Have to admit, I’ve had not the best weekend - I guess the world is not in the best shape, either, judging from Jeff Jarvis’s post on ‘A fundamental reboot’ which is a rare glimpse in the goings on of the Global Elite - that regularly meets at Davos, Daubi, and various places to discuss the future of the world and how they can “modulate” it (perhaps, controlling it’s direction).

It’s the kind of meeting we rarely get invited to, and I’m glad Jeff Jarvis does get invited - so we can know what the Global Elite are thinking, and now openly admitting, at least, among themselves.

Here’s the view, by the way, from Jeff Jarvis’s hotel room in Dubai. Ha, ha, ha … looks like another world …. too bad they don’t do their “economic planning” in the real world… go to some “exotic” retreat to do it.

According to  Jeff Jarvis,  some of the members admitted (at the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils meeting in Dubai) they messed up, big time on the state of the World Economy and it’s growth was “unsustainable”. Jarvis disagrees, but then again, he’s in Daubi, and part of the group, so, in a way, you’d not expect  him to fault the group that is hosting him:

” …Now some may say — as someone from OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) did here — that WEF, or its members, have been more a part of the problem than the solution. I don’t know about that. At least we can say that WEF has not been equipped to act quickly enough to forestall those crisis in food and credit. So it seems that this meeting is an attempt to respond to that, to set agendas more than spot them.”

It was also said, the WEF knows they’re all “in it” together and they are beginning to talk about Global Government but calling it Global Governance :

“…The need for global governance (not global government, they were careful to point out).”

“…The governance group argued that world trade works because of global governance but finance is broken because it does not. They said that this will require some relinquishment of sovereignty.”

All I can say, is ha, ha, ha … the are beginning to talk World Government - and look, given how the world financial system is collapsing  - it may end up being neccessary - even though these are the same groups that, essentially, brought it about - and they’re kinda of … admitting it.

“… The outlook for the global economy is the worst that many of us have seen in our lives,” she said. “There is no country, there is no industry that will be completely immune…. The current crisis is rooted in global macroeconomic imbalances. We are in this together.” This, she said, was “a problem of risk management. No one did a good job.” There was excessive risk taking and leverage. In that, she included not only the industry and governments but media and households. “It has undermined the perceived advantage of open capital markets and at the extreme has even questioned the value of capitalism today.”

Well … now the Global Elite are saying it’s all our faults (… in media and households) though, I would think, the greatest fault ought to be on the leaders of the various countries - that set behavior, by their example - which is why American’s voted Democratic this time.

“…Mobility. The governance group said that problems cross borders without passports but we expect solutions to move with passports. The economic development group urged a “global system of global migration” but admitted that with unemployment soaring, it’s not the time to push this; they suggested instead working it out quietly (that’s not very transparent).”

Ok, they are thinking about how to slowly control who goes and works,  where  - but I was struck by a few of the solutions being proposed:

“…Transparency of information is not enough. There needs to be more synthesis and analysis in the aggregate.” (And, no, I don’t know what that means.)

“…..Freedom of speech. Too little was said about that except whispers about taking on the topic in a nation that does not value and protect speech.  At least someone from the entertainment group — yes, frivolous entertainment — said that freedom of speech is essential so people will be able to tell their stories and understand each other better. Amen. I wish that had come as a strong statement from the internet and media groups as well. Show biz shamed us.

But going back to “…Transparency of information is not enough. There needs to be more synthesis and analysis in the aggregate.” really speaks to Analytics, and possibly, Web Analytics, depending on how sites are tagged.

I wrote about Change.Gov on Friday, it’s being tagged and tracked  by Google Analytics, according to dylanlewis.

And I thought “….“man,would I love to do segmentation analysis on Change.gov ongoing. A dream job!”   But what if we expanded that - and started to really create views of the data that come from various countries - and institutional sites - with the idea of finding wisdom out of it.

I guess, that’s my birthday wish - and a good one - it’s not about control - it about insight.

The Global Elite blew it - they know it - but the problem is - much of what they want to put in place to fix the World Economy, is actually going to be painful - you’ve got to wonder if the World Government can be good if they don’t actually look at data - if they don’t see what’s going on - and they they create the mess we’re in.

So, again, my birthday wish - that I get a chance to do something in this area - to learning how to take all this data we’re collecting, and use it for wisdom and better and fairer governance.

