The keynote that really stood out was by George Wright of Blendtec. I wasn’t all that familiar with the Blendtec ad campaign before the conference, but I still found George to be an excellent speaker who did a great job telling the story of a tiny company who increased their sales 700% all thanks to a marketing campaign started with $50.

I spent Monday morning in sessions on two great sessions about video. I want to specifically mention Robin Liss of Reviewed.com. I saw her speak last year as well. She seems genuinely enthusiastic about what she does, which always helps make a speaker more interesting. She also really knows her stuff, and I was able to come away with a lot of notes.

Another speaker I enjoyed was Wil Reynolds, who gave a talk about keyword selection and had some excellent tips, such as seeing what words people used to tag their bookmarks on delicious.

A third speaker who I want to mention is Ted Ulle, of webmasterworld.com, who absolutely knows his stuff when it comes to information architecture, and often overlooked part of web design.

I have pages of notes from this conference (which luckily are all digitized this time around), and can’t wait to start discussing and implementing some of these ideas.

The only criticisms I have about the conference are in regards to the logistical parts of it, not the speakers, so I suppose that’s a good thing. Here’s a few suggestions for Pubcon 2009:

• Better directions. Everyone I saw went to the Las Vegas Convention Center South Halls first (where the conference was last year).
• On that note, maybe consider moving back to the south halls. The session rooms in the North Halls are three times as wide as they are deep, leaving you craning your neck to see the speakers and the powerpoint.
• Include coats and gloves in the registration bag. Seriously, I think I got frostbite in some of those rooms.
• Charge $10, $25, $50 more for tickets and DO NOT RUN OUT OF COFFEE. Also, provide a decent breakfast - old fruit and dry bagels do not count.

Those are just some minor gripes on an overall excellent conference.

On a personal note, I had a blast in Vegas as always (Stomp Out Loud and Craps both provided a lot of entertainment), and am very glad we took Saturday to see Death Valley, which is a really amazing place.

So I was fairly dissapointed when I came in today and was greeted by a “disk full” error. I have several hundred gigabytes free on the drive I am backing up from, and a few gigabytes on the operating system drive, so I wasn’t sure exactly what the problem was. I clicked the error for more details, and was greeted with a screen that said the error was unknown.

The error was unknown? First of all, if the program generates an error, it should never be considered unknown. Second of all, this was a disk full error, which should be one of the most common errors a user could encounter. So why was there not more documentation on this?

I grudgingly picked up the phone (I learned long ago that emailing support at companies was useless if you wanted a response back anytime soon) and called their support number. I was greeted by a menu system, pressed a button, and immediately heard ringing. Then just a few seconds later, a support technician picked up.

Well this is a good start, I thought. I explained the error to the technician, who immediately recognized the problem and told me the cause (Mozy uses the temporary directory on the main partition on my server, which does not have much space free). Then in about thirty seconds he stepped me through changing the temporary directory. I thanked him and hung up.

In about two minutes, I had reached Mozy and fixed my problem. Very impressive, so much so that I forgave them for their lackluster help file - though I did make a suggestion to put what the technician had told me directly into that help file.

* at least, theoretically. Right now it’s backing up the entire file every night, which is horrible since the file is 3 gigabytes but the changes are only a few megabytes. Let’s hope Mozy fixes this problem as well as they did the previous one.

Well, it’s not! People are very wary of giving their email addresses away, thanks to all those lovely princes of Nigeria who would like to send us money if we would be kind enough to send them a few hundred dollars first. Of course, we never sell or rent the email address of anyone who signs up for our list, but other, less savory companies do. So I don’t blame people for being a bit hesitant before giving up their email address.

The challenge is to convince them that we do, in fact, offer an informative and entertaining service. And that convincing is done almost solely through good marketing copy. It’s been my experience that copy is drastically more important than design when it comes to landing pages, partially because you want to keep your landing pages as simple as possible, to draw the user into the one sole action on the page they can perform: Signing up for your mailing list.

This is when Google Website Optimizer steps in. Once we have a new landing page put together, we’ll run it for a few weeks, as a control test of sorts, to see how it performs. Then we’ll load it into Google Website Optimizer and feed it a few variations. This can be anything from changing headlines around, to using a different image.

Next, Google works its magic by creating the necessary number of combinations based on the different variations you gave it (if I paid more attention in statistics, I could tell you this formula off the top off my head). Then it presents a different combination to each visitor of your page.

Here’s an example of the current test we’re running, with the actual numbers blurred out to protect our marketing director from receiving even more requests for work than he already does:

In this test, we are only trying out different headlines. But you can tell even from the graph how big of a difference a few words can make.

My favorite example of this was a landing page we did a few months ago which referred to the “#1 Stock” We tested this phrase against “Number One Stock”, and found that actually spelling out the phrase increased the conversion rate by 5%!. When you are paying for each and every visitor to your page, that increased conversion rate can mean thousands of dollars saved.

So if you haven’t tried out Google Website Optimizer yet, I urge you to give it a try, even starting with a simple A/B split test to get a feel from it. And if you have used it, I’d love to hear your success stories.

