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Pubcon Sketchnotes

This year pubcon’s center of discussion was Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, a new search engine algorithm that was launched few months back.  With the launch of this algorithm google is redefining the search space and taking it to a new level. In broad stokes these are the areas that google is focusing:

• Knowledge Graph: Things not strings. Knowing what’s really behind a query.
• Voice Search: Getting better and better
• Conversational Search: Think pronouns, dereference the pronouns by maintaining an episodic memory during a conversational session
• Google Now: looking steps ahead where people may not even be querying
• Deep learning: Thousands of computers being used to learn neural networks

More about hummingbird – Core quality changes:

• Hummingbird: If you’re doing a query, it might be a natural language query, and it might include words you don’t need. “What is the capital of everlovin’ Texas?” Hummingbird is a step in the direction to figure out the words that matter more and give those words more intelligent scoring. There’s a lot being written about Hummingbird and the fact is it doesn’t affect SEO. It makes the results of long-tail and specific queries much better.
• Panda softening: There are always those grey-zone sites in Panda’s targets and some new signals they’ve added are meant to ease up on those sites.
• Detecting/boosting authorities: If you’re a topical authority, keep deepening that content.
• Smartphone ranking: If a searcher has a phone that doesn’t do Flash, Google is less likely to deliver results with Flash

Future trends of search include:

• Machine learning: Google will keep trying to figure out how to add more value to searchers
• Mobile: In 2011, YouTube had 6% of traffic from mobile phones. In 2012 it was 25% and in 2014 mobile is expected to be 40% of YouTube’s traffic. If you haven’t figured out your strategy for mobile, you better be thinking about it.
• Social/identity/authorship: Knowing who you are and identity can make a big difference. It’s a long-term signal that you’re a person people listen to.

Treat search engine as another person if you show authority and ownership of content people will listen and so will search engine. –

Content optimization trends for future

• Social Content: This plays front and center of search engine indexing. Increase in crowd sourced content publication and generation. Be Consistent, Be Interesting and Be Authentic.
• Social Sharing: Organically grown social sharing is a huge indicator of authentication indicator.
• Visual web: Web content media type will continue to increase from a text based to a more picture and video content.

2007-07-16 to 2007-07-19
We drove to Kansas City,MO along with my mentor Dr. Hu to attend Workforce Innovation 2007. We were almost approaching Kansas City and i saw the sky changing its beautiful colors. I always loved to watch how many colors change in just those few minutes during dusk, finally now i get a chance to capture its beauty. In few minutes the sky would have just changed to just black.

Checked in and settled down for the night. After attending the first day of conference my wife and i headed over to County Club Plaza which was just a mile away. This plaza is basically a collection of about 150 shops and dozens of fine restaurants, what else could you ask for :). Here is a collection of some pictures taken there.

After getting to know about shutter speed from my previous shoot (fireworks) i started exploring ISO and WB in this shoot combining at different apertures. Ken Rockwell has been my motivator in capturing high saturation pictures, making colors jump.