You know what, Jeremiah Owyang put together these stats on Social Media and the 2008 Presidential Election in Snapshot of Presidential Candidate Social Networking Stats: Nov 3, 2008

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Internet Usage in United States
United States Population: 303,824,646
Internet Usage: 220,141,969
Penetration rate: 72.5%
Growth from 2000-2008: 130.9%
Stats from Internet WorldStats (Census, Nielson)

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Facebook
Obama: 2,379,102 supporters
McCain: 620,359 supporters

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

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MySpace
Obama: Friends: 833,161
McCain: Friends: 217,811

Obama has 380% more supporters than McCain

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YouTube
Obama: 1792 videos uploaded since Nov 2006, Subscribers: 114,559 (uploads about 4 a day), Channel Views: 18,413,110
McCain: 329 videos uploaded since Feb 2007 (uploads about 2 a day), Subscribers: 28,419, Channel Views: 2,032,993

Obama has 403% more subscribers than McCain
Obama has 905% more viewers than McCain

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Twitter
Obama: @barackobama has 112,474 followers
McCain: @JohnMcCain (is it real?) 4,603 followers

Obama has 240 times more followers in Twitter than McCain

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Community Platforms/Branded Social Networks
MyBarackObama: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)
McCain Space: I was unable to find total number of registered members (anyone have data?)

I mean, overall, Obama had 4 times more presense in Social Media than John McCain. 

And, with Search Engines (ie: Google Insights for Search) it’s about 3:1 in Obama’s favor.

But don’t forget to vote Tuesday; I am certainly looking forward to it.

By the way, there was an article in the New York Times today about Campaigns in a Web 2.0 World

It seems to me Social Media and Web 2.0 are becoming more vital, perhaps even the centerpiece of campaigns, going forward:

“…..drawing on Mr. Obama’s background as a community organizer, his campaign decided early on to build a social network that would flank, and in some cases outflank, traditional news media.“

“.. Many of the media outlets influencing the 2008 election simply were not around in 2004. YouTube did not exist, and Facebook barely reached beyond the Ivy League. There was no Huffington Post to encourage citizen reporters, so Mr. Obama’s comment about voters clinging to guns or religion may have passed unnoticed. These sites and countless others have redefined how many Americans get their political news.

When viewers settle in Tuesday night to watch the election returns, they will also check text messages for alerts, browse the Web for exit poll results and watch videos distributed by the campaigns. And many folks will let go of the mouse only to pick up the remote and sample an array of cable channels with election coverage — from Comedy Central to BBC America.”

Could it be, that besides having more to day than McCain, Obama had a lot more avenues to say it?

Well, you know, as a Web Analyst - and blogger on the subject - it’s really hard to see how 99% of the polls could be wrong - Presidential Polls Over Time

I could wish for a State by State brakedown for each poll - though, to be honest, not sure how representative such a poll would be as the typical poll only surveies about 1000 people, and if our break that down by state - too much margin for error - you need much larger polling - say, 10,000 - and the idea it has to be people you call up on a land line is a detractor.

I just hope, this election is documented, on the District Level, far more, than the previous two presidential elections.

Couldn’t sleep, maybe it was the spiced up Italian food I had for dinner last night, or just maybe it’s the Global Markets of Britian, Germany and France that are down an average of -5% morning, suggesting Monday will be another day of losses in the Dow - all too familiar by now - and nail biting.

Nope, reading my RSS Feeds in Google Reader this morning, as my stomach churns, is a Twitter message (which can be one of my “feeds”) telling me about a depressing New York Times article about Facebook…..

“…Awkward piece in NYTimes Magazine makes me never want to organize / attend Facebook meetup: http://tr.im/l4w [Via @serial_consign's blog.]

Actually, the article is titled Facebook in a Crowd and reminds me of three facts - 1) that few virtual friends are going to show up when you set up an event AND 2)  Facebook and a few other Web 2.0 services, are going to be part of the new “glue”  that holds us together as the World Financial System unravels, perhaps, entirely. 3) Maybe there’s a way to measure the influence of a “virtual friend” or an “event” by holding one of them and seeing “who actually shows up”.

As I get tired, and ready to try to go back to bed again, with that sinking feeling that may be part my own exhaustion and part what is going on in the world, or even with my friends, a few that have just been “let go”, and even the uncertainty of anyone’s financial future right now (including my own), even as my body is telling me it’s time to sleep again … my thoughts go to 2 OP-ED articles appear in Monday’s New York Times.

