seattle and London events SEOmoz & Distilled had less than 15% women give talks - a shameful number, but one we definitely need to overcome.

Everyone can agree that we need more truly great speakers and fewer mediocre/poor ones. But when you're trying to discover new talent, mature up-and-coming stars AND bring as many speakers into the event as possible (see the next section), it clashes with the goals of consistently excellent quality speakers and presentations.

Session Formats

This might be the toughest problem of all. More speakers = more attendees. And yes, that often holds true for even new speakers and those of low-middling quality. The reason is that speakers frequently invite clients, partners and colleagues as well as promote the event on their sites, blogs and social media accounts. If you want your event to have thousands of attendees, get 100+ speakers and they'll (hopefully) help spread the word for you.

The problem is the session formats this creates. In order to maximize numbers of speakers while fixing the event length, you move from solo presentations to panels with increasingly larger number of participants.

Some organizers argue that panels are a good thing and I'd agree in moderation. For something like an "Ask the Search Engines" panel, having a representative from both Bing & Google makes sense. For Q+A sessions in general, 3-4 panelists can help to spark discussion and even get into vigorous and valuable debates (at SMX West last week, my friend Roger Monti and I got into a nice tiff that I think helped keep the audience on its toes - and yes, it was all in good fun and good humor).

However, when it comes to learning about an individual topic in a robust, in-depth fashion, not even conference organizers will argue that having a highly talented panel of 4 or 5 speakers give 10-14 minute slide decks can compare to a single 45-50 minute session with a single great speaker who can go both broad and deep (and then take questions). The highest rated panels (from my understanding and from direct experience with the ones I've seen) are always those where a remarkable presenter has the full time to dig into their subject matter. Three weeks ago I was at OMS San Diego where Dharmesh Shah spoke on Twitter and Tim Ash presented on Conversion Rate Optimization. The difference between that and a panel approach is night and day - there's just no comparison.

But, as an organizer, if you optimize towards these highly rated sessions and kill the panels, you lose speakers which costs you reach and buzz and, likely, attendees. Happy attendees might rave about the value of the session in their reviews, but no one has the incentive to fill the seats like a speaker (even a bad one). Solving this issue might be a pipe dream.

Session Topics

What about the topic choices themselves? I hear attendees constantly complain about certain topics going missing while others get too much coverage. Organizers, meanwhile, struggle with how to fit in esoteric, but likely fascinating topics against tried-and-true (and in-demand) popular sessions.

The best thing an organizer can do is to survey their audience ahead of time and plan/prepare from that feedback. But, this is much easier said than done. Organizers don't necessarily know who's going to be at a show with enough lead time to arrange speaker schedules and build a topic plan. It's also very hard to get commitments from a large number of speakers with a shorter deadline and nearly impossible to nail down keynotes and big names without months of advance notice.

When Will Critchlow and I do the planning for the SEOmoz/Distilled seminars, we get to cheat in a lot of ways. First off, we have the email addresses of all the PRO and registered (free) members on SEOmoz, so we can survey to our heart's content ahead of time (and do). Second, we actually optimize to speakers - since we largely don't use the panel approach, we pool together a list of the speakers we've seen in the last 12 months that have wowed us and then ask them to give performances that speak to their strengths and experiences. Since we only need 10-15 speakers per event, we can personally invite a handful of top-notch folks each time.

Can a larger conference use these tactics? Almost certainly not. Their audiences aren't nearly as nicely packaged ahead of time, and panels are critical to growing the number of speakers, providing the diversity, giving experience to the "diamonds-in-the-rough," etc. Conferences like Pubcon, SMX, SES and OMS would also almost certainly take a huge amount of heat if they stopped accepting pitches and simply relied on a smaller contingent of consistently excellent speakers. Advertisers, exhibitors and sponsorships would likely drop too (even though they're technically not at all tied to the editorial programming side of the equation), and these are a massive source of revenue.

