This has been my first SES in San Jose and my first GooglePlex Party, but the GoogleDance Party at the GooglePlex is one of the main attractions and reasons for going to San Jose Search Engine Strategies, in the first place.

Naturally, I got plenty of t-shirts, 3 to be exact - the GoogleDance 2008 black t-shirts had a mosaic or crossword puzzle on them, but Brett Crosby says what is really on that shirt is ………….. a face, but you need to look view the shirt in black light to see it.

I also got a GetFlipped image of me taken at one of the exhibits - it’s from www.getflippedsanfrancisco.com and I liked it - though someone said it’s just a glorified baggage tag - though the one you’d always wanted to put on your bag (like a photo id that changes as you look at it).

It was nice to see Sebastian Wenzel, my partner in the BlogSpeedway.com Blog Network and his friend stop by - and it was great hanging at with Rick Wehrle who was my boss at Monster.com, till recently.

I got on the SearchEngineWatch bus by mistake - but it was OK - packed it was - and the party at the GooglePlex was pretty cool - lots of food and drink and entertainment.

One thing I noticed was the branding message of Google is really aligned with the way their campus, the Googleplex, is structured. Google has figured out what it’s good at, and has really built a branding message that is consistant - down to the details, at the GooglePlex.

I’m wondering if Microsoft and Yahoo are as good at merging the branding message with the actual layout of their campuses as Google has been.

By the way, I’m having lunch with Avinash Kaushik at the GooglePlex on Thursday (tomorrow).

More about that meeting, later on - after it’s happened.