Today at the Emerce Travel Event 2010 I spoke about the future of search (in Dutch). I talked about Universal Search, how search engines are trying to grab the user intent and how you should handle that. It went really well and I was surprised about how many people showed up. It was standing room only and people were actually standing outside of the room listening to what I had to say, that was kinda cool .

Here’s my presentation on Slideshare:

I must admit, I’m not a big fan of the European song contest. But this Saturday, when the actual show was almost done, all the artists had done their bit, I zapped by the contest. And I stopped and watched… and watched… and watched… I was surprised because the Norwegian organizers had actually pulled of something “2.0″, something very nice. They pulled of a flash mob with people around Europe. I’m not sure if this is the biggest one ever, but it was fun. I had no idea it was coming and was pleasantly surprised. Has the oldest, most boring program in Europe finally grown up? Take a look at what they did:

By the way: as you may know I am a fan of these kind of initiatives, the T-Mobile efforts in the UK also were very nice and a simple search through YouTube also will give you some great examples.

Yesterday I made a very quick trip to London, I flew in on Wednesday afternoon, had a quick drink with my good friend and State of Search Nichola Stott and then went on to a Jazz club where I was invited by the organizers Andy Atkins Kruger and Gemma Birch from Webcertain. I had a great time there. A big compliment for the both of them.

The next day it was time for the conference, the International Search Summit. It was (again) a really, really good conference. Very well organized and a line up of impressing speakers who, something many organizers forget, were all complementary to one another, making the day very informative.

In the afternoon it was my turn to talk about Mobile Search in Europe. It’s not my main topic I usually discuss, but a topic I do work on quite a bit behind the scenes. Mobile, and mobile search in special, are a very much growing. If you don’t do it, you are crazy. I will put up a longer post on the subject on State of Search soon, but for now, here is my presentation:

This week I spent some time in Manchester for SASCON, a conference organized by a group of Manchester SEOs in an effort to attract attention to the fact that there is more than London when it comes to search marketing in the UK. After a day of conference (and two nights of networking and fun) we can safely say the organization has succeeded.

The conference was a big success  I think. There were many good speakers and the organizers did a great job in how they took care of the speakers. We as speakers all agreed on the fact they did that very good. Which is important when organizing a conference. I am already looking forward to next year, where the organisation wants to make things even better.

I was on two panels this show, the black hat / white hat panel and the Running a Pan-European Search Campaign panel. In the last one I did a presentation on how to handle the different cultural elements in Europe. It was in line with a post I did last year for Searchengineland. Below you can see the presentation on Slideshare.

State of Search, the website I founded only two months ago because I wanted to write in depth content, has been nominated for best SEO Blog!

It was kind of a surprise for all of us I think, but last week I noticed that at the Search & Social Web Awards there was one nomination among the 22 nominees for best SEO Blog who had never been there before: State of Search! We are ‘battling’ with great sites like Searchengineland, Dave Naylor’s blog and Searchenginepeople. All great blogs so we are first and foremost very proud of the nomination! Only two months in and then this, its a recognition for all the efforts we have put in there. Thanks to the bloggersteam at State of Search we made this nomination. But… off course we would like as many votes as possible to at least take a shot at victory. And for that we need you help!

What can you do? First of all, go here: and vote for us! You have to fill in quite the questionnaire (but a tip: you can skip things ). Second, you can spread the word! Retweet, mail, use Facebook, get your friends involved and help us get the votes! Much appreciated!

Some of the best State of Search posts are:

10 Ways to Increase your Twitter Followers & 10 Essential Tools to do it

This week is another week of traveling. Conference season continues with a trip to Manchester this week. Although right here, in my ‘home town’ (I don’t live there anymore, but it still feels like home) Amsterdam one of the best conferences in Europe takes place: The Next Web. This conference I used to cover for Dutch Cowboys a few years ago and it really is a great conference, which is organize by a ‘few good men’ Patrick, Boris and Arjen. Anyone in the Netherlands this week I urge them to go and buy a ticket and head over to the conference. But as said, I won’t be there myself. If you want to meet up with me, I will be in Manchester this week. There I will be speaking at SASCON, a conference which is organized by a group of Manchester SEOs who believe that the north of England also needs a good conference. And by the looks of it, they have succeeded. The line up of speakers is very very good, they even got Joost de Valk . I will be discussing international search. In my talk I will be looking at the differences within Europe, in the line of what I wrote about before on Searchengineland and something which will be published there this Tuesday. I’m very much looking forward to the conference. Be sure to check out what we write on State of Search and listen to our radioshow which we’ll be trying to do from Manchester this week!

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the B2B Marketing Forum on the changes we are seeing with the SERPS and how we should act on it. The subject was all about the future, where are the search engines going. After that session I got interviewed by a Dutch people search engine, 123 people. You can find the interview below. They also wrote out the entire interview here. The interview is in Dutch so if you want to understand it and are not Dutch, here’s te version which is translated using Google Translate (which has its usual quality so you are warned…).

Google is the ‘best’ search engine out there, at least that is what most people believe. Why? Because Google gives back the most relevant results. Or do they? Sometimes even Google ‘messes up’ so to speak. When looking for an image to go along a post about blogging I wrote today on State of Search I found these remarkable results:

Quite remarkable is it? There must be a logical explanation, maybe its personalized search, but most probably its because there are so many people blogging about their cats.

Of course I also checked this search on Bing Images (which looks much better than Google’s by the way) and to be fair: they didn’t give me the results I wanted either, but they didn’t find that much cats as Google did… It’s time for search engines to implement the user intent they have been talking about lately.

“Hell froze over” when Google decided to actually pay for an ad during the Super Bowl in the United States this year. The ad however was  an ‘oldie’, a video called ‘Parisian Love’ in which searches on Google were shown. It was a nice video which had some response to it. But Google now decided it was gonna do more with that video and gave users the opportunity to create one of those videos themselves. They created Google (YouTube) Search Stories.

By simply putting in search terms, choosing where the search should go (images, web, blogs etcetera) and choosing the music you can make your very own ‘Parisian Love‘. Something which many now have done over the past few days. And so have I…

I decided to play around a little with the functionality and create my own video. You can find the result here:

What do you think? I must say it was pretty easy to create the actual video, but there were a couple of things I didn’t like. You don’t really have much control over it. Google decides which way the ‘camera’ rolls,

what you get to see and how long it shows the results. Plus because I didn’t like the results right away I kept re-doing it over and over so in the end it still took quite some time…

Plus, you can only see Google results (I know, the reason for Google doing this is to create more attention to searches, but still…).

So… I decided to take a shot at it myself using Camtasia. I used only one ‘take’ so sorry for the less quality in video, the ‘beauty mistakes’ and some typos. But in the end it took me less time than doing the Google story. Here’s the result:

So, what do you think, am I up for an Oscar? Guess not… but it does show that with a little bit of effort you can do stuff yourself which Google hands you. But then again, if you are ‘lazy’ things like Google Search Stories can be quite handy .