Indeed, Google’s actually one of two diamond-level sponsors of the event (the other’s QNX Software Systems), and Guido van Rossum, the creator of Python, is employed by the search giant.  It’s hard to show much more support than that.

But that’s not the end of things.  A number of Googlers are supposed to attend PyCon, and employees will be making presentations, too.

A post on the Google Open Source Blog explained that there will be a Google App Engine tutorial on Wednesday, March 9th.  And Google App Engine is the force behind the official Royal Wedding site, if you’ll recall.

Then, on Friday the 11th, Google employees will give one talk titled “Creating Complex Data Pipelines in the Cloud” and another one related to Python 3.  A Q&A session with van Rossum will follow on Saturday, along with presentations called “Running Django Apps on Google App Engine,” “API Design anti-patterns,” and “HTTP in Python: which library for what task?”

The blog post concluded, “This will be PyCon’s biggest year yet, so hopefully you can join us in Atlanta next week!  Keep an eye out on the PyCon blog to get the latest news, and be sure to follow the Twitter hashtag (#pycon).”

Other Pycon sponsors include Disqus (silver), Dropbox (gold), GitHub, Microsoft (platinum), Rackspace (gold), Threadless (silver), and Walt Disney (gold), by the way.

Admittedly, this isn’t too huge a breakthrough in one sense; 886 video clips have already been posted at ted.com/talks, so anybody who knew what he (or she) was looking for was almost sure to find it.

The availability of the clips through Hulu represents a win for the site, however, as it should elevate Hulu’s reputation.  And it’s also sure to result in lots more people being introduced to interesting new notions.

A post on the Hulu Blog explained, "For those of you who are not familiar with TED, think of TEDTalks as a smart and concise way to explore new ideas and gain exposure to concepts and innovations you may not have ever seen before, all in 18 minutes or less.  All TEDTalks share a common thread: ideas worth spreading as told by the most inspiring and passionate doers and thinkers around."

Then the post added, "Through Hulu and Hulu Plus, we hope to extend the reach and impact of TED, because the more people who hear and understand an idea, the more powerful that idea becomes."

The 2011 TED Conference "Welcome Gala" will take place later today in Long Beach, California, by the way.

Joshua Bloch, Google’s chief Java architect, wrote on the Google Code Blog, "[W]e’re sad to announce that we won’t be able to present at JavaOne this year.  We wish that we could, but Oracle’s recent lawsuit against Google and open source has made it impossible for us to freely share our thoughts about the future of Java and open source generally."

Bloch then continued, "This is a painful realization for us, as we’ve participated in every JavaOne since 2004, and I personally have spoken at all but the first in 1996."

A few onlookers have taken to debating whether this is a childish act on Google’s part (as opposed to a legal necessity), but by and large, people who left comments following Bloch’s post have just expressed disappointment.

Which brings us back to the matter of cancellations and refunds, perhaps.  Unfortunately, the last day for even a 50 percent refund was August 20th.

Another not-so-fun fact: the standard ticket to the JavaOne and Oracle Develop conference sold for $1,795 this year.

Social media changes all of that, enabling events and their planners to have long-term, nuanced, shifting interactions with attendees.

I gave a speech last week in suburban Cincinnati to the Mid-American chapter of Meeting Planners International, titled “7 Ways to Use Social Media to Create Buzz-Worthy Events”.

My recommendations are based on my work with MarketingProfs and ExactTarget to add social frosting to their already fabulous events, and my experiences speaking at several dozen conferences annually.

There’s a total of 39 specific suggestions in the slides, but here are the highlights.

1. Engage

Get your potential attendees interacting with you early on by enabling some measure of feedback or crowd sourcing on the conference programming. South by Southwest has always led in this area, with its “panel picker” process that turns over 30% of the programming selection to potential attendees.

An easier way to do this would be to utilize something like Crowd Campaign, which gives participants a way to suggest content, and for others to vote on it. Or, you could go even simpler, and use Tweetpoll or PollDaddy (As I did when I asked you for feedback on potential new designs for this blog).

2. Intrigue

Almost all events have an official Web site. But very few (except for the geek events) take full advantage of all the free event listing and event management opportunities. At a minimum, you should create event pages on:

- Facebook Events
- Eventbrite (where you can also sell tickets, if you’re so inclined)
- Upcoming
- Linkedin (if it’s a business event)

Sure, its a bit of a hassle to oversee all of these event pages, but your attendees swim in different ponds. Plus, every conference has the same MVP attendee: some guy named Google. Why would you pass up a chance to double, triple, quadruple your search engine listings?

