Search engine optimisation isn't magic, just hard work.

Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG) This News Blog is dedicated to bringing news, information and innovations targeting the Search Engine Optimisation industry.	Editor: Matt Paines blog@xseo.com

16 Jan06

Microsofts MSN Search Champs V4

Microsoft's renowned Search Champs meets again in a little over a weeks time at Redmond, Seattle. It is unclear how many have been invited this time round, that said I'm pleased to find myself on the list once again.

There don't appear to be many repeat Champs this time, with the exception of Chris Pirillo, Buzz Bruggeman, Joe James, Liz Lawley and myself. The known line up so far is:

	Returning Champs
	Chris Pirillo author and creator of the award-winning Lockergnome series of online publications Seattle
	Robert Scoble I'm the video guy over on http://channel9.msdn.com and I have a blog at http://scobleizer.wordpress.com and just got done with a book about corporate blogging at http://www.nakedconversations.com
	Buzz Bruggeman An Odysseus of modern times, Buzz uses the 'products are conversations' meme to demonstrate the power of ActiveWords, a Windows productivity tool. He travels all over the world and is a frequent speaker at blogging and technology events.
	Joe Janes Author, expert searcher, researcher, Information School, University of Washington.
	Liz Lawley I'm a professor of information technology and the director of the lab for social computing at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology). I'm also--like Mary Ellen--a "recovering librarian."
	New Champs
	Alex Barnett I’m at Microsoft Corp, Redmond, WA. I’ve creating online customer experiences since 1994 and hold a deep passion for the web. I’ve been luck to be able to pursue this passion with some of the greatest companies in the world (Microsoft, Levis, Reebok, Volkswagen and GE). Originally from London, I joined Microsoft UK in 2002 as Online Customer Experience Manager (CRM and Online Marketing).
	Andy Oram Cambridge, MA
	Annalee Newitz Currently I'm a contributing editor at Wired magazine, and I also write for Popular Science, New Scientist, and New York magazine San Francisco
	Bert Bates
	Brandon Leblanc I work at a local CLEC Telecommunications company called OregonTel specializing in high speed voice and data solutions for small businesses as well as dipping into Voice-over-IP. I specialize in operating, maintaining our Windows DNS Servers, Web servers, and Exchange Server on top of learning about new VoIP technologies. We're located outside Portland, OR in the small city of McMinnville (home of Howard Hugh's "Spruce Goose").
	Cathal Gurrin My background is academic. I am a postdoctoral researcher and research manager at the Centre for Digital Video Processing, Dublin City Univeristy, Ireland and am also currently a visiting researcher at the University of Tromso, Norway, where I maintain a part-time position. My research background is in search engines and I currently work developing techniques for multimedia search engines both in Dublin and here in Norway
	Charles Bailey Jr Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development, University of Houston Libraries
	Charles Blair Current technical interests: faceted metadata (google berkeley flamenco for an example); how to leverage the notion of metadata as assertions about things (not just data about data) to build more agile, extensible, _interesting_ searching systems; functional programming languages (current favorites: erlang; xquery. faded love: common lisp); digital archiving (is it harder than it seems or simpler than it sounds?)Prior interest: riding my BMW R100GS to sturgis.
	Chris Smoak
	Cindy Cunningham
	Craig Van Dyck Vice President, Operations, in the Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishing division of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.. Responsible for Production and Manufacturing, and for Finance and Administration, plus a special brief for corporate content management systems. Been with Wiley since 1996. New York
	Dan Lester Overall responsibility for all things electronic at Albertsons Library of Boise State University. Idaho
	Darren Barefoot Vancouver Technologist, Writer, Raconteur and Miscellanist. Alas Darren couldn't make it in the end- read why
	Dave McClure VP Evangelism, Simply Hired
	Dion Hinchcliffe Chief Technology Officer of Sphere of Influence, enterprise software architect, emerging technology evangelist, Web 2.0 and SOA expert, frequent event speaker, prolific article writer, and dedicated blogger.
	Donavon West Gadget "rock star" and winner of Microsoft's Gadget contest on MicrosoftGadgets.com . Washington DC/Northern Virginia area
	Dori Smith Author of books on JavaScript, Dreamweaver, Mac OS X, Wi-Fi, and Java. Frequent conference speaker, Web Standards Project Steering Committee member, Wise-Women.org ListMom, and long-time blogger. Northern California
	Emily Chang Emily Chang is an award-winning web and interaction designer, technology strategist and co-founder and principal of Ideacodes, a web consultancy in San Francisco. She writes at emilychang.com and is the creator of the popular web 2.0 resource, eHub (http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub). For the last ten years, Emily has created websites, applications, and online products for a diverse range of clients including Six Apart, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Hewlett Packard, University of Redlands, Kenyon College, Geophone Records and the Sierra Club.
	Emad Fanous Emad has held various positions at IAC (including Ticketmaster and Citysearch), USC/ISI (including RFC Editor, Los Nettos, CalREN2, IANA, LAP, Colo, and more), and few dot-busts. He has also been contracting (most of which is covered an NDA) providing consulting on product design, high performance software architecture/development, and business development/strategy for large companies. Emad is available for hire on select projects.
	Fred Cavazza
