SMX West occurred last week, kicking off a bunch of conferences and meetups for yours truly (I’m headed to SXSW Interactive on Thursday followed by SES NY right after I get back, and then there’s the Saturday night Blogger Social event only a week later). As all conferences I’ve attended, it was a great one, and by far the best part was the smallness of the conference overall which really helped the networking efforts. As for the sessions I liveblogged, there were eleven in total (see the Search Engine Roundtable’s SMX West coverage for details). Here are some of the bigger takeaways for me:

• We all know that the search landscape is changing. Louis Monier’s Wednesday keynote summarized the future in the world of search, as we’re looking at the following elements:
  • Human powered search: you get high quality content but since it’s human driven, the coverage isn’t as vast as we’d like.
  • Personalization: presenting results based on past activity. Monier suggests that it could be flawed, however, as in describing a “diamond:” what if a baseball enthusiast chooses to buy his wife a nice piece of jewelry?

Thought you had enough of the greatest Internet Marketing posts of 2007? Well, unfortunately, your reading list has just lengthened. Matt McGee over at Small Business SEM has compiled his own list of the “best posts of 2007″ in a site with a brilliantly and cleverly chosen title, the SEMMYS (Search Marketing Emmys). In addition to a bit over overlap from my previous post, Matt covers other categories pertinent to search marketing, including local search, search technology (e.g. robots.txt, IP questions for hosting, etc.), small business, analytics (he dedicates a whole section to this one!), rants, and funny posts about the search marketing industry in general.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be judging the category on Blogs and Blogging along with Michael Gray. Since I love blogs about blogging (really, I do!), this is the perfect match. (Thanks, Matt!)

I’m also pleasantly surprised to see that seven blog posts of mine on three blogs have somehow been nominated in six different categories. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Top 6 Ideas for Incredible Viral Content (Viral Marketing, posted here on Techipedia)
• How to Use StumbleUpon for Your Business: The Definitive Guide (Social Media, posted on the 10e20 Blog)

Last year, I ended 2006 with a great (and still pertinent) list of blog posts and articles that I felt were really the best in their class in the area of Internet Marketing. This year, I present you my favorite timeless posts of 2007, complete with descriptions about each blog post (which more than quadrupled the workload for me this time around, especially because I tripled the amount of links, but I had fun!) (Disclaimer: I’m certain that even with this list in excess of 250 links, I forgot a bunch of posts, so if you have any additional recommendations, please feel free to comment and I’ll add them!)

By the way, I still haven’t fully embraced video yet, so this will only include written articles. Maybe next year, folks!

Social Media Sites: General

• The Big Boys of Social Bookmarking: The Top 20 Sites (10e20): Chris Winfield ranks the top 20 social bookmarking sites by their Alexa rankings and gives a short description of what each does — in case you haven’t ventured beyond Digg.
• 24 Do-Follow Social Bookmarking Sites that Actually Work (Caroline Middlebrook): Get some powerful links on some of these lesser-known social sites.

(Note: It will soon become evident that I started this on the plane. However, it’s Wednesday and I finally wrapped it up.)

As I write this post on the plane, I am already beginning to miss SES San Jose 2007 (August 20-23), which was one of the most successful search conferences that I was fortunate enough to be able to attend. Not only was it educationally enriching, it was also an extremely successful and exciting networking event. And this flight, which actually is running early, was by far the easiest check-in and take-off in my entire life of traveling. Even though my seat is broken (the seat back flung backwards as soon as the plane lifted into the air), life is good.

During the day, life was all about business, and the intellectual stimulation began. Seventeen (!) sessions were liveblogged by yours truly, and Search Engine Roundtable covered a whopping 64 of the 74 sessions. The evenings were filled with a little more laid back fun, from an Ask.com dinner on Monday night to an incredibly awesome Google Dance on Tuesday and a pretty crazy WebmasterRadio bash on Wednesday night. I have to say that it was great. Thank you Barry.

Here’s the deal. If you’re real life friends with Kevin Rose, you have a new product website to launch, and Kevin submits the story for you, expect that the submission will make the Digg front page within hours of its submission.

There’s preferential treatment to young Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and their close-knit circles are pretty exclusive.

Many have contested the launch of Jason Calacanis’s newest venture, Mahalo. The discussion pretty much revolves around the same concept: 1) “old is new again”; 2) this is Wikipedia and About.com; 3) it’s just not scalable.

Many believe that Mahalo, by itself, would probably not gain popularity. Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors seemed to have been big for all of a week but many seem to have already forgotten about it. However, once you have a rockstar Digging your site, you’re bound to make waves and get popular.

Once upon a time, Jason whined that SEOs were snake oil salesmen. Jason said: “SEO is BS, if you generate a web page with good content Google will rank the page properly.�? I personally don’t have anything against Jason’s very candid opinion.