Back in March, my boss asked that I plan to attend SMX Advanced since PRWeb is the media sponsor. In addition to representing the company, I am also attending sessions and the special in-house meeting that happens on Thursday.

Having never attended an SMX meeting before, I wasn’t certain what to expect.

In short – wow!

Starting in April I received regular email updates. In early May they launched a social site using Crowdvine for attendees. The site allows you to search your own contacts for attendees but also search others’ profiles via tags generated from common answers. You can set up a menu of friends, colleagues and people you want to meet.

Want to plan in advance? You can review the entire schedule and select your sessions. You can even see other people who are attending that session.

And to get people familiar with each other, they are even mashing up people’s Twitter feeds!

I only know one or two people going, so getting the chance to find people with similar interests, and reach out to them before the meeting has been great.

So meeting planners take note: get yourself and your events set up with crowdvine – and you will make a lot of people happy AND productive.

And something else very cool is the WordPress iPhone app. Write your post on the plane – post on debarkation.

Update:  Post-conference – I’ve gotten back into the Crowdvine and downloaded contact information for all of the people I met.  Very cool application – hats off.

Shashib, Network Solutions Social Media Swami, just worked with several contacts to build a Black Friday Shopping widget. There are offers out there – and now you can see a consolidation of a number of them in one helpful spot. Check out the widget below, and learn about how this came about at the Network Solutions blog.

Google seems to have just launched new functionality for people who are logged into their accounts – you can “promote” or “demote” specific natural search results with a click – and you can even comment on different search results! Comments seem to be “public” comments – I have only seen a couple of examples where there are comments from others – maybe Google is rolling out the public part of commenting slowly – since it isn’t in my account yet.

Question – does this informal “voting” for sites have an affect on natural search results seen by people who are NOT logged into their accounts? Does this commenting show up? If so, Google will need to consider that there are a lot of people who will quickly figure out how to game this system… User generated content (UGC) cuts both ways – and adding it into the search algorithm, even if it is minor, could have a significant affect on the way that natural search results are accessed and optimized for. According to an interview in the Wall Street Journal, Google will not “initially” base search results on voting or comments – however with all of that great data at their disposal, will it not be really tempting to have it influence ranking to some degree?

Interesting addition – but I am really concerned about whether people will “game” this system (seems like the Black Hat Killer App!).

Here is a screen capture of how the votes and comments appear when you are signed into your Google account.