Meet the Super Bloggers of Search - Pubcon Boston 2006

This morning’s sessions is “Meet the Super Bloggers of Search”, featuring Matt Cutts from Google, Robert Scoble from MSN/Microsoft & Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo. Brett Tabke from WMW is moderating.

Matt led the Google session yesterday, and he comes across as a really nice, down to earth guy.

Matt just took a swipe at Paul Gardi’s comment a few years ago to him, saying that PageRank is old technology - roar from the audience.

So the question is : “Where is blogging heading?”

The group census is that blogging is like a Genie, once it’s left the bottle - once you’ve had a taste of it, you won’t go back. So blogging is here to stay, obviously.

I’m going to paraphrase the comments from the panel here, so I’ll write this blog in the first person, although I’m taking what they’re saying and writing it down.

One of the things about blogging is that it tends to target smaller niche communities. Alot more people are going to be blogging, and a good source of traffic.

Blogging has changed the way people have communicated life within the company. Employees are alot more vocal on what happens within the company.

Sometimes it’s not worth bring up a public topic, when you know the person responsible for an issue. You can burn bridges if you’re not careful.

Another good laugh was the fact that when you leave a session, you read 4-5 different accounts of the same session - which leads to alot of PR nightmares. Journalists are looking at Technorati all day long, looking for a great new story.

Jeremy Zawodny also says that he found that ruffling feathers through his blog will get him better contacts internally anyways. Given that Yahoo is such a large corporate (10,000 people), it’s obviously difficult to locate the right person.

He also says that sometimes it’s difficult (red tape) to get something published on the company’s official search blog, so his blog is used as a quick outlet to market.

Blogger etiquette within companies is crucial to prevent employees from

I just asked Matt why he doesn’t use blogspot - he said that he can’t use categories, etc.
The funny thing is that none of these guys use their companiy’s blogging services.

More questions:

What keeps you guys going? Red Bull
What’s your motivation for blogging? Tapping into a whole world of people that talk about interesting things.

The guys go off on a tangent, rambling about how people who read their blog, interact with them afterward.

Someone was interviewing for a job at Google, and he mentioned Matt’s blog and mentioned that the guy interviewing used to make useful comments on his blog from time to time.

Roundup: Meet the bloggers - they want to meet you! Go introduce yourself!

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