I went off the radar for a few weeks. Apologies for that. I have a lot going on in my life right now - not all of it good - that is taking up a lot of my time and headspace at the moment. Plus I've been traveling a lot. I just got back from a 10 day trip to the Bay area for 3 conferences -- FooCamp, Ypulse, and BlogHer.

It was my first FooCamp (I'm so psyched that I got an invite!). For those of you unfamiliar with Foo Camp, it is the predecessor to BarCamp with the word "Foo" an acronym for "Friends of O'Reilly." Besides being a huge fan of O'Reilly since about 1994, I'm co-authoring an O'Reilly book with Rand Fishkin and Jessie Stricchiola called The Art of SEO and I've spoken twice at O'Reilly/CMP's "Web 2.0 Expo" conference. So yes I'm an unabashed "Foo". FooCamp is invitation-only and limited to several hundred people. It's an "unconference" -- where the program is developed and presented by the attendees. The more proactive you are at Foo Camp (in terms of sharing/participating), the more you'll get out of it (and the more likely you'll be invited back again). It's completely free - free to attend, free food, free drinks, free "lodging" on the grounds - just bring your own tent. And yep, a lot of folks brought tents and camped out on the lawn. Some folks slept in the office buildings on the floor in sleeping bags. I'm not into "roughing it", so I stayed at a nearby Holiday Inn Express. My older two daughters got to hang out at the Holiday Inn while I went to the conference, which was pretty boring -- so they told me... about a MILLION times! Arrgh. Gotta love teenagers. Speaking of my teenagers, the middle one (who is 15) drew this flattering illustration (on the left) of me wearing a Foo Camp t-shirt. She finds it quite hilarious that I wear a T-shirt in public that says "Foo Camp." Of course I live to embarrass her (or so she thinks!).

Foo Camp attendees run the gamut - entrepreneurs to authors to venture capitalists - but they can all be described as leading thinkers and innovators. It was a real treat. I got to meet a lot of amazing people. Way too many to list. But here's an example: the founder of Drupal, Dries Buytaert. Dries blogged about his Foo Camp experience. Nobody has a bad time at Foo Camp.

After the Foo Camp weekend came Ypulse, a youth marketing conference. It was excellent. If you market to kids, tweens or teens, you should have been at this conference (so go to the next one!). My oldest Chloe was a speaker on the "Totally Wired Superstars" panel with other teen entrepreneurs. I really enjoyed the conference, but Chloe was in heaven -- she met directors (Chloe wants to be a director), journalists, folks from Disney, Seventeen.com, MTV, and her hero, Ashley Qualls, the teenage "MySpace millionaire".

Then a couple days later came the BlogHer conference, a conference focused on the women blogger community -- a powerful and diverse voice in the blogosphere that includes "mommy bloggers", foodies, political bloggers, techies, etc. It was my second BlogHer conference. I went last year too, when Chloe spoke. This time we just attended. Chloe did manage to get on the local (Bay area) news (see the video here) - she was interviewed as an attendee.

BlogHer was great. I did sometimes feel like the "token male" in the audience, because women so outnumbered men (I never felt unwelcome though, just to clarify!). Instead of feeling out of place, a male could look at it as an opportunity. For instance, I remember a guy telling me at last year's BlogHer how he loved coming to their conferences because "it was like shooting fish in a barrel". Ha ha! I presume he was single, but I probably shouldn't assume that.

Now I'm back and it's back to the grindstone. I have articles to write, the book to work on, conference presentations to prepare for, a ton of emails to respond to, and personal crises to deal with. *deep sigh*

Rock on.

Now that I'm back full-time in the US, it's not such a chore to get to conferences. I can even attend conferences that I'm not speaking at, which is something I seldom (if ever) did in the 8 years I lived in New Zealand. Yet it can be an excellent opportunity to connect with really interesting people and to expand my thinking. Last month, I attended BlogHer, to listen to my daughter Chloe, and I also made the trip to San Francisco for WordCamp. This month, I almost went to Gnomedex, but I hadn't acted soon enough and it had sold out by the time I went to register.

