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Another SMX is in the books and I had a fantastic time! From checking out awesome Panels to speaking on the “Proving the Value of Social Media” Panel to the amazing people, SMX Advanced still is one of my favorite conferences to attend during the year.

Of course, this year, a bit topic of discussion was Microsoft launching Bing…which of course was the search engine formerly known as Live Search and MSN…wonder if Microsoft can pick a brand and stick to it with Bing now…

That said, there was some other major topics of discussion this year from the entire track dedicated to Social Media, which I truly enjoyed hearing about StumbleUpon from Brent Csutoras, to Twitter from Michael Gray, and well, my talk about proving the value of social media and the metrics and data behind it. I did have a couple interesting discussions though about the need for a seperation between the Monitoring and Corporate Social Media Profiles and the Persona based Social Media Marketing panels.

On the SEO side of things there is always a fun discussion with Paid Links with Michael Gray talking about Google Profiling SEOs. Michael and Matt definitely got into it a little bit at the Mixer and it was definitely made clear during the You & A with Matt Cutts. Also, during the Canonical Tag Panel there was a major debate apprently about how the tag is really not working as it is suppose to, and, how people are still using PageRank Sculpting. There was obviously some confusion about how the “nofollow” attribute is being used and some debate about how it is working.

That said, as always, my favorite part about the conference is the 1 on 1 conversations that I got to have with some of the most amazing people that I know in this industry. I had some amazing conversations with people like Michael Gray, Alex Bennert, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Brent Csutoras, Michelle Robbins, and Rae Hoffman. I also got a chance to uphold Yahoo!’s honor by beating Matt Cutts and Danny Sullivan at a game of Pool with Jonathan Hochman at the SEOMoz party. And, Carol Adam (my sister) helped out the Third Door Media team by volunteering to help and apparently did so well, others wanted to hire her as a Virtual Assistant! (Go Carol!)

Finally, I got to take some really cool pictures at the conference, here is the Flickr Slideshow:

See all the SMX Advanced Pictures!