The Future of Advertising

For anyone who is interested in the future of advertising, I am going to be giving a short talk on the subject at the New York Future Salon meetup tomorrow. And if advertising does not excite you, there will also be other cool topics on the agenda such as future connectivity, Internet governance, and decentralization.

Full details are available on Meetup.com, but here is the time and place:

• Stone Creek Bar
  140 East 27th Street
  New York, NY 10016
  (between Lexington and 3rd Avenues)
  
• Saturday, September 20th @ 4pm

NYC SEO Meetup

Hi everyone, please stop by Aspen Lounge if you're in the New York City area this Monday, February 11th. There will be a short talk from our own Mike Levin, Kevin Heisler (executive editor of Search Engine Watch), and Marshall Sponder (analytics specialist at Monster.com). Doors open at 5:30 and the formalities begin at 6:00. It should prove to be a great chance to network with other search marketing professionals and bloggers as we already have over 40 people who have RSVP'd for the event.

Details are available on Meetup.com!

A Meetup Invitation, a Connors Client Slot, and a Link-Back

Anyone who is in the New York area tonight is welcome to stop by they Prey bar for the SEO Superpowers Meetup, and say hello to the HitTail and Connors Communications crew.

A few other items I want to get out there in this post: Connors Communications, the company that created HitTail, and played a fundamental role in kick-starting the commercial Internet, has a few slots opening up in its SEO and PR schedule. Usually, engagements start at no less than $25K/mo. I thought I'd mention it on the HitTail blog, since this is where much of our audience currently resides. So if you know of someone with a large AdWords budget, looking to diversify and free themselves from the Google Tax Man, then drop us a line or corner me at Prey.

Also, for anyone who hasn't noticed yet, almost any reference you make to HitTail in your blog post will usually score you a mention and a link-back in our TypePad collection of quotes and testmonials. So, if you've been waiting to say a few nice words about us, now seems like a good time.

And finally, I'm really pushing to get people to sign up for at least the Plus service, just as a way of supporting us. It's only $99.95 per year, and think how much time we're saving you struggling with those other analytics packages that ask you to jump through hoops before you figure out what to do with your data. As our quote page shows, we're rapidly becoming an integral part of many peoples' day-to-day marketing activities, and the surest way to a long-term relationship is throwing a little support our way!

HitTail at New York Web Entrepreneurs MeetUp tonight

Greetings HitTailers! I'll be presenting at the Web2NewYork New York Web Entrepreneurs MeetUp tonight. I'll be one of 6 presenters. I'll spare everyone the PowerPoint, and just dive into the 30-second elevator pitch that I refined at SES, NY. That should take 5 minutes. Then, I'll open it up to questions, answers, ridicule and heckling. Give me your best shot, New York! If I can make it here... well, you know the rest.

SEO Super Powers Meetup #1

We had a successful SEO Super Powers meetup yesterday, considering the rain kept all but 4 non-Connors people away. With myself, my Connors posse, and Marshall Sponder (Webmetricsguru), Pauli Price of Sindex Systems and Rupali Shah of 24/7 Real Media, we discussed a broad array of issues, veering far off the Ajax + SEO subject for the night, but always returning to the theme of how to make business more successful. The life-span of SEO as we know it was estimated from anywhere from 2 to 5 years, with much talk of social media. Time was spent discussing whether or not blogging is SEO, and what the process might look like from someone initially discovering you, to building trust, to some sort of relationship (customer).

I feel that this meeting laid the foundation for future SEO Super Power meetups in NYC, where we will fully embrace, and perhaps even lead, what the field is becoming. Stay tuned for the information regarding the next meetup. And on a related note, I think I'll start getting out to some more of the meetups around New York. There's Technology, Entrepreneurship, Networking, Marketing, Programming, Graphic Design and the like. It's going to be a challenge pairing it down to a reasonable number to attend each month!

HitTail Hosts SEO SuperPower Meetup Tonight

Just a reminder to everyone in the NYC area that HitTail is hosting a SEO SuperPowers Meetup tonight. The topic is the effect of Ajax and other Web development technologies, such as Silverlight, Apollo, Java, Mobile and others on SEO today and in the future.

Anyone in the neigborhood is welcome to stop by. It starts at 6:30PM tonight at the Connors Communications office in New York City on 7 West 22nd Streeet, between 5th and 6th Avenues. It's the "Spinning Wheel" building--a small entrance. We're on the 7th floor.

Free drinks.

NYC Search Engine Super Powers

Search Engine Super Powers of NYC... UNITE!!!

Join the city's most authorative meetup group on optimizing, e-commerce, blogging, and search engine marketing.

Graphics Contest

Let's call this a Web 2.0 graphics contest. That means I'm throwing caution to the wind, and asking for submissions from all you graphic designers, Photoshop users, GIMP chimps and miscellaneous artists. Can you do the HitTail user interface better? Michele thinks so. If you prove him correct, we promise you nothing, but whatever fame and glory exposure on the HitTail site can deliver.

This may or may not amount to anything.

In order to facilitate this mission, I'm thinking of getting more involved in the graphics communities, especially here in NYC, where there are so many of you. Maybe a NYC graphic designer meetup? Who knows. In-person meetings are not required to participate. Just email entries to us at hittail at connors dot com. Be sure to only email GIFs or JPEGs. No attachments other than GIFs or JPEGs will be opened.

Anyway, we'll throw in a free premium HitTail account to the winner. But we promise no exposure whatsoever if you're not chosen (though we may send a complimentary shout-out). And we don't even promise that we're going to choose a winner. Sound fair? But seriously, anyone who reads our stuff knows we're good folks and are generous sharing the spotlight.

If your entry knocks us out, and we choose to use it, we will make you sign releases proving that we're allowed to use it, and then we're going to promote you on the site. If you're an ambitious graphic designer trying to make your mark, this is a chance to design graphics for a Web 2.0 startup whose success, judging by the buzz on the Internet, is likely assured. Nice feather in your cap.

A critical rule of the contest is to know what HitTail is and what it does. You need to understand the list-pairing concept. You have to experiment with paging forward and back through the datagrid and notice how there's no "position popping". That's an unusual thing in a datagrid, tied to the use of non-proportional fonts. All applications should have one homepage graphic, and one interior page graphic containing the datagrid. It's a user interface design project. Notice the mouse-overs used in HitTail. The application needs to be designed as self-documenting, compelling the user to do right without resorting to help screens.

I encourage working a concept such as "writing suggestion tool" or "build traffic" into the navigational design, so that no matter what page you're visiting, the HitTail "story" is being told in an encapsulated visual format. We're talking an attempt to instantly communicate what HitTail's about on each and every page. Two jpegs. Send to hittail at connors dot com.