PubCon 2008, Las Vegas – Great times!

First of all: It’s been a blast, again! Seriously, if you consider going to conferences in the States, this one should be one of them. But let’s start with the beginning…

After a freaking 28 hours door-to-door travelling (Hannover – Frankfurt – Chicago – Las Vegas) I was completely done for the day but we still ended up in the bar of Treasure Island, hanging there until approx. 3am. The TI – as a location for a conference hotel was OK – nothing really impressive but a solid pricing and a nice bar were you could meet PubCon attendees all the time. So pretty good!

Tuesday:
First day of the conference started for me around 8am – still being completely jetlagged but hey… Getting the badge was easy – no queue, very short waiting time (someone told me they send the badges by mail, at least to every attendee from the States – I didn’t get one upfront). After a short breakfast (the American style – cookies and other sweets…) the event kicked off with a keynote at nine by Shawn Rorick who is the Director of Marketing for Cirque du Soleil. In my opinion day one was pretty low when you only consider the sessions, but hey – conferences are for networking right?

Wednesday:
Same story – a complete hangover from the day before forced me to skip the breakfast – regarding the sessions, I think the highlights were the keynote by George Wright of Blendtec (I think most of you know about the IPhone and the blender, right? If not, just check www.willitblend.com) as well as the “Local and Mobile Search” session and “Competitive Intelligence : Know Thy Competitor Well” – good stuff. Other than that I’ve mostly been to site review sessions, it’s always great fun. In the evening SEOmoz.org had its werewolf thingy going – it was… well, freaky.

Thursday:
If you only had a look at the agenda this would be the “must-attend” day. And it was just great. I followed those sessions over the day:

• Keynote Address by Satya Nadella of Microsoft Live Search
• Getting Rid of Duplicate Content Issues Once and For All
• Linkfluence : How To Buy Links With Maximum Juice and Minimum Risk
• Top Secret Tools of The Trade
• Real-World Low-Risk, High-Reward Link Building Strategies

After that, there was the site review session with Matt Cutts, Greg Boser and Nathan Buggia – it was unbelievable funny. It’s so ridiculous what some people are willing to show off. Wow… for everybody who attended: “hotels.biz” (no you don’t get a link to this one…)!

The evening was probably also one of the best – we we’re hanging at the WebmasterRadio.FM Search Bash party at RAIN Night Club at Palms. DJ of the evening was Paul Oakenfold – great sound and a pretty nice show. A blast! After that we switched over to the Venetian where PurposeInc had its poker tournament going on. It was a hard one, believe me. There are some pics over there…

Friday:
The “classic” PubCon day – funnily it was at the “Hofbräuhaus” Las Vegas. Really nothing to impress a German guy with but hey – at least the beer was good. However the location was pretty lame – too big and way too loud. So we spent a lot of time out of the building. But anyway, there were some nice talks going on. After the event was finally over we switched to the TI bar again were all the crowd was hanging anyway. I really enjoyed it, especially partying with Chris, Michael & Francois – great times.

Summary:
In general I think the event was absolutely worth the trip – of course it’s hard to measure the impact of a conference but yeah, I got a pretty good feeling and some nice ideas out of it. Unfortunately the event seems to be suffering from the entire crisis currently going on – not sure what the official attendee numbers are but it felt emptier compared to the years before.
The German-(speaking) fraction was also not too big this year – if I am not totally wrong it must be something around ten or even less (at least I remember Marcus, Pascal, Rudi, Ralf, Ralf and yeah some more…)

I also spent the weekend there – I mean Las Vegas is always just great: Gambling, the shows and of course the great nightlife – I really liked it, again. This said: See you next year at PubCon!

On a side note: There will be a European PubCon next year, the classic style (just one day) in London, and also another one in Austin, Texas. I’ll try to be at least in London, I think it’ll be fun.

And I’ll have some pictures online on the weekend – for now my cell doesn’t want to work with the laptop… sorry.