Amenities

As an attendee, we probably think that things like reliable wifi, better food and comfortable seating with tables and power outlets in session rooms makes a big difference. The problem is, these don't tend to correlate with how we actually choose conferences to attend and/or return to.  I know organizers who've invested hugely in the attendee experience, only to see retention rates drop (despite the fewer numbers of tweeted/blogged complaints). When those dollars are re-invested in marketing the conference, drawing in bigger keynotes, or optimizing other aspects, the numbers get better (even when cardboard sandwiches and grade-school chairs are employed).

We, as conference goers, vote with our wallets, and we apparently don't care as much about the amenities as we make out to (personal note - please, conference organizers, don't use this knowledge against us too much; I love comfy chairs, good food and great wifi).

Press Passes & Guest Passes

Speaking of thorny issues - little in the conference world raises as much public ire as this one. For nearly every event it makes good sense to give bloggers and journalists press passes. However, when a big, expensive, popular event is thrown, these can quickly gobble into profit margins with questionable returns.

The problems are myriad - bloggers don't often deliver the extent or quality of coverage they promise and traditional journalists frequently make no promise of coverage at all (and then write nothing). Feeding and seating them alone can run into the hundreds of dollars per day (trust me, you don't want to know what a trade venue will charge for a cup of coffee or a bag of Cheetos). And, as savvy organizers know, some (possibly even many or most) bloggers would pay to attend the event if their press pass request was rejected. You don't want to anger this vocal minority, but you also can't afford to be taken advantage of.

For sold out events, it gets even harder. Longtime "friends" and traditional receivers of press passes may need to be sacrificed to make room for paying attendees, especially if the event relies on those last 1-200 seats for the majority of the profit margin.

Organizers know they need to be careful to be generous, but discerning, or risk becoming known for "giving free access to anyone who can set up Wordpress." They also want to try to give newcomers to the blogging/coverage scene a chance to make an impact, while being mindful of abuse and sensitive to the dangers of angering influencers. It's a tough tightrope to walk and one that press pass requesters should be more sensitive to (I'm speaking from personal experience on this one, and know that we certainly owe some apologies for past requests and perceived slights).

Optimizing the Conference Experience

Now that we're through some of the reasons events are so hard to get right, I'll try to provide some recommendations for every participant in the process. This is personal opinion, and unlike SEO, it's not based on thousands of hours of experience, but probably just a few hundred and my own observations. Still, I hope it's valuable, or, at the least, worth considering.

Advice & Experiments for Organizers

• If possible, try to shave panels down to more reasonable sizes. Both speakers and attendees will appreciate it, and those nasty timing issues that can wreck schedules and hurt moderators will get better, too.
  
• Great networking events should be built into more conferences. Many attendees say that the most value they get is from the networking outside the sessions (which, to my mind means the sessions need help, but that's another matter).
• This also speaks to the value of providing great areas to network during the event. Quiet areas with couches, tables, drinks and wifi can make for very happy conference goers (note: for some reason, putting these in/around the trade booths never seems to work very while, though perhaps I just haven't seen an optimal configuration).
• Select speakers more carefully. Yes, it's hard work, but it's worthwhile. And consider optimizing topics to speakers rather than the other way around - if you know that a particular individual can give an amazing experience to attendees, block off 45 minutes, email and offer to pick up a flight and/or hotel. I've been consistently shocked by who will say yes (and then feel so guilty/thankful about having their expenses covered that they'll put in twice the effort preparing and promoting) .
• Be harsh on returning speakers if their last presentation wasn't up to standards. I understand having some new blood every time, but if someone under-delivered, you need to axe them, or make it clear that the next one needs to make the audience stand up and cheer.
• Likewise, bring back great speakers more often, but make them craft new content. In my experience, great speakers seem to do well no matter the topic (so long as they have some experience/relevance to it) far more so than experienced/talented professionals correlate with great presentations on those topic.
• Try playing with venues. OMS this year moved to a new location that was 10X better than their previous spot, and my understanding is that the cost was lower, too (SEMpdx's Searchfest also had a new location in downtown Portland this year that was fantastic, though I don't know the cost differential). When you find venues that will be accommodating, magic happens because your cost structure suddenly becomes less of a burden and more of an opportunity to do creative, interesting things attendees will remember.
• Big one - don't let the room sizes dwarf the audience sizes. I was just at an event where the room could hold 1,500 people but only 200 were in the session. It feels to everyone - speakers, organizers, attendees -  like there's no energy or excitement. In comparison, I was at an event a few weeks back where the room could only hold 150 and 170 squeezed in. The air felt electric and every presentation, question and tip felt alive. Optimize this one carefully because it makes a huge difference.
• Make new speakers jump through a few hoops to sell you on being installed on a panel. An impressive CV, a good blog and a high ranking title do not correlate with great presentations, but the ability to make a compelling web video (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) on the topic does.

