Earth Hour at the Sydney Opera House

I'm heading to Sydney today for SMX (see my last post for context). This past Saturday night ago was Earth Hour, an event which I understand started in Sydney where people around the world are voluntarily encouraged to turn off lights for one hour in recognition of climate change. It is of course only symbolic, not a real fix, which bothers some folks but it is OK with me.

Anyway, the Boston Big Picture, one of my favorite blogs which I've talked about before, had a post showing before and after photos of various landmarks during the earth-hour blackout. It is quite stunning - click on each photo to see it fade in and out of darkness. Highly recommended for taking a look at. Above are a few of their photos from the Sydney Opera house which I will be seeing for the first time in person very soon.

Heading to Australia for SMX Sydney Events

This time next week, I'll be in Sydney Australia to attend SMX Sydney 2009 (Search Marketing Expo). I've never been to Australia before, but it looks like a great conference and a fun city, so I'm really looking forward to the trip.

For the agenda: On Thursday, I'll be talking about the mysteries of URLs, domains, and dreaded "duplicate content" issues in the Links and URLs track. I'll be discussing how to deal with multiple domains, subdomains, URLs and sitemaps. I'll give a quick review of how the new rel=canonical tag works and how we are seeing it get used.

Friday, I'll be doing a lunch Q&A panel, Meet the Search Engines, as well as my personal favorite, a site clinic. The sites we will be discussing are a secret even to me, so think of it as a improv act.

If you are going to be in Sydney for the conference, make sure you find me and introduce yourself. My ugly mug shot is up on the website. Tell me you heard about it on Gregable first! I'll be at all of the social events in the evening as well, so bring all your burning Google questions. I expect that this will be a fun event, and I look forward to meeting some of you.