Posted by randfish

This event is fast and furious so I've got to keep it in list format again:

• Apparently I was wrong about Todd Malicoat - he has a crush on me (pictures to prove this later) not Lisa Barone. On the female side of the aisle there is a girl that he's devoted to but she's not at the conference so we don't get to meet her :(
• In other news I interviewed Vanessa Fox for WebProNews a few hours ago and actually had a terrific chat about Sitemaps - format signals what to use it for and what they really pay attention to in the meta data you can provide (the interview should be live next week).
• Prior to Vanessa's chat with me I asked her to make an addition to the Google Webmaster Guidelines page noting how important it can be to deliver either a 404 or a 200 for a robots.txt request. Apparently Google might have big problems crawling sites that have server errors or timeouts when requesting the robots file.
• We visited the Art Institue of Chicago today and had a terrific time. I highly recommend going if you can make it to the city - their collection is fantastic (and yes they have that Seurat work that's featured in Ferris Buehler's Day Off)
• Matt Cutts' Pubcon callout of a gentleman who ran a lot of "spammy-looking" sites is getting a good bit of press and discussion - should Google be punishing sites because they're owned by operators of other unsavory properties?
• My post on TLA's transparency stirred up some anger with Patrick's crew - my apologies there. Luckily I have no such beef with ReviewMe which is an excellent service model in my opinion - more on that later.
• Loren Baker's got a fancy new design... ours is behind schedule as always but I promise it's good.
• Calcanis lost the respect of a lot of folks in the webmaster industry this morning; according to attendees hypocrisy & bad-mouthing the folks who hired you for a keynote don't go together as well as Jason might have thought.
• Google threw a closed-door party tonight that upset more folks. Quite a few big Google partners and spenders (who griped about it on the expo hall floor) were not invited. Now it's MSN's turn to snub would-be party-goers at the next conference :)
• The high today in Chicago was 26... low around -10. It's chilly to say the least.
• SEOmoz auctioned off a link last night at Alan Dick's Vintage Tub & Bath party. He'd prefer I use the anchor text - clawfoot tubs. Note to self - add sponsoring events and inviting bloggers to list of good link building tactics.
• Hatbait is hilarious - great photos and a great idea from Liana.

For those Chicago SES attendees who are reading - anything I missed that needs to be discussed?

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