Advice & Experiments for Attendees

• If you love an event, a speaker or a session, sing it from the rooftops. Tweet, blog, write reviews, tell friends and invite colleagues next time. So many of the incentive problems described above happen because as attendees, we don't do the marketing or give the feedback we could and should.
• Don't tolerate low quality speakers/presentations, but also don't make it public. Tweeting nasty remarks about a speaker while they're on a panel shouldn't be any more acceptable than booing or throwing fruit. Make your voice heard to the organizers afterward - it will have a real impact (and if it doesn't, don't come back).
• You get out what you put in. Come with an open mind, a stack of business cards, openness to new ideas and a slough of great questions. Introduce yourself, don't be shy and make the most of networking opportunities; they often end up producing the most memorable value.
• Be the change you want to see - make sure to let organizers and speakers know what you liked and didn't via email and feedback forms. This includes venue/amenities/location/timing. None of us are clairvoyant (though Google's working on something, I hear).

Advice & Experiments for Budget Authorizers

• Give your employees freedom to choose their own events. Great people will choose wisely, and that's who you want to keep anyway.
• Let them stretch their budgets and time - at SEOmoz, we fix number of dollars and let our people do the rest. If they want to spend it all on one big trip to a conference in Fiji, go for it. If they'd prefer to optimize for multiple events closer to home, that's great, too. You'll often find employees are much more accountable if they know their budget really belongs to them.
• Ask attendees to record and share their experiences. Internal docs or wikis or a 20 minute PPT during a brown bag lunch from employees who attend events goes a long way. It will force them to take some notes and provide some actionable value back to the rest of the company and it lets the employee be the star - the one who's been somewhere and learned something no one else knows.

Advice & Experiments for Speakers

• Be empathetic - imagine yourself in the audience or better yet, remember yourself in the audience in the last session or at the last conference. What impressed you? Do that. What sucked? Avoid that.
• Go advanced - I have almost never been asked to go more basic at a search marketing event, no matter how adavanced my presentation or content gets. My takeaway is either that everything I do is way too beginner level or that audiences just love more "down-the-rabbit-hole" material. If you're on the fence, lean advanced.
• Don't pitch or present if you can't kick butt. You owe it to the audience, to the organizers and, for goodness sake, to yourself, to do an amazing job every time you're up speaking. If you're not funny or charismatic, don't sweat it - let the material do the talking.
• Fewer bullet points, less text, less time talking about each slide and less.
• More images, more screenshots, more callouts (text boxes with arrows to important stuff on a slide/screenshot), more stories and more real life examples.
• Don't ask for a business card to send someone a copy of your slide deck. Make it available online at a URL everyone can access. If your material is good enough, you'll get plenty of warm leads.
• Prepare. I'm a busy guy - no, seriously, I mean really busy - and I still take hours putting together high quality decks for even small conferences and 12 minutes presentations in half-full rooms. If you don't have the time to set aside and do great work on a presentation, you better either be incredibly naturally gifted on stage or have a team that makes great decks for you. If you can't do any of these, don't present.
• Remember you are why the event happens, you're why everyone is there, and you have a massive responsibility to deliver something that will add value for the audience. Just one or two actionable tips can tilt the balance, but don't settle for that. Do better than anyone would think possible and I promise the rewards will be tremendous. This industry is still craving excellence from its presenters and you have that chance - don't waste it.
• Experiment with taking questions in the middle of your talk, particularly if you're going longer than 20 minutes (which, sadly, is quite rare). It brings a liveliness and level of engagement that's tough to match with a purely "I'm going to talk at you" presentation.

