Credit: Keith Wondra

No shit, the company has been great to me. The culture there is really down-to-earth and void of a lot of the bullshit office politics you find in so many place. My job has also let me travel to a bunch of places I’ve never been, and the company has given me more flexibility than I thought was possible with a 9-5. It’s been a lot of fun, and I’m sure I’m going to miss it.

So why am I leaving?

Simply put, it’s time for something new. There are things I want to do that I haven’t done yet, and I’m not getting any younger, so I mind as well get cracking.

So what’s the plan?

Well, I’m not sure yet. I mean, yeah, I’ll be working on some things that I’ve been chiseling away at for a while, and hopefully finish them in time for my 31st birthday — I think that would be a nice birthday present to myself.

But career-wise, I don’t know what my next move is going to be. Maybe I’ll freelance, maybe I’ll get an offer I can’t refuse, or maybe I’ll change professions altogether.

In any case, it should be interesting…

The session I gave at Podcamp Toronto 2010 was titled Saving Newspapers Using Search & Social. It was all about how newspapers could use a blend of SEO, social media, and mobile apps to increase their audience and offer more diversified and targeted ad buys. Some of the audience seemed to thinks that I was on to something, and some of the audience thought I was dreaming.

On the last day of PCTO, I met Dave Coleman. He’s the Director of Marketing for Spreed Inc, a company that’s already working with newspapers to provide the mobile component of what I recommended in my presentation. Spreed is working with some major newspapers, such as the Globe & Mail, which served up 7.5 million page views a month last month through their iPhone App alone.

iPhone Version

So it looks like newspapers aren’t f**ked, after all. They just need to start looking at themselves as Social News Organizations rather than suppliers of physical, printed artifacts. Because, frankly, their business model hinges on providing authority, printed content, and there’s nothing in that which stipulates that that content has to be delivered via a berliner, tabloid, or broadsheet format.

Meet Ken Jurina, the CEO of Epiar. I met him in Vegas, at Pubcon 2009, and interviewed him for the NVI blog. I also got to hang out with him a bit the night before this was shot. Ken is truly a fun loving guy, and I think we all had a good time.

While most of the people that I talked to at Pubcon told me what to do, Ken decided to discuss what not to do — specifically in the world of PPC. He went into the importance of negative keywords when you’re managing a PPC campaign. In addition to sharing how a good negative keyword list will bolster your ROI just as much as a targeted keyword list, he also touched upon a few tricks he uses for coming up with that negative keyword list. Finally, he went into the emergence of Bing and how the new search engine might affect how PPC advertisers deal with negative keywords.

I’ve been in SEM in some form or another for about 5 years now, and there’s always been this guy how SEM peeps have a love-hate relationship with. His name is Matt Cutts, and he’s the head of Google’s Webspam Team.

You see, SEMs love him because he drops subtle hints on how Google might indexing content, but they hate him because it’s his personal mission to make sure that people don’t rank for anything they are not absolutely relevant for. The trouble for us SEMs is that we set out to become the most relevant result by using search engines to first convincing the consumer that we’re the most relevant.

It’s all terribly circular, but sometimes life is illogical that way ;)

Anyway, I recently got to meet Matt for a few minutes at Pubcon 2009. I was vlogging the event for NVI, I happen to stumble on Matt, he was super chill, and so I talked him into a quick interview. In this first half, Matt tells us the story of how he got his new haircut.

In this second half of our chat, Matt gets down to business. He discusses what spammers are up to these days, and how their exploiting open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal to spam the web with dodgy content. He also offers some advice on how to prevent spammers from hacking your site.

So last week I was down at SMX East 2009 in NYC. I had a blast, both during business hours and afterwards. During business hours, though, I was blogging and video blogging for NVI. Well, of all the video interviews I did, here’s the one I enjoyed doing the most — and I’m not even in front of the camera.

This is the first of three installments of a chat with Rand Fishkin and Guillaume Bouchard. They discuss where they think search might be headed in the coming year.

Rand is the CEO of SEOmoz, Guillaume is the CEO of NVI (my boss), the two of them are good friends, and they have both forgotten more about search engine marketing than most of us will ever know. All in all, it was a bit of an intimidating experience to be hanging out with them both.