As you might have noticed before when you have visited this (personal) blog before I was asked to speak at the Domainfest conference in Prague earlier this month. It was quite the experience! In a good way!

As you may have seen they put me in a hotel room which was astonishing. Huge and very comfortable. I almost didn’t want to leave the room! The evening also was interesting with a dinner party in the Czech National Museum. Not many people will have done that and as a former history student that was special! I missed the second day because I had to fly back but they actually went on a AK47 shooting contest…!

Next to that the conference was interesting itself. There were some interesting speakers, but the main thing which caught my attention was the actual domain-auction they did. I have never seen anything like it. Domains being sold as if they were paintings from Vincent van Gogh himself. Breathtaking to watch. And some domains really got some huge numbers. I understand that restaurants.com was sold for about $6 million… Watch here how pounds.com got sold for 35.000 dollars.

And what about my talk? That went very well I think. You always have to wait and see if your story really ‘catches on’. But I think it did, at least when I talked to people afterwards it seemed that way. Below you can find my presentation, those of you who have seen my presentations before will recognize things.

I’d like to again thank the organizers for a great event and say hi to everybody I met there. I’m sure we’ll be in touch!

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,

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Sometimes it can be very interesting to look back into the past. As an historian I know that you can get new insights from looking back. With 2010 just starting and many bloggers looking forward, a view back in time can give you a lot of insight.

 As a boy I grew up watching football a lot. And though I’m not a UK resident I did see a lot of Gary Lineker, England striker, Barcelona player. He was "the role model" for every player, never got a yellow card, always nice, yet succesfull. Yet I never dreamed (or wanted for that matter) about seeing him in his ‘birthday suite’. The former England captain, now BBC Match Of The Day anchorman, showed up in this commercial. 

So why post it here? Well, for one thing because it surprised me, second I believe this is one of those commercials which could go viral. I talked about linkbait the other day in a training session I did on search marketing. Here’s an example of some brilliant linkbait by Walkers Crips…