While at the SXSW Interactive Festival last month, Lance and I were interviewed about our book, Web Design for ROI. The interview has been posted to YouTube, but in case you’d like to save yourself a few clicks here it is, in two parts. Our interviewer is fellow New Riders author Charles Wyke-Smith.

Part 1:

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Some quick stats from the SXSW Interactive Festival, to give you some idea what it was like:

• Verbal NDA’s given, between Lance and myself: 6
• Movie stars seen: at least 5 that we know of
• Tradeshow schwag items gathered, each: about 500,000
• Tradeshow schwag items that were actually cool: 3
• Best - but least effective - tradeshow schwag item: magnetic buzzing balls handed out by a company whose name I can’t remember
• Internet-related company founders, coders, financers, and top executives seen: hundreds
• Best sessions: Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, talking openly about how the company reached the success it has; Jared Spool, illustrating with magic tricks the importance of illusion and magic in meeting users’ needs; Guy Kawasaki, moderating a panel discussion on social media.
• Lance’s top memories: meeting Guy Kawasaki; dinner at Vespaio; screening “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”.
• My top memories: Seeing Helen Hunt speak; watching the Zappos.com team appear out of nowhere to hand out hundreds of rain ponchos when the weather turned bad
• Minutes of boredom: 0

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Now that we’ve had a chance to catch our collective breath at CLM, here’s a quick look back at SMX West, the hot new search marketing conference and expo co-chaired by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman.

SMX West was held Feb. 26-28, and despite the early calendar date was heavily and enthusiastically attended. News had evidently spread about the success of the inaugural SMX conference, SMX Advanced, which was held in Seattle last summer (and is scheduled for June 3-4, 2008).

Day 1: Danny kicked off the event with a rousing and inspiring keynote address on the future of search titled “Web 3.0, 4.0 and Beyond”, followed by breakout sessions. The sessions are generally a combination of short presentations (5 - 15 minutes each presenter) followed by a question & answer / panel discussion period. In the afternoon, our very own Amy Konefal presented on the topic of Avoiding PPC Pitfalls on a panel with Addie Connor from Course Advisor, Inc. and David Szetela from Clix Marketing, moderated by Matt Van Wagner.

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SEO practitioners and search engines have had an uneasy relationship at times. One might even say the discourse has occasionally been strained.

And why not? Search engines do so much for us who work in the search industry, and how often do we do anything for them in return? Other than facilitating the entry of high-quality sites into their indexes and routing millions of dollars in revenue through their ad platforms, practically nothing.

Until now.

At last, I’ve found a way to thank Google for all the years of employment and high-quality search results. I’m going to help Google fix its 404 error page.

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What if you could inject usability test results directly into your design process - and do it quickly and easily?

Web and interface designers are in a unique and powerful position to serve as user advocates. By incorporating usability and conversion principles into design from the beginning of the process, designers can help ensure the user-friendliness and effectiveness of the end product.

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