Where do I even start with this one. To me this year Think Visibility had the whole PubCon feel from many years ago, SEO’s sharing tips, war stories and basically doing crazy stuff!

One of my normal complaints at search conferences is the parties, not because they aren’t good parties they are, but they aren’t good for networking and I guess for anyone who is organising a conference you have to get the right mixture of imparting knowledge, networking and partying.

Imparting knowledge can be a bit tricky, getting the right speakers that can cater for the largest possible spread of attendees. It’s really hard, how can a speaker with 45 minutes of speaking time help the guy or girl that’s just getting into the search industry and also help the guy with over 13 years’ experience .

I went to see the Let’s Talk About Links Baby, from Paddy Moogan notice I linked to twitter and not to Distilled this is the new thing apparently us blogging types do;) )  I’m not going to cover the session here on this blog but you can check out http://www.vertical-leap.co.uk/blog/think-visibility-5-roundup/ btw not because I’m lazy, just can’t remember which bit Paddy didn’t want blogging.

But from my point of view it was ok to good, it gave me some food of thought and me being one of those 13+ year guys in the audience, it left me feeling that I needed to check a few things out when back in the office so that’s always a good feeling.

Networking can be broken down into two areas – coffee breaks and lunchtimes and the after parties, I ThinkVis failed a little on the coffee breaks mainly due to too many people in too small a space which left most attendees waiting in line getting bacon butties, coffee and pick n mix, but there was no real space to site and chat and make new friends. The after parties were much better in fact the most noise was coming from attendees making friends chatting with each other while playing Scalextric or Rockband. The thing here, it wasn’t in some flash night club with music banging out. We had a bar large enough to get served quickly and enough room for people to sit and chat – a big win win. I would perhaps make the suggestion though of switching venues so that both nights aren’t in the same place.

I also agreed to link to a few people in this post, first off was the winner of the poker game. I found out this when Al Carlton came over and asked me to shout out that the Poker Tournament was starting because apparently I’m LOUD! Then he told me that I would announce the winner on my blog !

The Charity Poker night raised £400 for the Jaamit fund but I needed to find out who the winner was so I tweeted out to @chrisclarkson and got this back

@GeorgeCurrie of sunshine.co.uk! But @AlCarlton said we can F off for links to sunshine http://www.georgecurrie.com/

(haha, it’s a small world as my Mum and Dad just got back from their fantastic 4 week holiday in the sun – they actually used http://www.sunshine.co.uk to book their holiday so I’m giving them a link anyway !)

The first winner of the Jaamit Award was Rhys Wynne for winning a competition which was hidden in the Think Visibility Robot.txt file.

Now seeing how we are having awards I’m going to give out a Life Time Achievement  award, this goes to a UK SEO, a man that tests everything rel-canonical, First link First and in another time he was a Dog Bed tester and at this ThinkVis he tested the absorbency factors of common items you could find in a hotel room.

Toilet roll score 1/10 mainly due to the test apparently you would need 15,067 toilet rolls to soak up the test, only having 2 toilet rolls is pretty useless.

Dressing Gowns 2/10 these are quite good and can be reused unlike toilet rolls in fact they are like very large towels but again only 1 in the Room and quite hard to wring out.

Towels score 3/10 slightly better than the dressing gowns they are easier to wring out and you get 4 albeit 2 very small ones.

Bed Sheets 4/10 good for large scale clean ups but not big enough to handle this test.

Pillow 5/10 it’s like a big sponge but water off a duck back came to my mind.

Quilt 6/10 this is very heavy when wet and if used more than 3 times you will get a bit of a sweat on while wringing it out and may want to stop the test, shower and go for a pint (while testing it was found later that maybe holding some toilet roll and a towel back could have been advantageous)

Things not used anything electrical as water and electric don’t mix and could end up being an expensive test £1.29 to be honest, which was tested many years ago also.