Internet World Exhibition Disappoints… Again
by matt @ 4:45 pm. Blogged under Web Hosting, Web Technology, Search Optimisation, Pay Per Click, Email Marketing
I should have remembered how disappointing I found Internet World to be last year at Earls Court, but with free mini seminars on offer covering SEM, PPC and Web 2.0 it again seemed to be worth a visit. Unfortunately within minutes of arriving I was reminded of why the free seminars are NOT a good reason to attend the Internet World show; over subscribed presentations causing a massive shortage of seats and some very basic topics being presented. Quite why a packed crowd was sitting listening to one guy go over slides on SEO which I could well have written seven years ago I don’t know.
Thankfully I found one or two vendors to talk to about new industry offerings, and a possible new web hosting vendor to replace Rackspace; Jamie on the Serverstream stand was pretty helpful and I’ll definitely be seeing if they can get me migrated over from Rackspace. The folks at ‘Ciao’ – an online shopping comparison service were telling me how they pay people for product reviews, even now paying £7 for each approved user video review. I’ve not come across anybody doing that before so that tells you something about the way things are headed. It’s probably a sensible approach since the main driver behind a review is typically a negative experience, paying for reviews must give them more of a balance.
I managed to find the Wordtracker stand – a keyword building tool I haven’t tried using in maybe five years, I was curious to see if it’s improved any over the Yahoo! Overture search term suggestion tool. I think it’s safe to say it hasn’t much - the exhibition stand implied that UK data had been added to their database, but when I asked for a demo I was told that the UK data wouldn’t be available until early summer. Since the source of the data is ISP based, I don’t expect the tool to ever be any better than Yahoo!’s tool or the Google Suggestion tool – so not really worth paying for in my opinion.
After a couple of hours at Internet World I left, I was completely unable to locate one of the seminars I had hoped to hear (presumably it was cancelled), the other seminar snippets I listened in on at various presentation points weren’t particularly awe inspiring either. I ask myself whether anything will ever blow me away again as much as my first Search Engine Strategies conference did in 2001. I suspect the answer to that is ‘no’ – the Internet world just isn’t moving at quite the same pace anymore, either that or I’m keeping up with it…
Technorati Tags: internet world, earls court, web conference, internet events, wordtracker, ciao, serverstream, rackspace
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May 24th, 2007 at 12:52 am
I attended this event on several occassions 6 - 7 years ago as a vendor and I think it was starting to fall pretty flat then.
Really need something new to come in to the market to shake it all up again
May 31st, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Ashame to hear that you felt the event did not meet your expectations. From our point of view it was a very successful event with good comments received from many visitors and exhibitors. Next year we are swopping sides with the IDMF which should give more space in the theatres and we are also having some masterclass seminars and discussions to meet the needs of this dynamic market. There are an amazing number of people who still request to be educated on the basics and many who voice their opinion at the seminars and find their questions answered…
I hope you attend next year and find a better event.
Mark Ram
Marketing Manager, Internet World 2007