In Paul Krugman’s Widening Gyre there’s the crisis of the emerging markets to get my stomach to churn again, and get dizzy, along with some poetry to go with it, according to Krugman, the Hedge Funds are now failing and it’s taking down developing markets, that were thinking, even recently, of decoupling and thriving as the West declined  ….. but that is not to be … because….

“…..as I was contemplating the latest set of numbers, I realized that I had William Butler Yeats running through my head: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer; / Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

The widening gyre, in this case, would be the feedback loops (so much for poetry) causing the financial crisis to spin ever further out of control. The hapless falconer would, I guess, be Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary.

And the gyre continues to widen in new and scary ways. Even as Mr. Paulson and his counterparts in other countries moved to rescue the banks, fresh disasters mounted on other fronts.

“….The really shocking thing, however, is the way the crisis is spreading to emerging markets — countries like Russia, Korea and Brazil.”

And if that didn’t finish me off, and give me more fatigue to go back to bed - William Cohen writes in  “Shoot the Horses?” that ….

“….a banker friend, and he told me the “unraveling” could go on for ages. I thought he meant the unwinding of all the leverage that had inflated everything from the price of stocks to the price of homes.

But, just to be sure, I asked him: “Unraveling of what?”

He paused, before saying, “Almost our way of life.”

A friend of his, he went on, has a horse farm north of New York City. “I told him, for heaven’s sake, you have to get rid of your horses. Shoot them if necessary.”

That got me thinking.

Are we going to be living on horse meat before we get to the bottom of this?”

Now, I’m really getting dizzy and need to sleep, again, when I read further down in the article:

“…. It’s really a wonder, when you think about it, that there are still two guys in the race to become U.S. president, pulling out all the stops in these last eight days of campaigning to be chosen as the one to face the nightmare.

Let’s fast-forward a year to October 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate stands at 10 percent. Crime is up across the country. The economy is shrinking. No arm-twisting from the Treasury has managed to restore the broken confidence between borrowers and lenders. Banks, the few still standing, are holding fast to their cash. Property prices are down more than 25 percent from current levels.

The Dow is still heading south as people get used to the idea of stocks trading at no more than 10 times earnings, rather than the much higher ratios our former leveraged world delivered.

New buildings stand empty all over New York because at the end of a boom — that’s to say right now — a lot of new construction comes to market. Exports, long a bright spot in the economy, have plummeted because of a rising dollar. The deficit and national debt stand at unprecedented levels.

The hedge fund industry is decimated — its model of flipping cheap borrowings into leveraged bets around the world has blown up — and one desperate, even contrite, former master of the universe has just sold a Rauschenberg for $9 million less than he paid in 2004.

People still have way too much debt, and the collateral for it keeps evaporating. They are angry. Civil unrest is stirring.

I ask you, Senator McCain, Senator Obama, do you still want the job?”

To finish me off, but give us some hope again, maybe a new WPA program, a New York Times Editorial: As China Goes covers how China is doing what we should be, and spending money to stimulate it’s own economy, and support it’s people, which seems like we need to emulate, and hopefully, will emulate soon, with new leadership:

“….To get China’s consumers to spend, the government will need to spend more at home, investing in public works projects and providing more social benefits — including health insurance and pensions — so its citizens don’t feel they have to save so much for a rainy day.

This is clearly in Beijing’s interest, though China’s leaders are still clinging to the old export strategy.

China is already feeling the impact of a slower world economy. Both economic growth and export growth have braked sharply. The slowdown threatens job creation, direly needed to absorb millions of rural Chinese seeking employment in the cities.”

If anything, all of this stuff I read, which helped my stomach churn, or made it stop, is meant to highlight just how interconnected our world is now - how different it was from 1929 or 1932, in that those systems that were put in place to prevent the Great Unraveling that his happening now, were meant to safeguard on a national level - but no one thought the world would be so interconnected then, as it is now.

And now, time for bed, again - if only for a few hours - till I wake up and read the news, all over again.

I think that’s where Michelle  Wolverton is going at SmartMobs when she posted on Using Twitter to Solve Problems on Election Day, where Twitter is envisioned as being leveraged to monitor the election and deploy resources in needed areas in real time.

I’m wondering what Obama campaign’s plans are, given the history of contentous elections, in leveraging the large grassroots support to monitor the election for such “irregularities” as can be expected.

