So right now I am up at 8 am on a Monday from the night before. I came back from SES NYC Thursday night and just got done catching up with my 100 or so blogs and half dozen or so forums I track.

While looking through blogs I noticed that I just missed the Online Social Networks conference.

Last night I just bought my ticket and Friday I will be flying out to Austin, TX for the South by Southwest interactive festival. While surfing further I noticed an overlap with O'reilly Emerging Technology conference.

From April 11-12 there is the Search Engine Meeting

From April 25-27 there is Ad Tech

From May 27th - 29th there is ThreadWatch. While there you may want to stay by for SES London on June 1st & 2nd.

From June 21th-24th there is WebmasteWorld

From June 23-25 there is Gnomedex

From August 2nd-5th there is SES San Jose

I was joking with a friend and we figured that there were about 30 conferences you should go to each year, and it seems like soon that will be the reality.

I think some people have traded in their regular jobs to be traveling salesmen / lead generation / speakers at various conferences. I can't see myself ever trying to be too much of a salesman (or a public speaker), but the conferences sure are fun and there are a ton of them.

Someone should write an ebook about working (or optimizing the output from) the conference scene ;)

What conferences do you like?

ACCOONA gave away a car at the NYC SES show and since then I have seen multiple forum owners complain about them spamming their forums.

Even if they were not the ones doing it, the complete lack of participation in those conversations is a bad thing for their search engine.

Not to mention that the ads are in the left rail and when I clicked an organic search result link in the right rail it went through Overture. At least I had a good laugh when I saw clicking on a link to my other site sent me to this one and cost me 50 cents.

Whether or not you actively participate in communities if you are above radar people will find a way to create hate threads about you. People tend to look much more credible when they show up than when they ignore them.

You gotta wonder if the $30,000 they spent on the car and booth would have been better spent actively participating in their marketplace. Tim Mayer and Matt Cutts do.

• Google Print now accepting PDF files

• Google adds weather to search results
• adds reviews to their local product
• I am told they recently did a backlink update as well.

Lawrence Lessig - The Comedy of the Commons (1.61 hr audio)

Mitch Ratcliff is to launch a social network mapping product.

Online Social Networks conference 2005 - not sure how I missed it but it looked cool.
New Media Ecosystem Flowchart
Deception Detection Techniques for Journalism

Secrets of Journalism Success. Jon Stewart style (mov file)

Berkshire Hathaway 2004 Annual Report (PDF) - not related to search, but probably some good investing and economic tips.

• Google Search Counts Tool -Beta - data not 100% accurate, but interesting

• Google Recently Spidered
• Funky Site Search using Yahoo APIs
• Yahoo Keyword Tracker
• ODP Directory Script - sure lots of people are going to create a ton of niche ODP mirror directories with this. here is another one too.
• NicheBot
• Keyword Discovery
• Yahoo! Search developer network wiki