Apparently though, there has been quite a bit of grumbling by iPhone users as well. At the moment, online activation is down, meaning purchasers of the new iPhone currently lack the ability to use it as, well, a phone. And my oh my, what a maelstrom of tweets this has caused.

I understand the frustration, but unfortunately the only real solution is to just deal with it. I used to pull my hair out after standing in line for the latest MMORPG (from Everquest to World of Warcraft) only to come home and not be able to sign on due to the huge rush of people creating accounts. There were always cries of outrage for a class action lawsuit.

Of course, a few weeks later everything would be working perfectly, and all the angst of the first few days would be forgotten. Why? Well, the company set up their servers to handle a normal load of users, which would work in all situations except one: The release.

So is it really reasonable to expect for a company to spend a huge amount of money on additional hardware which will be useless all but one or two days of the year? I think not.

And it was excellent. The event was put together by Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni, two self-professed Salem web geeks. I originally found out about the event through the North Shore Web Geeks meetup (who, according to Angelo, is their rival gang. He explained Build Guild is better because they have a better gang sign), and while I couldn’t make it to that, I eventually stumbled on a link for Build Guild.

I chatted with people in all sorts of positions, from someone who is forced to develop solely in IE6 for a state government website, to someone who works just in Ruby on Rails. They were all friendly, intelligent people, and besides the horrible lack of air conditioning at the Beer Works, we both had a great time.

Photo by Peter Wood

The problem was that it would not only redirect to the new domain, but include the full URL. And since her old blog used a different folder structure, people who clicked this link would receive a 404 error.

The specific issue was there was a question mark in the URL, which made the URL into a query string, which is handled differently than normal forwarding requests in an .htaccess file. The solution?

Put a question mark at the end of the RewriteRule. So in this specific case, the file now looks like:

Adding that question mark to the end seems to overwrite any previous query string requests, and will send any requests from the old domain to the root of the new one.

Turns out they not only had a seminar, but it was in Boston - in two days. I sheepishly went up to my boss and asked if it was alright if I was out Monday and Tuesday to attend this, apologizing for the late notice. She said go for it, so I registered that night, and the following Monday made the nightmarish rush hour commute down to the Marriott at Copley Square.

Overall, the event was fantastic. At first I was a bit hesitant to find that this was a one-track conference, meaning you couldn’t choose which presentation to go to. However I can now see the benefits of that, as each and every speaker was talented and put a lot of work into their presentations.

The seven sessions each day were a really good mix of practicality and conceptual ideas. Striking this balance can be very difficult, but I was pleased to come away with both specific notes (down to exact lines of CSS I wanted to try) as well as general ideas I wanted to implement.

I also should mention that some of these people really, really know how to use Keynote. Ethan Marcotte did an especially good job with this on a presentation he did entitled Comps and Code: Couples’ Therapy, on how designers and developers should work with each other.

My absolute favorite speaker was Andy Budd. I have never been so engrossed in a speech on web design. He had a perfect mix of storytelling, humor, and solid advice. I literally had trouble holding my applause back until the end of his presentation.

Of course, I wasn’t as big of a fan of every one of the other presentations. One focused a bit too much on style, art, and fashion, though I’m sure those people more focused on design appreciated it. There was also a speech on standards in the enterprise that I didn’t follow closely, simply because I don’t work in anything close to an enterprise environment. It also didn’t help that the speech was right before lunch and running fifteen minutes over!

Still, I look at my notes from the conference and can see how many great ideas I came away with. I am very much looking forward to attending this again next year.

Google realizes how little benefit the pages add as well, and now offers a way to circumvent those pages. Good for them! This is a great example of a company taking an extra step to make its customers happy, while at the same time doing a favor for those websites.

So let’s take Today’s Big Thing and Alltop as examples. They both have a similar goal: To find the most popular, recent content. Except they take exact opposite approaches to it.

The great thing is that there is room for both. I personally visit both every day. Today’s Big Thing takes about 3 minutes (depending on the length of the video), while I can spend hours at AllTop if I’m not careful. I love Today’s Big Thing for its simplicity and the way it gets me something entertaining to watch the second I arrive. I love AllTop for the ridiculous wealth of information there, and how I usually end up with twenty Firefox tabs - and that’s only for one category.

And in a lot of ways, I think that is true. You won’t be able to place ads on Facebook and make millions of dollars, but you might be able to integrate your company into facebook in a way that gives you millions of hits.

I feel as though Twitter, of all social networking sites, is leading the way in terms of providing a model on how businesses can promote good will while providing customer service. When I read the first story about this, I just thought it was a fluke. Then I read about how even Comcast was solving customer issues via Twitter, and I knew it was real, because honestly - Comcast?

Still, I feel as though this is only the tip of the iceberg - and in a bad way. I am all for this use of Twitter. But I am sure that if the news of this successful foray into social media by businesses reaches the CEO offices of the Forbes 500, we are in for some embarrassing and expensive attempts to monetize social media.