Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008

I’ll Be at Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008

I’ve been granted a media pass to the upcoming Search Engine Strategies Toronto 2008 conference, which takes place here in Accordion City from June 16th to 18th. The media pass will probably give me access to some free snacks in the press lounge, but more importantly, it’ll give me access to the whole conference — not just keynotes and presentations, but the tutorial sessions and even one-on-one interviews with some of the search engine experts who’ll be presenting and teaching at the conference.

In exchange for this access to the conference, I’ll be posting blog entries about the conference for the next little while, both in the time leading up to the conference and from the conference floor. I’ll post articles about search engines and search engine optimization as well as my one-on-one interviews. They appear in both my blogs, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy, with the more general-interest material in Accordion Guy and the more technical stuff in Global Nerdy. I hope you’ll enjoy them, whether you’re deeply involved in web development, are someone hoping to promote his or her business online or just curious about how you find things on the web.

Linda Evangelista, My Google Indicator (or: It’s Not Just a Nerd Topic Anymore)

I try to be careful not to make too many assumptions about which technologies the general public uses. As someone who works (and lives and plays) in the tech industry, I’m an early adopter of some technologies and an unusual user of others. I realized this ages ago when somebody asked me to run a quick calculation; she was surprised when instead of firing up the Calculator application or Excel, I punched up terminal window and started a Python interactive shell. Why fire up some puny little calculator when there’s a whole programming tool at your disposal?

Since I’m the type who prefers to write software for ordinary people (other programmers prefer to write systems software, who primary “users” are machines or other software), I make it a point to observe how people who don’t eat, breathe and sleep technology use it. It’s not something I always consciously do; I often just see a non-techie using technology and make a mental note of what happens.

One such moment stands out in my mind. About five years ago, I was lazily leafing through a celebrity magazine while waiting to get my hair cut when I stumbled across an article about supermodel Linda Evangelista. The only thing I remember about the article is that at one point, Linda said “Hold on, let me Google it.”

Normally, when I hear about supermodels and technology, it’s usually something along the lines of the incident where Naomi Campbell flipped out and hurled a BlackBerry— one studded with Swarovski crystals, in fact — at her upstairs housekeeper (she has two assigned to each floor of her house). The fact that Linda Evangelista used “Google” in its I’m-searching-the-web verb form was a hint that search engine technology wasn’t just used by techies. It’s a sign that everyone’s using search engines.

Next: How a search engine helped my pick my job title.