With flying in to NYC Monday evening, we had our light night to prepare for our Tuesday exhibit hall shake down. It was just our plan to hit the hall Tuesday, then sessions and meetings Wednesday and so on. Once we get all registered in, and gather all our swag, we dart for the exhibit hall. For those who do not know the next thing that happened, we get rejected. Tuesday was the day all of the booths setup. Bad planning on my part. . .or WAS it?

After walking around in circles for a couple of hours, we realized our client meeting was not for another 4-5 hours, so we claimed some real estate at a nice little pub called “Faces & Names“. A place I try to go every stop through NYC. It’s a very laid back but exciting bar. Great food and very nice locals come in. Well, we sat down around 3pm and finally had to head over to meet our client by 8pm. We had a great dinner and our waiter was one we’ll always remember. . DONE! After dinner, our client Jeff, who lives in midtown, took us to several bars, then had two of his girl friends show up; one oddly from Google!

The pub crawl continued, vision grew blurry and speech turned to mush. We had meetings in the morning and my business owner instincts began to take over, so I random left Matt at the bar with the locals. For the record, I did call for his name a few times. So I finally get home at 3:30AM!! 12 hours later. Then here comes Matt at 4. Needless to say, the morning meeting seemed bleak! But no despair, while I was talking on the phone saying I might need to push the meeting back, the other party messaged me wanting to push it back. Seems they were hit by the same party bug, NYC.

Our meetings were pushed back but were fulfilled. They were very productive and well worth our trip. It’s also so great to put faces to names. One thing the internet will probably never have and that’s true personality.

Once our bags show up, the fake Samual L. Jackson, an independent town car driver, offered to drive us for a set price. With reluctance, we hired him for the ride. Well, rather than take us out to a car on the curb, we walked our luggage out to a distant parking lot to a 1983 Lincoln Town Car. Anxiety crossed our minds thinking we were going to be robbed, but Antonio quickly changed our minds with his over politeness, the smooth sounds of his “Kenny G” cd playing in the background and his very subtle whistling.

Antonio made a definite point to learn our names and us learn his, and then told us that right then he was our driver, but the minute we hit the city, “we’re his friends!” (insert strong Bronx accent) And he went on, “Yeah, there is a $200 per infraction charge if they catch anyone offering rides outside of the taxi union. So we met downtown on 10th street and he’s just giving us a ride”. Of course, what were we suppose to say?

To follow up on this experience, after all the time we spent with him going over the fact he was “Antonio” and we were “Matt & Ron”, as we were pulling into our hotel he says, “Now it’s Brian & Ron, right?” And after all the promises of taking care of us whenever we needed rides during our stay, it was very surprising that he never checked up on us.

A lot of folks in our industry, and just about any other industry that relies on an online presence, have long been frustrated with the lack of information Google shares publicly. But maybe that is changing… at least for webmasters, SEO’s, etc…

Adamap.com has a screenshot of the Google Keyword tool showing search numbers instead of just the generic green bar measuring a keyword’s search volume.  I haven’t seen this personally, yet, but I hope it is something that will go live soon. In our jobs at LinkWorth of developing custom linking strategies, keyword search volume is something we spend a lot of time researching.  It would definitely be nice to have some new alternatives to the Overture Keyword tool since it’s so fickle when it comes to usability.

With the greatness of StumbleUpon, a time killer in itself, making some kind of organization can sometimes help find the best of the best. So no more wasting time, here is my top 10:

1. Papervision3D – Click on the images and enjoy the craziness.
2. – This is one is a great time killer if you are into the night sky and what exactly is out there.
3. – Stellarium takes the sky-map above, to a whole new level. If you want to see exactly what you see when you look at any part of your sky at any time of the day, download and install the freeware software. It is open source and there are no ads or anything involved. Learn about all stars and constellations. You can even have falling stars while you’re gazing.
4. I’ve got a big bag of crabs – Something that puts you in a transe and you can’t take your eye’s off.
5. Killer Music Player – This is a very cool music tool that allows you to build your music and listen to it.
6. Unusual Deaths – this is a wiki version that has all of the popular deaths and how they died. It tends to focus on the real bizarre.
7. Super cool fast animated video’s of cosmos. Speed time up to see the future faster.
8. Wildcard – This is a definite time kill. There are 5 options to mess with down in the lower left corner.
9. Popular Links For All – Social bookmarking to a new level. Everything you could possibly need.
10. What song was on your birth date – Enter your birth date and see what music was the top hit on that day.

There are loads more, so I’ll try to do it 5 at a time since 10 takes too long. It took me a good hour to do this for being sidetracked.

Today someone published a Digg about the biggest Google Bomb ever. It appears the individual was searching for “how student loans affect fico score” and wow were the results a little favored towards Google’s blogspot pages! Since I’m sure they are going to correct this issue before some read this post, I went ahead and printed the top 100 results to PDF so you could see what it looked like.

Google Results-PDF

The comments for this digg post shows Matt Cutt’s immediately responding to the digg with the following suggestion:

Hi, I work at Google and I’ll check on this. My impression was that something was happening in the migration from the old blogger to the new version of blogger, but I’ll definitely check with the blogger team about tackling this.

Hmmm, does this mean they place weight on blogspot sites over other sites? Probably not, probably just a huge bug, but interesting to see.