3. Invigorate

As the event draws closer, you have to pull potential attendees off of the fence with content hors d’ouerves

Start a Twitter contest. Online Marketing Summit does this well, awarding free registration to the conference for people that can correctly answer marketing trivia via their Twitter feed.

Get your speakers to produce teaser content. A simple video would be ideal. However, some speakers (either full of attitude or devoid of tech savvy) can’t handle the video creation process. In that case, set up a blog on Tumblr (for free, in about 10 minutes) and have your speakers call the toll-free number and leave a voicemail. It will be automatically transcribed, and posted to the official event blog.

Speaking of blogs, consider setting up a Netvibes.com page for the event, and creating a centralized repository for all blog posts by speakers. Netvibes.com is free, and all you need to do is pick a layout, and then subscribe to the RSS feeds of each speaker’s blog.

Use Pitchengine to create multi-media enabled press releases, and send the URL for the release to any and all “maybes” on your list.

Gather social information from all registrants. Create a Twitter list of all attendees, and update it each time a new person registers.

4. Integrate

Now we’re talking about the on-site experience, which is where social media can really add impact and get people talking.

Pick a hash tag for your event, so attendees and remote watchers can monitor on Twitter. Shorter the better, please. Then, start your conference with an unofficial Tweet-up. It gets your likely content creators motivated and excited.

I’m not a big fan of the geek conference staple of having a live, streaming Twitter wall behind speakers while they speak. Too distracting. But, I love having a big Twitter wall in a central conference location. This requires very little effort now, using something like Tweetwally.

Create an event within the event by running contests on Twitter during the conference. My friend Dawn DeVirgilio at ExactTarget is great at this, with multiple small prizes per day.

In this one, she hid gift cards around the conference, and took pictures of the locations. Whomever found it first, won.

Here, she drove people to the Expo Hall, and awarding an unexpected, memorable prize – an upgrade to a hotel suite.

5. Inform

I’m a big fan of voting via text message, and I’d like to see more events more toward session evaluations through that same interface. Do we really need to be killing trees for written speaker evaluation forms, not to mention the environmental impact of hundreds of golf pencils.

I also believe QR codes have huge potential at events, and SXSW put them on every name tag this year. Alas, until standards are adopted and the software is built in to smartphones, we won’t see widespread adoption. But, it will happen by 2012 for certain.

6. Propagate

Create your own media during the event.

Via Ustream (and its amazing iphone app) you can stream live video of your event for free. Why wouldn’t you?

Set up an official Flickr gallery for the event, and encourage attendees to take photos and upload them. Give prizes for Photo of the Day.

Make a daily post-show podcast, interviewing speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Or, atomize that audio even more, and create tweets with sound using Twaud.io

7. Aggregate

Take the conference content and spread it as widely as possible. Your goal is to get the doubters that didn’t come this year to view that content and decide to go the next year.

Take every conference presentation, and instead of just putting them on your Web site or emailing links to attendees, release them on SlideShare (one per day for maximum impact)

Provide Twitter transcripts to attendees, and also post it to your various event pages. Backupify has a super cool new, free service called Session Tweets where you can automatically make a PDF of all tweets using your event hashtag.

Reward good content. MarketingProfs’ Ann Handley staged a contest last year for their B2B Forum where attendees that created blog posts, video posts, photo galleries, etc and submitted them to the MarketingProfs blog were entered to win a prize – a free registration to next year’s event.

Why couldn’t you do that? Why can’t you do all of this?

