PubCon Las Vegas 2006 Wrap Up

Last week's PubCon Conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center was a roaring success with a record setting 2,100+ attendee count. To give an indication of how much of a success I believe that it was and to provide a good basis for comparison, one should know that I spoke at or attended 16 conferences all over the world last year (more international than this year) and I've already hit 17 this year (next months SES Chicago will mark 18 this year for me). So far this year I've hit:

Affiliate Summit - Las Vegas
Search Engine Strategies - New York (speaking engagement)
OMMA West - Hollywood
Webmasters in the Sun - San Diego
PubCon - Boston (speaking engagement)
Search Engine Strategies - Toronto (speaking engagement)
Ad:Tech - San Francisco
Search Engine Watch LIVE - Seattle (speaking engagement)
Search Engine Strategies - London (speaking engagement)
Search Engine Strategies Latino - Miami (speaking engagement)
HostingCon - Las Vegas
Search Engine Strategies - San Jose (speaking engagement)
Casino Affiliate Conference - Las Vegas
Direct Marketing Association - San Francisco
Digital Hollywood - Santa Monica
Ad:Tech - New York
PubCon - Las Vegas (speaking engagement)

Now I may be a little bit biased because I'm one of the conference organizers of PubCon, but taking off my PubCon (tinfoil) hat, I can say that last week's show was without a doubt the best show this year thus far. Some excellent coverage of the event has been posted by Barry Schwartz, Chris Tolles, Greg Jarboe, Andrew Goodman and Matt Cutts.

Lee Odden and Yahoo's own Marc Levin provide coverage of the Search Party of the Year when Yahoo's YPN group rented out Hugh Hefner's Playboy Fantasy Sky Villa - complete with a huge terraced jacuzzi overlooking the Las Vegas skyline and a rotating bed where a playful pillowfight between three beautiful unnamed female search marketers took place. Danny Sullivan even provides some excellent party coverage on his blog detailing the three parties at various suites within the Palms Hotel and Casino thrown by Yahoo, MSN and Greg Boser. Pay no attention to bathtub comments made by Lyndsay Walker on her blog - I have no idea what she's talking about! ;)

All in all, the conference keynotes were superb and informative, I really enjoyed Guy Kawasaki's opening keynote (there's your link Guy!) ;) It was really great seeing Danny Sullivan at his first US PubCon and his keynote was fantastic as usual. The sessions were great, I received a lot of great feedback, the networking was probably the best yet at a conference. The ingenious PubCon Drinking Game put on by Nathaniel Broughton of SEO Thursday was eclipsed only by the creativity of Chris Hooley, whose out of the box thinking won the contest. Check out Rand Fishkin's video interview by Lee Odden (I did my best to make Rand look famous with all of the flashbulb effects - lol)

You have no idea how much I'm looking forward to the next one ;)

See you then!

Update,

I think the best coverage of the conference was delivered by the 'J Crew' (Jane and Jeff) of SEOmoz.