One of the obvious reasons to expect irregularities, is that in the Federal and State, the opposition partly is largely still in control - and they don’t want to leave.  Forget about what’s better for the country or not, that’s always debatable and most of the country will never be on the same page about that - but we can play fair, except, some people don’t play fair, they play to win, sometimes, at any cost.

It sound like Obama’s campaign has taken all the neccessary steps, and he’s surrounded by really smart people who he shows the ability to listen to.  Certainly, Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama today -see Powell Backs Obama and Criticizes McCain Tactics in the New York Times- is yet another step in “inoculating” Obama and his campaign in case a “national security” incident, all of a sudden, arises in the next two weeks, one that would play to John McCain’s strengths - I hope that doesn’t happen, but it’s naive, given the track record of the last 8 years, not to plan for it, especially if it’s the only card left to play.

It’s one thing, too, to broadly come out against unfair tactics, in a campaign, or party, and another to enforce it - especially at the local level.  In 2004 there was clearly a lot of fowl play that was difficult to pin down and react to till it was too late - and that’s where Twitter, YouTube and RSS Feeds can nutrualize a lot of the potential damage.

But another reason for mobalize grassroots support to document the election is the case where something goes wrong, massively wrong - and it ends up in the Supreme Court or Congress to solve.

Last time something like that happened, in 2000, and to some extent, in 2004, documentation, as I recall, of voting irregularities, were, no doubt, hard to pin down.

This can be very important if things do go south at the last minute - because with this much grass roots support and documentation, on the internet, on Election Day, the kind of antics pulled off in the last two elections, will be largely nullified - not entirely, but largely neutralized - and it’s important to take any step, ahead of time, know that the party in power, does not want to leave.   It’s hard to play the same card, over and over, and always win, at some point, it stops being effective - I think that’s what is happening in this election.

And look, there’s a lot of reasons for the ruling party not to want to leave - let’s not make it easier for them.

I had not planned on writing this post had it not been conceived while taking a walk in Prospect Park this morning with my friend and business partner in Blogspeedway.com, Sebastian, who writes www.Webanalyticsbook.com (He will be speaking at Emetrics DC next week in a panel titled Mobile Analytics is Calling You - Sebastian Wenzel).

Yesterday, Jeff Jarvis wrote a post on Google’s Third Quarter Results that were, again, as always, beyond Wall Street’s Expectations - defying all odds, and confirming that Google is a company that appears to defy normal physics (see my Google Recession post- when everyone else is suffering - they glide into a 3rd Quater Profit - but how? According to SeekingAlpha:

Market reaction: Wall Street was pleasantly surprised by the earnings release, rewarding the shares with almost a 12% markup in after hours trading. The shares saw nearly a $100 swing from their lows to their highs providing a nice selling opportunity for prudent traders. I think if you dig deeper into the report, you may detect some fool’s gold from within.

And now, according to Jeff Jarvis in a post on The Google economy, indeed

Google does indeed have its own economy. It’s latest results:

The Web search leader reported third-quarter earnings that far exceeded the expectations of analysts, especially those who thought the company might finally fall victim to the slumping economy. Thanks largely to having contained costs better than in previous quarters, Google reported on Oct. 16 that profit rose 26%, to $1.35 billion, significantly higher than analysts had predicted. Sales jumped 31%, to $5.54 billion.

The analysts are stumped because they are not judging Google as a new kind of company in a new kind of economy. It’s different.

Indeed - strange - until Sebastian woke me up to something about Google that no one talks about.

Ha, ha, ha, Google has “rigged” their system so it always pays out profitable …

Google is the will, the way and the word, Google controls almost 75% of Search in the United States according to a post in Web Analytics World Google Up 12 Percent Year Over Year and 80% of all the Paid Search Advertising Share according to the Rimm-Kaufman Group - look at this chart from Alan Rimm Kaufman’s blog:

Well, want to know the secret of why Google is profitable and always will be, even when the rest of the economy crashes?

Simple, with AdSence and AdWords - Publishers don’t know the actual money that Google is making on each ad .. no one does - except Google.

If Google were a European company, it would have been much more regulated, Europeans would not have allowed Google to create such a financial system.