Your Thoughts

I don't mean to be forward, but I suspect a lot of organizers, speakers and attendees in the search marketing conference space will check out this post. Please, please share your thoughts and feedback below, with one caveat - we like to keep this blog TAGFEE, so no harsh insults or personal attacks. That's what YouTube comments are for :-)

p.s. I'm just back from Searchfest in Portland (which was a terrific event that continues to get better every year). I was originally asked to give a 20 minute presentation on SEOmoz's toolset, but decided I couldn't be quite that self promotional and created a deck that covers a wider range. I saw folks giving my co-presenter, Enquisite's Richard Zwicky, a hard time over Twitter for talking all about Enquisite's software, but in fact, that's what we were asked to do and I was the one who went off-focus (so if anything, you should blame me). You can check out my slide deck here -  SEO Problems and the Tool to Solve Them. Hope you enjoy and sorry about the weird formatting; Scribd didn't import PPTx very well this time.

p.p.s. Please excuse my lack of links to appropriate sites/pages/people and probably spelling errors (drove back from Portland tonight and still not over my sinus infection). Jen, if you have time early tomorrow, maybe you can help add those in? :-)

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Last week, we introduced you to some great search features to keep up with the 82nd Academy Awards. The coveted statuettes have been distributed and the post-show analysis is in full swing!

The buzziest acceptance speeches of the evening:  Sandra Bullock and  Mo’Nique – although the story behind Elinor Burkett and her so-called “hijacked” acceptance speech blazed a path through search logs on Monday.

Best Motion Picture contender that is the most anticipated DVD in search: The Blind Side, followed by Avatar, Precious, and The Hurt Locker.

The buzz, of course, is never simply about who won.  One of our favorite ways to explore major events is to check out the questions they inspired in search.  One standout: “Are the Oscars the same as the Academy Awards?”  (Why, yes!)

A sampling of notable Oscar 2010 search questions:

• Who won Best Actress? – the biggest award category in search questions
• Has Meryl Streep ever won an Oscar?
• What does Hurt Locker mean? – a big theme in search, coupled with “What is The Hurt Locker about?”
• How tall is Kathryn Bigelow?
• Are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal related?
• Who votes for the Oscars?

Check out The Buzz Log for more Oscar search trends and buzzing topics, courtesy of our friends at Yahoo! Buzz.

Andrea Sandke

Yahoo! Search

Last week, Yahoo! JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford delivered the fourth installment of his Crockford on JavaScript series:

1. Volume One: The Early Years
2. Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript
3. Act III: Function the Ultimate
4. Episode IV: The Metamorphosis of Ajax
5. Part V: The End of All Things (March 31 — RSVP)

In this session, Douglas tackles the DOM. On the one hand there was JavaScript, he says, and JavaScript is “what made the browser work.”

On the other hand, there was the Document Object Model, also known affectionately as the DOM. It is what most people hate when they say they hate JavaScript. Most of the people who say they hate JavaScript don’t know JavaScript, might have never seen JavaScript, but they’ve felt the DOM alright. If you don’t know what the difference is and you say, “JavaScript is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” you’re not talking about JavaScript, you’re talking about the DOM. The DOM is the browser’s API. It is the interface. It provides JavaScript for manipulating documents.

The DOM may be imperfect, but it’s nonetheless crucial to what frontend engineers do when they write web applications. In this talk, Douglas provides an overview, situated historically, of where the DOM came from, how it achieved ascendance with Ajax, and what the future might hold. In Douglas’s inimitable fashion, this history starts with Sir John Harrington and takes us up to the present day. A few choice words for CSS are among the many applause lines for veteran developers:

I find within the community of people who use CSS great affection for it. They’re totally invested in CSS, they love it. They can’t imagine any other way of doing formatting in a document. It’s it. It’s sort of like watching an episode of Cops where the cops come in and break up the family dispute, and there’s this “CSS ain’t bad, you just don’t understand it like I do. I know it hurts me, but I make mistakes, I’m wrong.” CSS is awful, and it amazes me the way people get invested in it. It’s like once you figure it out, kind of go “oh, OK, I see how I might be able to make it work,” then you flip from hating it to loving it, and despising anybody who hasn’t gone through what you’ve gone through. It doesn’t make sense to me.

