SES San Jose 2007 Recap

San Jose SES started off rough but was a really great time.

Sunday

Sunday I barely made my connection to San Jose but to my surprise on my flight was Chris Sherman and Loren Baker. Loren bought be a Capt Morgan and Diet and I returned the favor shortly after by buying him a drink… After about 5 more the flight seem to go by very fast…

Landed in San Jose. Luggage no where to be found. fun times. (why does this always happen when I travel United

Monday

Woke up wide awake at 6am started surfing for porn working.

For the next 2 hours I played this fun game called find your luggage. It consisted of United telling me that they dropped my bag off at the Hotel and the Hotel telling me that they did not have it.

I worked on my presentation that I had to give at 3pm and decided that I was not going to see my luggage so I should just use the 20 cent big single blade razor from the front desk to shave my face (not my head though). I cut myself pretty good with the razor.. yay…. now i get to look like I have a giant bugger under my left nostril when I do my presentation.

About 1:20pm my bag showed up to my room along with a OUPS OUR FAULT note from the Marriott saying they did have the bag and just did not know it. O well no worries. I got my clothes out and quickly started ironing.

Our 4 star Making Money With Contextual Advertising panel was really good. It consisted of Jen Slegg, Marcus Frind, Brian Vu (of Google) and myself. (Yahoo! why do you keep ducking the panel?). The panel was also moderated by the God Father Of Search, Danny Sullivan.

Photo by Tamar Weinberg

That panel was closely followed by our contextual ad clinic where we review peoples sites. This is always a tough one for me but I think we gave a lot of value to the people who submitted there sites.

Monday night was the Vintage Tub and Bath, Pepperjam Search, Epiar, Range online media party and it rocked. Alan Dick outdid himself this time and had a slot car track with mini nascar like slot cars painted like all the major search engines. Then he had representatives from each search engine racing the cars in a competition. Tim Mayer from Yahoo! won, Natala from MSN came in second, and Google came in last. When asked on the podium how she felt about coming in last the person representing Google said “Well we are first at everything else” which got a nice rise out of the crowd.

After the party we went back to the conference area and bar hopped a bit before hitting the Fairmont hotel. Now this was a party. Dax played piano and everyone mingled. I requested some songs but Dax busted out “Dick in a box” and I sang. Great time.

I crashed about 3am ish or so Monday night.

Tuesday – I woke up at 8AM and checked email and stuff.. Then texted dillsmack to see if he wanted to grab some breakfast. We went down to the lobby in the marriot and it was like a mini seo convention. We found Dave Naylor and Jensense, Kris and Robyn Jones, Bob Rains and others already eating the breakfast buffet.

After that we headed to the expo halls. I LOVE EXPO HALLS. Just walking booth to booth meeting people and companies. Its a great time. A lot of the companies had sent me t-shirts for free shirt friday and it was cool to meet them in person.

I did a radio show live from the floor at 3pm then went back to my room to take a shower and get ready for the Google Dance!!!!!!

Google dance was awesome as always. Google really puts on a great party for everyone. After the Google dance there was a Best Of The Web party that was a riot:

Wednesday

Wednesday I slept in a bit and made my way to the conference hall. I had 3 interviews with magazines and 1 video interview. This pretty much killed my day. I did not get to mingle in the expo floor nearly as much as I wanted to.

Wednesday night I went to the Page-Zero book launch party for Mona’s new book about Yahoo! Panama (review coming soon).

After the book singing shindig we headed to SEARCH BASH – The Webmasterradio, Moniker Party that is always off the hook.

Rumor has it that there was someone who looked like me at this event that was very intoxicated walking around with a bottle of butterscotch schnapps pouring it into peoples drinks… I just want to be clear this was not me it was someone who “looked” like me Evidently this same person also fell and bled all over them self (gross picture here). Again just a rumor but I just want to set the record straight that it was not me.

Thursday

I slept until noon on Thursday then went to Mountain View to play werewolf with some friends. I was not sure about the game but it turned out to be a riot.

It was great to see everyone!!! See you at the next event!