And as we sit here and think about the implications - look what happened on Wall Street - all the “sub-prime” mortgages, and “credit swaps”. from Lehman Brothers amounted to almost $607 Billion dollars - I think that’s why the FED didn’t bail them out - they had simply too much unregulated Debt (I’m trying to find the article in the New York Times where I read about the over 600 Billion that Lehman lost .. and could not find it, but I’m sure I read it today)

All Google needs to do at any point, is manipulate the dials to pay out to publishers more or less, as they need to, to make whatever Quarterly Goal they want.

In other words, Google has total control over it’s own Economy - Google is it’s own Economy - and it can alter the payout on advertising to publishers in any way it feels like - without anyone ever knowing how much they actually made, and it can alter its PPC Ads to be easier or harder to click on, as it wants - all which end up controlling how much money it makes and how much money it reports.

Google is the ultimate “rigged” system - as much as I love wearing Google T-Shirts and Swag - as great as their products are - their 3Q08 results each quarter are as “unnatural” as George W. Bush’s winning the Presidential Elections of 2000 and 2004 - especially 2004 (Neocons are trying to do it again in 2008, but having a much harder time of it).

In fact, Google can almost, almost make as much money as it wants to make…. as long as people use Google to publish PPC Ads of any variety, and people click on them ….. Google will be profitable. How profitable?

As profitable as their CFO decides they need to be in any quarter. That’s Google’s Secret - they are their own Internet Economy. Microsoft and Yahoo simply can’t compete, they don’t have enough of a market share in Search to drive any real policies.

So the question may come up ….. should Google be regulated? And the answer is ….. Yes. Their quarterly results are …. well … whatever they want them to be …, and that’s unnatural.

But think of it this way - while Google is not a monopoly in name, it might as well be …. because they can set prices with no regulation - no one sees what Google really makes vs what they pay out.

But … I bet, with some sluthwork, large publishers could determine sublte changes in payouts earch month - I’m sure Google doesn’t make it easy but it seems like there’s enough data in publisher’s hands where they could notice the average payout per click in a specific position might vary slighly - and all Google needs is to make very subtle alterations to what they pay publishers OR how they position their ads, and presto … all the money the need.

The CFO of Google might as well have a dart board in his office and just sit there with and throw darts on the numbers they want to make and then just manipulate the dials of Google to pay out whatever they want.

Yep, Google must regulated at some point soon - they’re too powerful, too dangerous to be allowed to continue to operate this way, much longer - because they’re acting much as Government would, as a Federal Reserve would - except, they’re not accountable to anyone but their stakeholders - and that’s not right, especially as they’re a de-facto monopoly in search, both Paid and Organic, and that’s not right.

However, to be fair, SeekingAlpha has a more probing look at Google’s 3Q Results and sees signs of weakness - results that Google is probably trying to spin it’s own way - Google: 3Q Results Reveal Chinks in the Armor

“….On the surface, Google (GOOG) appeared to soundly beat analyst expectations of $4.76, by reporting diluted earnings per share of $4.92, on a top line of $ 4.04 billion (see conference call transcript). GOOG’s revenues were $20 million short of analyst expectations of $4.06 billion. This was the first time in GOOG’s trading history that they actually missed revenue estimates, and their sales gain amounted to a mere 4% sequential rise against second quarter results. The company’s growth rate is indeed in a declining phase, as the law of larger numbers, a dismal economy and a stronger US dollar are factors beginning to take their toll.

But not that much of a toll - in fact, I bet Google could have easily “erased” that $20 million decline by just “turning the dial” up a little.

Yes, it’s a rigged system - the problem is there’s no real competition to Google - nothing to keep them in line - they can, essentially, do whatever they want, and their profit will be, well … whatever they want or need it to be.

Meant to write about this earlier this morning - get a lot of my ideas while walking.   On the way to work I read Paul Krugman’s post  Let’s Get Fiscal where he said Alan Greenspan managed to replace on kind of financial bubble with another:

“…But the truth is that we were looking Japanese for quite a while: the Fed had a hard time getting traction. Despite repeated interest rate cuts, which eventually brought the federal funds rate down to just 1 percent, the unemployment rate just kept on rising; it was more than two years before the job picture started to improve. And when a convincing recovery finally did come, it was only because Alan Greenspan had managed to replace the technology bubble with a housing bubble.”

Started thinking about how we often have to approach a problem by multiple paths at the same time, but there are situations where we take a problem in one area and change it to another - but the problem isn’t really solved, just changed into something else.   I guess that makes Alan Greenspan more like a magician - abiet, a bad one.