If the video embed below doesn’t show up correctly in your RSS reader of choice, be sure to click through to watch the high-resolution version of the video on YUI Theater.

• Download HD video (480p ~720MB)
• Download video (m4v)
• Download slides
• A high-resolution, transcripted version of this talk is available on the YUI Theater site

Other Recent YUI Theater Videos:

• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Act III: Function the Ultimate — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford continues his lecture series on the JavaScript programming language with a discussion of functions in JavaScript. ‘Functions are the very best part of JavaScript,’ Crockford says. ‘It’s where the power is, it’s where the beauty is.’ Watch the video to learn why.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Chapter 2: And Then There Was JavaScript — Yahoo!’s JavaScript architect Douglas Crockford surveys the features of the JavaScript programming language.
• Douglas Crockford: Crockford on JavaScript — Volume 1: The Early Years — Douglas Crockford puts the JavaScript programming language in its proper historical context, tracing the language’s structure and conventions (and some of its quirks) back to their roots in the early decades of computer science.
• Christian Heilmann: YQL and YUI: Building Blocks for Quick Applications — The Yahoo! Developer Network’s international evangelist Christian Heilmann discusses his philosophy for creating fast, powerful, compelling applications using the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) and the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI).

Subscribing to YUI Theater:

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[From time to time we invite guests to blog about initiatives of interest, and are very pleased to have Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry, join us here. -Ed.]

When you don’t have to sacrifice your love of the outdoors for your career or vice versa, it’s something special. In fact, my love of both skiing and marketing has grown dramatically since I took my job at Backcountry. Getting to work with Google, specifically managing our AdWords account, is an online marketing geek’s dream come true. Combine that with every skier’s dream of Utah powder, and life is good.

Day traders wake up every morning to check their portfolio — I get up and check my AdWords accounts. Backcountry sells gear and equipment for the outdoor enthusiast from ski boots to tents, and we sell all of it online. My job is to drive valuable, qualified traffic 365 days a year to Backcountry using AdWords. The AdWords platform lets me manage hundreds of campaigns and hundreds of thousands of keywords with relative ease. I have access to huge amounts of data that are revealed as daily ebbs and flows in impressions, clicks and bids. If you do a Google search for [telemark ski gear], you’ll see our ad:


Backcountry was founded in 1996 by two self-proclaimed ski bums, John Bresee and Jim Holland. Since then, the company has grown to hundreds of employees. I’ve been working here for over two years. Ultimately, our goal is to “crush it,” as some ski town folk say: work hard, play hard.

A typical powder day for me is like this one last Friday when Park City got 12 inches of new snow overnight. Here’s how AdWords helps me manage both work and fun.

7 – 7:45am
Roll out of bed.
Get the coffee going.
Fry eggs and bacon.
Check snow totals.

If it looks like a good ski morning, I first check my email and glance over our AdWords campaigns. All I need to do is my daily reporting to see that I’m on target for my revenue and cost goals. As long as things are okay, I email my boss to say I’ll be out slaying the white dragon.

Just as I have the ideal tools to maximize our online campaign performance, I have the tools avid skiers covet for deep days: fat, rockered skis, stiff ski boots, Gore-Tex jacket and pants, helmet, goggles, merino wool layers, etc. After I grab my gear, I’m off.

7:45am – 12noon

My commute to The Canyons Ski Resort takes 10 minutes. My friends and I know how to get the most out of our time on the mountain, balancing chair lift time, snow quality and vertical. Does that sound a bit like cost-per-click, conversion rate and top-line revenue? Take this lift to that lift, ski the trees while we wait for that chair to open, get after our favorite steep lines. Next thing you know:

Photo by Jim Harris
Face shots are invigorating. Hard to explain, best to experience! After a few glances at the time and collecting my thoughts, I make my way off the mountain.