Comments

1. High-res Photo Note Taking – One of the tough things about a big event (aside from choosing which sessions to attend) is how to best take notes to bring information back to your internal colleagues who didn’t attend the event, or publish your own take on the sessions. A technique I have started using is taking high-res photos of key slides from presenters. It takes just a second, and it’s the easiest form of note taking as the slide becomes a reminder of a key point to write about later. To augment, sometimes I will also think of taking notes in terms of Twitter posts (140 character max). That format forces you to just focus on the key points of a session instead of just trying to capture everything a speaker says.
2. Brochure Collecting - At an event like SXSW, there are lots of sites and new innovations that are interesting and worth looking at … but time is limited at the event. Instead of trying to write down every URL, I collect their brochures or postcards and save them. That way I have a visual reminder to check out a particular site later when I am back in the office and have a free moment. Last year after SXSW, it took me a few months to get through looking at all the sites I found interesting – but I had a constant reminder of those sites through the stack of postcards and brochures and it helped me to stay organized.
3. Plan B Sessions - Your time is valuable and at a large conference usually you will be drawn in multiple directions. At SXSW a common complaint is that for every timeslot there are several sessions that you might be interested in seeing. Ultimately, you need to pick one, but my long time advice for attendees of a conference like this has been that if you find a session is not useful after the first 10 or 15 minutes, you should feel empowered to leave and go to your "plan B session." For every time you go to a session, you should always have a second option – just in case. That way you can maximize your time and what you learn from the event, and be flexible enough to correct a mistake without wasting an entire hour (or more).
4. Influencer Tracking – When you are not necessarily connected to every event or happening at an event, it can be tough to know what you might be missing. One useful way to track the events that you may want to be part of is by creating your own short list of people who you know will be attending all the best events. If they are active social media users (as they tend to be at an event like SXSW), you can see where they are headed and mirror some of your own choices of where to go based on this information. Even if they are not active with social media, this technique can work by talking to them or others to see where they will going.
5. Eating Left Handed - As promised in the title of this post, the last tip is about eating left handed. Chances are, you just spent a good part of the day shaking people’s hands and accumulating some kind of unwanted germs (no offense to the people you met, but facts are facts). We should all get more diligent about using that hand sanitizing stuff – but if you are like me and usually forget to do it, a good technique to teach yourself is to always eat left handed (ie – with your "non-shaking hand").

For those big event or SXSW veterans, feel free to suggest some other tips to help someone survive at a large conference in the comments … they might help me survive the last day of SXSW too!

Comments

These facts were posted on the official Chirp homepage today, and the first 100 tickets (out of a total of 800) were released, too.  Interest seems to be high so far.

Of course, a lot of details remain unannounced.  For example: the only speakers to have been revealed so far are Dick Costolo, Ryan Sarver, Biz Stone, and Ev Williams – Twitter employees, all.  So whether anyone else is going to be brought in or the company just intends to parade its own people across a stage is hard to say.

Also, although an after-party’s scheduled, Twitter’s just said it’ll involve "free beer, food and music," and since tickets cost $469 each, it matters quite a lot whether that covers Bud Light, bad tacos, and disco, or Belgian ale, gourmet burgers, and a live performance by Radiohead.

Ah, well.  We’ll try to provide more details whenever Twitter sees fit to publish them.

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Look for a lot of new innovations in mobile, television, cars, and apps. There will no doubt be a lot of cool things unveiled.

As usual, there will be quite a few celebrities in attendance at the event. This year, a guest might bump into Stan Lee, Drew Carey, James Worthy, Chris Mullin, or Methods of Mayhem’s Tommy Lee. A full list is here.

Keynotes will be delivered by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro, Ford President and CEO Alan Mulally, Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini, Nokia President and CEO  Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Qualcomm Chairman and CEO Dr. Paul E. Jacobs, and Hisense Chairman Zhou Houjian.

There will be many, many exhibitors such as Adobe, AMD, Cisco, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Ford Motor Company, Garmin, Intel, Kia Motors, Kodak, LG Electronics, Marvel, Microsoft, Monster, MOtorola, Opera, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, Sanyo, Sprint, Taser, and lots more.

The nearly 400-page directory for the event gives you a pretty good idea about the breadth of information and technology that will be covered at this enormous event.  

You can find some of our past CES coverage here (articles). Our video coverage can be found here.

Related Articles:

> Scoble on TV Experience and CES

> The Truth About CES

> Looking Back on CES

More WebProNews Videos

Social media isn’t always as social as its name would imply. For example, you can have conversations with people online and really not know them at all personally. 

How many of your professional social media friends do you actually know personally? Comment here.

It’s possible that you’ve had a really deep and meaningful conversation on Twitter or Facebook with someone in your niche that you greatly respect, but if you passed them on the street you wouldn’t even recognize them, let alone stop and chat. 