Here is a list of conferences that I haven't been invited to speak at and would love to attend:

• Pop!Tech
• South by Southwest (SXSW)
• TED - already sold out
• Web 2.0 Summit - invitation only
• Emerging Technology (ETech)
• Accelerating Change - on hiatus

These conferences are exclusive and expensive -- and worth even penny. For those who can't swing the invite or the budget, there are free podcasts of past talks. Pop!Tech has their Pop!Casts, TED has their TED Talks, SXSW has their SXSW Podcasts, and IT Conversations has covered a number of conferences including Web 2.0 2005/2004, Accelerating Change 2005/2004, and ETech.

How does your conference schedule look? What are some of your important conferences that you feel you have to attend?

Steve Spangler of SteveSpanglerScience.com leapt in — boots and all! First time attendee and speaker on my panel "What Happened when eTailers dove into Blogs, Podcasting and RSS" at Shop.org in Las Vegas last week, Steve didn't let the thought of mingling with billion dollar online retailers intimidate him. And he has a message for all those more modest online retailers — be there next year! His head still hurts, because there was so much to learn.

Steve says:

There was so much information that I filled an entire reporter's notebook. And I also asked myself: "How is it that we are surrounded by people who are so smart?" In a culture where the Internet is changing so quickly, and everybody has got their different spin on what's happening, I realized there were 1500 people there, 1499 of whom knew more than I did about on-line retail.

To get to have breakfast with the Internet Marketing Director of Best Buy, or the guy from CNET, or Amazon.com, these people were willing to share their best practices in an open and frank way. I learned how to increase clickthrough rates. Conversion rates. Landing pages. I was overwhelmed by what people were willing to share with us. What was so refreshing was that the major players were extremely honest with one another as well!

There is no magic bullet, nor one thing that anybody can do to make their website search better look to their customers. A website is a living breathing being. You have to feed it, nurture and care for it. Just like raising kids. We are all excited when a child is born, and then it grows and we get into the serious business of parenting.

Walking the exhibit hall for the first time in my life, I visited a booth called BillMeLater. They offer a great service, but don't take on any company doing less than $15 million in on-line retail. We're a little smaller than that! But it certainly was eye opening.

From the standpoint of finding out what a landing page was, and what caused people to stay on that page - that was the best takeaway from the whole conference. We were in the process of doing a product page redesign, and what I took away from that session changed what we put on that page. What would be the #1 factor on that page? Price? Shipping? Trust? Answer: Free shipping – or some form of shipping discount. An orange "free shipping!" logo or box drew the greater conversion rate. The key is to get people to put their credit card in and drive those sales.

Kelly Mooney's "Gender Agenda" session provided a great insight into website viewing habits. The guys tend to stay predominantly on one site, 3 or 4 clicks just to compare prices. To women, however, it is an incredibly enjoyable experience, many taking 20 minutes to browse for products other than their initial reason for visiting. That sort of information is important to an on-line retailer. I have got a lot of work ahead of me.

As for my own panel presentation with Stephan, I looked out at that audience and saw people from those huge billion dollar retailers thinking that this blogging lark could be something we are going to have to explore.

Listen to my podcast interview with Steve after Shop.org for his full and frank views on this remarkable event. And take on board his recommendation: Be There Next Year!

Last week I was in Sydney speaking at the new Australian SEO conference Search Engine Room. It was my first time in Australia, which is inexcusable considering it's just "across the ditch" from New Zealand — where I've been living for over 5 years now. For a brand new conference, I found Search Engine Room well-organized and well-attended. All the major players in the SEO business in Australasia were represented. It was a one-day conference, so the conference was composed mostly of fast-paced panel discussions. I moderated the session "Search Engine Optimisation: Black Art or Sweet Science?" and in my 5-minute overview (I think I might have hogged more time than that though) I made my case for SEO being "sweet science" - measurable, attainable, predictable, and so forth. My Powerpoint deck is available for download. The panel covered best practices, favorite tactics, ethics, and more.

A few hours after my session, I had to high-tail it back to New Zealand, because, to my surprise, one of my daughters was admitted that day to the hospital for appendicitis. (She's back home now, minus her appendix, and recovering nicely.)