12pm – 5pm

I head a few miles down the road to the office. As the afternoon goes by, co-workers will emerge from their cubicles; sometimes because legs are cramping up but also to share stories about how the morning was. Where did you ski? How was the snow? Smiles all around.

I settle into work knowing what I need to succeed at my job is at my fingertips. AdWords gives me visibility into my programs to prioritize and understand trends. It also makes it easy to add and edit my account without getting bogged down in manual work. I regularly use Keyword Performance Reports to monitor both head terms and tail terms to stay on top of revenue opportunities. I’ll take into account the average order value and also the percentage of clicks that turn into sales (rate of conversion) in order to manage our keyword bids. As I do bid updates, I also check the AdWords Preview Tool to see how our ads are ranked and what is going on with our competition. We don’t really focus on “cost-per-click” but instead on “cost as percentage of revenue,” which means the more people purchase, the more ads we can run. So the higher the return on advertising spend, the more room we have to grow our paid search presence.

5 pm – 8 pm

I like this afternoon time in particular because it’s quiet and I can really focus on data-crunching. Uninterrupted time and a strong cup of coffee are essential for doing long-term analysis.

Campaign Performance Reports are great for identifying long- and short-term trends as seasons shift or for changes in demand by brand. We just wrapped up our winter sale, so this is a great time for me to run an Ad Performance Report to analyze which versions of ad copy had the strongest clickthrough rates for future reference. Finally, Google Insights for Search is a fun tool. It’s a great way to connect with our buyers by discussing big-picture trends with the brands we carry. We can look at AdWords Campaign performance and try to tie it back to general search volume in the marketplace and identify product searches on the rise. In short, given our metrics focus, AdWords gives me the information I need to make decisions about specific keywords, bids, and our overall spend.

There are typically the same few folks hanging out at the office this late. We’ll exchange some pleasantries, and as the lights get turned off I’ll shut down my computer.

When I earned an undergraduate degree in marketing and cultural anthropology, I had only a vague idea how I was going to create a career with behavioral and analytical activities. It turns out online marketing is an exciting mix of real-time data and customer service. AdWords lets me manage campaigns very efficiently, so I have time to dig deeper and do the strategic analysis that makes this job about much more than just meeting revenue goals.

Finally, I picked Park City because it’s more than a ski town. Here fanatical skiers, trail runners, bikers, snowboarders and climbers can live year round and still have a meaningful career. I’ll always be grateful to companies like Backcountry and Google for making this possible: Backcountry for fostering the passions of the outdoor enthusiast, and Google for innovation in creating the forums and tools that really work for us.

Posted by Allison Schwam, Senior Search Analyst at Backcountry

You’ve probably heard that Apple recently released the iPad. The absence of Flash Player on the device seems to have awakened the HTML5 vs. Flash debate. Apparently, it’s the final nail in the coffin for Flash. Either that, or the HTML5 community is overhyping its still nascent markup language update. The arguments run wide, strong, and legitimate on both sides. Yet both sides might also be wrong. Designer/developer Dan Mall is equally adept at web standards and Flash; what matters, he says, isn't technology, but people.

E-books aren’t going to replace books. E-books are books, merely with a different form. More and more often, that form is ePub, a format powered by standard XHTML. As such, ePub can benefit from our nearly ten years’ experience building standards-compliant websites. That's great news for publishers and standards-aware web designers. Great news for readers, too. Our favorite genius, Joe Clark, explains the simple why and how.

  

I thought I could not be out-geeked. With a background in radio, and having dabbled in the demo scene on the Commodore 64 and hung out on BBSes and IRC for a long time and all the other things normal kids don't quite get, I thought I was safe in this area.

Then I went to my first WhereCamp, an unconference dealing with geographical issues and how they relate to the world of Web development. Even my A-Levels in Astronomy did not help me there. I was out-geeked by the people who drive and tweak the things that we now consider normal about geo-location on the Web.

Pulling out your phone, find your location and getting directions to the nearest bar is easy, but a lot of work has gone into making that possible. The good news is that because of that effort, mere geo-mortals like you and me can now create geographically aware products using a few lines of code. So, let's give the geo-community a big hand.