Comments on: Google Needs to Change It’s Conference Presentation Policy

By: Shortex

Shortex — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:51:50 +0000

Agreed!!! Whats up with having “unavailable” stamped next to all of their presentations from SMX West? What if everyone followed in their footsteps?

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 12:16:41 +0000

An example of something I would appreciate being recreated as a presentation on the Google webmaster blog.

At SMX advance, there was discussion regarding affiliate links passing juice, or that could potentially pass juice depending on circumstances. There was a little blog coverage, but nothing specific that you could class as guidelines.

It is possible the videos are now available behind a paywall on SELand (I haven’t joined yet) but that isn’t suitable for 3rd party reference.

By: Michael Gray

Michael Gray — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:29:52 +0000

@matt I can appreciate that but as society we’ve become stuck in a quagmire created politicians, bureaucrats, and lawyers, what we need is leadership that does the right thing, not look for loopholes to plant a flag in and rally around.

I’m sure there are plenty of people who tell the TED conference they should sell DVD’s of the presentations but they rise above the pettiness, and give them all away for free.

So I challenge google to do the the right thing, if they aren’t company confidential information, give away the presentations to the conference and on the google websites. This should apply to everyone at google not just the people with moxy.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:42:47 +0000

Oh, I almost forgot one incident that probably affected Google’s current policy as well. In 2006, the PowerPoint slides for an analyst day presentation were posted, but the slides contained comments about internal Google projects such as “Teragoogle.” I would say that 2006 incident certainly made Google more cautious about sharing raw PowerPoint files as well. Any time that I’m making a presentation that might be public eventually, I now tend to start from scratch with a blank file to ensure that I don’t leak any information.

By: Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:42:18 +0000

Sherry, here are a few reasons:
- slides on paper or PPT files can get stale, e.g. we add things in the webmaster console and change the UI there relatively often. I had to ask Third Door to update something that I got wrong in my canonical link tag presentation, for example, because I had sent them PPT.
- slide presentations by themselves often lack the context that you get from watching the speaker

I’ve worked with a lot of conferences, and they each seem to have their own philosophy about presentations. Some want to make them available for free to the public. Some conferences want to put them behind a paywall or put them on a DVD that they sell for hundreds of dollars. Conferences also have different policies on videos; some video the presentation and put it up (for free or for pay). Some conferences don’t want people in the audience to take video. Some conferences want to make speakers sign agreements about what they will or won’t do.

So this is a bit of a complex subject. We do often put up our presentations, e.g. I think most/all of our Developer Day presentations are up online for free. I’m not positive that there’s one policy that will make every (speaker, conference, conference attendee, member of the general public) happy.

By: K4Z

K4Z — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:38:19 +0000

They will find their way to a torrent site eventually. Some SEM will put them up. Serves Google up

By: Sherry Gray (unrelated)

Sherry Gray (unrelated) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:25:50 +0000

What’s the reasoning for not making this information available? Proprietary materials – a pay per view issue?

By: Michael Gray

Michael Gray — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:11:15 +0000

to back up what @lisa said, I think what people want from a presentation is something actionable to come home with. You don’t have to give away the farm but you should at least be pointing someone in the right direction and give them a gentle nudge. Yes it’s interesting to know where search wiki came from and that there where 100 buttons tested, but for conference goers who spent a few days of their lives and few thousand dollars of someone’s money, that’s not an actionable item.

By: Lisa Barone

Lisa Barone — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:49:46 +0000

@Matt: It was a bit more widespread than that. Corey wouldn’t comment on anything about SearchWiki. Not the adoption rate, why it was put in place, what Google was looking at, if people were engaging more with head or tail terms, etc. And that’s fine. You don’t want to give people enough information to tamper/ruin it before you get what you need. But then don’t hold a panel entitled SearchWiki. Because if you do, and then the only question you’re willing to answer is, “where did the name come from?”, people (or perhaps just me) are going to riot.

Good seeing you at West though. And I was mostly kidding about that pipe thing.

By: Michael Gray

Michael Gray — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:28:37 +0000

@matt yes the video thing was cool, i just don’t know that everyone is up to that. There will always be questions people can’t answer but try to find a way to talk to the core issue if possible and not the detail would come off a little less like we’re being stonewalled, with no info.