But it also got me to think about how many other things get “solved” by “simplistic thinking” - and I need to applogise if my thoughts at the end of the day aren’t as clear as they were when it first occured.   At times, decisions are made on a strategic level with out really seeing and understanding what’s going on, and I’ve come across that recently with Social Media - CMO’s don’t understand Social Media all that well, and I suspect, Web Analytics, not much better.

What I’m trying to say, is that, at a strategic level, some decisions are made that don’t really make that much sense.   And that’s exactly the opposite of the sense I got when I read Paul Krugman’s article today.

In the thick of allowing the financial system to slide over the abyss, policy makers didn’t actually understand the implications of the decisions they made - some of it was idology, but another part was not really understanding fundamentals.

And in way, by saying “Alan Greenspan had managed to replace the technology bubble with a housing bubble ” much of the situation we’re now in is explained - it’s not a detailed explaination - but as a “handle” in order to get a grip on it - it works.

And it reminds me of a book I read a while back called Focusing by Eugene T. Gendlin

Gendlin wrote that sometimes, when we have a lot of complex feelings - there’s an overall one, that when identify it, acts as a “handle” - I think that’s what Krugman’s one liner of Greenspan does - it gets us to see what happened in a way that makes sense - and it’s exactly that kind of clearity that Greenspan and company, lacked - which is why they could rationalize the kind of stuff they did, and why the house of cards that was set up with international finance, fell apart.

But that’s just my take.

I’m going over to the Metropolitan tonight - and that always gets me in a good train of thought - perhaps I’ll have more to say about this later on.

About the New York Times article on Krugman Wins Economics Nobel

I have to say, this is great news and suggests. that on the international finance and economics, Paul Krugman, has been recognized as an thought leader - which is kinda timely, given that he’s been pretty much right on most of the major issues in the several years I’ve been reading his OPED Column in the New York Times.

I also think the Nobel Prize was given to Paul Krugman, to bolster his position, just now, with the Financial Meltdown that has occured over the last few months - and especially in the last month.

Congratulations, Paul, there’s no one that deserves this award more than you.

I like it - Read/WriteWEb has a post on Memorandum Colors: X-Ray Glasses for Political Bias in Blogs where you can, in the quotes of Marshall Kirkpatrick, “…install Greasemonkey plug-in that shows the political bias of past linking behavior on blogs aggregated by Memeorandum, the political sister-site of tech aggregator Techmeme.”

I installed Greasemonkey first and then the rest and now get something like this … Pretty cool!

Christopher Buckley / The Daily Beast:

Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama —  Welcome to The Daily Beast: A Q&A with Tina Brown  —  The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.  —  Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon.

Link Search: Technorati, Google, IceRocket, and Ask

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Discussion: Washington Monthly, The Corner, The Daily Dish, Commentary, The Campaign Spot, Fausta’s Blog, TBogg, Wonkette, Gawker, Political Machine, Salon and Washington Post

Cleveland Leader:

Barack Obama’s Involvement with ACORN Unearthed, Missing Article Recovered — Elections - Elections 2008 - News - Politics - Society - U.S. Politics - US News  —  While Barack Obama’s connection with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has not gone entirely unreported, it has not been fully explained.

Link Search: Technorati, Google, IceRocket, and Ask

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Discussion: Gateway Pundit, Weekly Standard, www.redstate.com, Hot Air, Atlas Shrugs, Lonewacko, The Jawa Report and About.com US Politics

Want to get this video up of the New York Tech Meetup I attended tonight at the IAC Building

My thoughts about SMX East starts 6 minutes into the online video, above.  For one thing, the advertisers were much the same as what I’ve seen at all the other search shows I’ve attended, so I can’t really get excited over the floor, because there wasn’t much to note.   On the other hand, the session I went to on Search and The US Presidential Election at SMX East that Sara Holoubek put together was absolutely fantastic and probably never would have happened at a SES Show.

On the other hand, doing a panel about a topical subject, such as the US Presidential Election, and the interest in the election, is hard to do on a regular basis, from show to show.  Still, I think, in  a lot of cases, content could be better than it has been.

Overall, I’d give SMX East more points than Search Engine Strategies in terms of quality of panels, it truly is a better experience.

And the Tech Meetup was great - plus I got to see the US Presidential Debate between Barack Obama and John McCain, on a gigantic screen - who can ask for more than that?