WebProNews spoke with IZEA CEO Ted Murphy recently about how sometimes, it just helps to pull back from the social media and really get social. It also helps to pull back if you want to create original content. That doesn’t mean stop using social media. It means don’t be strapped down by it. 

"The Blogosphere and social media have become a bit of an echo chamber," says Murphy. "The likes and the shares and the retweets and all that stuff – it’s great for spreading a message, but it’s like everybody now becomes programmed in the same way, doing the same thing." 

"So if we can teach people to pull back from that and say, ‘Ok, if I want to come up with a really original blog…a really original idea, I don’t want to know about all that other stuff. I need to unplug myself, and I need to just ideate,’" he adds. 

In other words, get out there in the world and experience things first hand, and maybe you can find some inspiration for original content. Then, maybe the echo chamber will echo you, instead of vice versa. What are some problems, concerns, issues, or observations you’ve made running your own business? What are some you’ve seen with other businesses? Maybe you can use these things to bring something new to the table, or at least start a fresh conversation. 

Even simply talking to the same kinds of people you would be conversing with online, in an offline setting can spark inspiration that may not have occurred from a conversation on Twitter or Facebook. Industry conferences are obviously a great place to meet people and to meet people that you have already had a professional relationship with online.  Great ideas can come from these conversations, and they’re not online for the world to see (and echo) yet, so you can take those with you and create that content.

Chances are that if a subject was worth talking about offline, it was probably worth talking about online as well (as long as its topical). 

"The reason that we come to conferences…is that it’s one thing to engage with somebody through Twitter or to do a chat with them or leave a comment on their blog," says Murphy. "It’s another thing to shake their hand and look them in the eye and share a beer with them."

"So I think the people that are going to get the most out of an experience like this are the people that spend the entire time trying to meet as many people as they possibly can, and not just coming here and staying with the people that you came here with," he says. 

"You should be coming home with stacks of…not just business cards and contacts, but experiences with those people," he adds. 

You don’t have to limit offline professional socializing to conferences though. You can do lunches or arrange other get-togethers. Don’t forget "tweetups". 

What are some other ways to create professional relationships offline that you’ve found value in? Share in the comments. 

The IAB says the rules unfairly and unconstitutionally impose penalties on online media for practices in which offline media have engaged for decades. In an open letter to FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, Randall Rothenberg, the President and CEO of the IAB, called the FTC’s distinction between offline media and online media, "constitutionally dubious."

"What concerns us the most in these revisions is that the Internet, the cheapest, most widely accessible communications medium ever invented, would have less freedom than other media," he said. "These revisions are punitive to the online world and unfairly distinquish between the same speech, based on the medium in which it is delivered. The practices have long been afforded strong First Amendment protections in traditional media outlets, but the Commission is saying that the same speech deserves fewer Constitutional protections online. I urge the Commission to retract the current set of Guides and to commence a fair and open process in order to develop a roadmap by which responsible online actors can engage with consumers and continue to provide the invaluable content and services that have so transformed people’s lives."

Rothenberg’s letter can be read here in its entirety. The FTC’s guidelines are set to go into effect at the beginning of December.

WebProNews attended a keynote at the BlogWorld Expo this week, which dealt with the FTC’s forthcoming regulations. Among the speakers were Ted Murphy, CEO of the controversial IZEA, the company known for PayPerPost and sponsored tweeting, Wendy Piersall of Sparkplugging.com, Jennifer Leggio, a blogger for ZDNet and Lisa Rotkin, an attorney from LA. Interestingly, about 60% of people in the room were for sponsored tweets, with very few indicating that they were against it.

Rotkin says the guidelines clarify the definition of endorsement, and that the FTC believes it has to be authenticated. She says that the blogger is as much liable as the advertiser, although recent comments from the FTC indicate that they are more concerned with the advertisers. She notes that bloggers would have to disclose relationships, but points out that there’s a gray area in how to disclose.

There are also gray areas in what is actually considered to be a sponsored post. In the session, it was said that there are 8 forms:

1. Access
2. Incentive
3. Thank you
4. Product demo
5. Advertorial
6. Paid Reviews
7. Junket
8. Payola

Rotkin says that sponsored posts aren’t right for everyone, but in some cases they are appropriate. However, she believes that bloggers aren’t looking at the long term.

