Boston was nice, but it’s good to be home again too.

The second day of PubCon went very well.  It started off with Matt Cutts (Google), Robert Scoble (MSN) and Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) talking about their blogs.  How they love the feedback and the human effect it adds to their companies.  They even talked about the ‘rules’ of blogging for thier company.  Basically, don’t be stupid.  Post only what they fell isn’t a ‘company secret’ yet be helpful and interesting.  All three love blogging and are very excited to be able to do it.  One of the best parts is that you get to meet people and learn about them without every meeting them.  Granted, they’d all love to meet everyone, it’s just not that easy when you work for a global company.

The second session I attended was one on PR.  The best part of this was that it covered all aspects of PR.  From online optimization to TV and newspapers.  My boss, Lee Odden, talked about the online aspect while Robin Liss and Lawrence Coburn talked a little more on the TV/Print side of things.  Each one gave an excellent presentation and were very enjoyable to watch.  Following them was David McInnis from PRWeb. He talked about the tons of features PRWeb has and has been adding lately.  They seem to be doing a great job of keeping PRWeb up-to-speed with the ever evolving online PR world.

After that came the Link Building Campaigns session.  Sorry, there is still no real ‘easy’ way to do linking.  It wasn’t anything to new, but Jim Boykin did give some good tips.  However, he made us swear we wouldn’t tell.

I also went to the Forensic and Competitive Intelligence session.  This wasn’t what I was expecting really.  It was more on what you can do when you know your competitors are hitting your site often.  Like server up different content or 404 errors.  It was interesting, but I don’t feel they really gave much info on how watch your competitors or know if you are being watched.

Last was the Super Session with the four search engines.  Each one talked about what they’ve done in the past few months and how cool they are.  The only really cool thing was an MSN announcement.  They are working on adding a feature in to the mapping software that allows you to drive or walk a route.  That’s right, from behind the wheel with actual buildings and scenery.  Now that’s cool.  You can preview it at http://preview.local.live.com/

The sessions were informative also. Especially the Local Search session. I don’t pay to much attention to local search and I have realized that I’m missing out. I need to checkout places like truelocal.com and make sure my clients are in there. Not only that, but they look like extremely great places to do local searches. I’ll admit it, I usually use Google or Yahoo and put in a city name with my search. It works, but it’s probably not near as relevant as the local search engines.

In the evening Yahoo Publisher Network threw a party. Just free drinks, some food and networking. It was a lot of fun and I got to talk to some cool people. Even Matt Cutts and another Google guy (sorry don’t remember his name).

I’m leaving today for PubCon in Boston. It’s my first PubCon and my second search conference. Should be a lot of fun.