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Thursday August 10, 2006

Mike McDonald found himself in a room with a larger A-list than a Nathaniel Hawthorne character sketch. San Jose (or thereabouts) is where the big search engines and their famed bloggers live. The only thing better than this, says Mike, would be Danny Sullivan in lederhosen.
Editor's Note: Managing editor Mike McDonald of WebProNews filed this exclusive look at the SES 2006 San Jose session featuring a number of A list bloggers. Discuss your reaction at WebProWorld. "I lost a World Cup bet, so tomorrow I will be wearing lederhosen for the organic search panel," says Sullivan.

Score!

Sullivan is the moderator for "Speaking Unofficially," a panel comprised of Google's Matt Cutts, Yahoo!'s Jeremy Zawodny, Microsoft's Niall Kennedy, and Ask.com's Gary Price. The four of them spill their guts about life on the corporate blogging A-list.

Cutts and Zawodny, as may be expected, seem to have the most to say on the subject. Cutts feels as though he's a "security blanket" to an extent, as SEOers and Webmasters hang on his every word for the next Google tweak. Zawodny just wants everyone to know that bloggin' ain't easy.

Keeping up with a blog is a lot of work. How do you guys do it?

Zawodny: It does take a lot of time. People ask: 'how much time does it take?' And I never know how to answer that because it's so hard to quantify. Sometimes it takes no time at all, other times it takes half the day.

Are you having to show the company what you guys write about?

Cutts: Maybe 3 or 4 posts I've sent over to legal or PR, but in general it's just something I write at 3 am and just send out.

Zawodny: I think maybe I've done that 3 or 4 times, but I've never had anybody say 'don't say this' or 'don't post out' or anything like that.

Jeremy on speaking for Yahoo:

Mike

"One thing that happens is that someone will see something I've said and ascribe that to Yahoo, as in 'Yahoo draws a hard line,' or whatever, which is just wrong. And then what happens a lot of the time is that people won't link back to the original statements, or whatever, and the inaccuracy just lives on in the headlines."

How has the blogosphere created something of a democracy, and also somewhat of an imbalance insofar as what gets talked about? How do you feel about that underlying democracy wherein you have so much more influence over what is discussed than the smaller guy?

Cutts: I try to look for a lot of important feeds where news might break where people wouldn't normally look. I try to track down the smaller guys. The blogosphere can act as an echo chamber in both a good and bad way.

Zawodny: I think the whole democratizing nature of it went away a couple of years ago. I've actually tried to shy away from more of the echo side of things. The skill, I think, for companies is knowing when to get involved and when not to get involved.

Price: There's so much in the blogosphere where one person says something's great and the next will say it sucks.

Are you PR people at the end of the day?

Cutts: "I don't view Jeremy as ...