Piersall says that people are able to disclose very well, and there are consequences if they do it wrong. She notes that she has no control over people’s perceptions, whether she is being sponsored or not.

Murphy, who was wearing a shirt that said "I heart the FTC" said his company has been under a lot of attack because they monetize people.

Leggio says being a popular social media/blogger person is different than being a celebrity. She says sponsored blogging doesn’t help relationships. "Do you want a spokesmodel or a thought leader?" she asked.

The character limit of Twitter is a subject that is often brought up in the FTC regulations discussion. How do you disclose on Twitter? Jeremiah Owyang, who moderated the session, doesn’t think a hashtag like #ad is enough. Murphy thinks having "tools for disclosure" is the only way. It’s unclear what these tools are exactly.

WebProNews reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this report from BlogWorld.

Do you think paid tweeting is a good idea? Share your thoughts.

What do you think the most important topic in the search industry is right now? Discuss here.

1. A Black Hat Debate

There was an interesting discussion about the difference between "Black Hat" and "white Hat" SEO, and how their meanings change over time. This led to talk about Google’s place as the enforcer of rules.

Read here.

2. What’s Better: PPC or SEO?

If you’ve ever wondered whether you should focus your efforts on PPC or SEO, some experts looked at the pros and cons of both, which could help you in your decision. Of course using both is always an option, but does one fit your plan and budget better than the other?

Read here.

3. Ranking In Real-Time Search

Real-time search has been the subject of much discussion throughout the industry in 2009. Now the year is almost over, and Google has finally introduced its version right into its regular search results.  What does this mean and how can you optimize for it?

Read here.

4. The Future Of Online PR

PR tools change over time, but the principles remain relatively consistent. In the age of social media, many PR professionals have discovered just that, and many more marketers continue to do so as time progresses. That said, PR must still evolve to utilize the evolution of tools and go where the people are.

Read here.

5. Lessons from Political Social Media

Social media has changed politics. There’s no question about it. The last U.S. Presidential election really highlighted it, but you can expect that every election from here on out will accentuate that point further. Dan Siroker, former Deputy New Media Director for the Obama Presidential Transition discussed the topic at the conference and pointed to five lessons that should be taken away.

Read here.

6. Be Proactive to Avoid Duplicate Content Issues

Duplicate content is one of those topics in search engine marketing that comes up over and over again. It never really goes away. Though Google has come right out and said that it doesn’t exactly get you "penalized" in their search engine, there are still reasons it should generally be avoided in most cases (though there are exceptions). Experts discussed ways to better manage your content to avoid duplicate content issues.

Read here.

7. Small Businesses And Social Media

The big companies often make social media look easy, but let’s face it. Small businesses just don’t have the same resources. That doesn’t mean that small businesses can find a tremendous amount of benefit to using social media channels to connect with the customers and the general public. Need some advice?

Read here.

8. Moving Beyond Google

There’s no question that Google is a dominant force on the Internet. You can hardly ignore Google as a marketer or webmaster. Still, it’s not the only thing people use on the Internet, and it’s not the only way they find content, products, and sites. It shouldn’t be your only area of focus. At SES, some tips on moving beyond Google were discussed.

Read here.

9. How Marketers Can Find Success Via Search

Search is getting harder for marketers all the time. Search engines frequently change how they deliver results. Google has really driven this point home in the past week with the announcements of personalized and real-time search. Search marketers have to constantly adapt. Still, there are some things that never change. Experts discussed how marketers can find success with search in one session at the conference.

Read here.

10. Optimizing for Mixed Media Search Results

One of the ways search is getting more challenging for marketers is the inclusion of mixed media search results like Google’s Universal Search. Google sometimes delivers news search, image search, blog search, local search, and other kinds of results (now real-time results) in SERPs, and while this can be great for users, it also means less focus on organic search results. That means as a search marketer, you really can’t ignore the mixed media result being pulled.

Read here.

As always WebProNews conducted a number of exclusive interview at the conference. These will be posted over time, so check the WebProNews Video Blog frequently. Here is a taste of what we have live so far:

Conferences like Search Engine Strategies and others frequently provide great discussion about topics that WebProNews readers care about. That’s why we attend so many of them. We also like to extend the discussion that takes place at the conferences to our readers. That’s why we encourage you to comment on our articles and extend the conversation even further.

Share your thoughts on any of the ten topics mentioned above.