	Frederico Oliveira Publishes WeBreakStuff - one of the founding members of the Web 2.0 Workgroup. A network of blogs and bloggers who report on the latest web technologies.
	Gary Marchionini Gary Marchionini is Cary C. Boshamer Professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina where he teaches courses in human-information interaction, interface design and testing, and digital libraries. His Ph.D. is from Wayne State University in mathematics education with an emphasis on educational computing. He was previously professor in the College of Library and Information Services at the University of Maryland and a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. He heads the Interaction Design Laboratory at SILS. North Carolina
	Gina Trapani Freelance web developer and tech writer. Currently living in sunny San Diego, California, she edits Lifehacker.com, a weblog focused on software and personal productivity.
	Herbert Van de Sompel Digital Library Research & Prototyping Los Alamos National Laboratory, Research Library.
	Jake Ludington I cover digital media topics at Jake Ludington's MediaBlab, hang out backstage on The Chris Pirillo Show and rant at podcasters about needing search friendly text so that people will know they exist.
	Jenny Levine I'm the "Strategy Guide" (a nice, vague title) at the Metropolitan Library System in Burr Ridge,Chicago, Illinois. We work with our member libraries - 900 academic, public, school, and special libraries - rather than the public, and I help with technology, websites, blogs, RSS, authentication scripts, and the like.
	John Musser I now make my living as a technology consultantand spent the previous 20 years developing software or managing theprocess -- Bell Labs (geek heaven way back when), paying dues on Wall St (more than once), games (for EA and others), startups (last one heading engineering at LivePerson.com), and occasionally write and teach (most recently at UW).
	Joshua Porter As a developer I create and maintain web sites for people who want to make their web sites better. We also put on our annual User Interface Conference (uiconf.com ) which is consistently ranked highly in the usability industry, which is tremendous fun. New England
	Kathy Gill Since 2003, I've been a senior lecturer in the Master of Communication, Digital Media program at the University of Washington. When I'm not at the keyboard, I ride my Ducati or BMW and teach newbies how to ride motorcycles. - Alas Kathy Couldn't make it in the end
	Kathy Sierra My background is software development -- programming and interaction design mostly working in games (Virgin), entertainment (Amblin, MGM), AI, and computer-based learning. The last few years were about Java -- I was the lead developer of most of Sun's Java Programmer certification exams.
	Mary Ellen Bates Boulder, Colorado-based librarian of fortune, writer, speaker, author of (soon to be) 7 books about online research and related topics.
	Mary Hodder I write a blog about disruptive technologies and social issues around information technologiesBefore this company, I spent a lot of time working for companies like Technorati and others doing blog and other 'live web' search. Before that I was at UC Berkeley's Information Science school completing a masters. And before that I was at Adobe doing various projects over several years. Berkeley, CA
	Max Kiesler Max Kiesler is an award-winning web and interface designer with extensive experience in website development and internet communications. He has designed, programmed, and produced websites for e-commerce companies, higher education institutions, nonprofits, art organizations and technology start-ups. He is a co-founder and principal at Ideacodes (link to http://www.ideacodes.com), a web consultancy in San Francisco.
	Merlin Mann I live and type in San Francisco. Mainly I write stuff for a site I do called 43 Folders, but I also write things for other folks, plus I occasionally do some wildly lightweight consulting with a few friends' companies
	Michael Arrington
	Michael Casey Michael Casey is a branch manager with the Gwinnett County Public Library in metro Atlanta. For the past several months he has been involved in the construction of the system's newest branch, which is scheduled to open in April, 2006. He chairs the library's Emerging Technology Team and sits on the Technology Plan Task Force. He is also author of the Library 2.0 weblog LibraryCrunch. Michael holds a BA in political science and history from Duquesne University, an MA in political science from Penn State, and an MLS from Southern Connecticut State.
	Nancy White Online interaction designer (the people/process stuff), facilitator and coach for distributed CoPs, elearning, and virtual teams and communities. Online interaction addict. Chocoholic. Currently over committed. Seattle
	Nathan Weinberg I'm a refugee of the newspaper business. I write about Google, Microsoft and all related industries over at my Blog News Channel website, which some people are calling a blog network, although I have some other things in mind. New York
	Paul Mouton 10(+) years in the information field. Currently working with one of the largest reference publishers in the world. Over the last 10 years I have built and/or managed new publishing technologies and markets from early alert services to our current open web initiatives. Michigan
	Rael Dornfest Portland
	Raymond Chen Raymond Chen has worked in the Microsoft Windows division since 1992 and has seen a lot of things come and go. His Web site deals with the history of Windows and the dying art of Win32 programming.
	Remi Van Beekum Remi is the manager of the Organic Search department of Dutch Search Engine Marketing company Traffic4u. For the past couple of years he has executed and guided a considerable amount of larger Organic Search projects. One of these projects (Speurders.nl) resulted in Traffic4u winning the Dutch Search Engine Marketing award of 2005. Furthermore is he’s actively helping Dutch search engines to get rid of spam by reporting spam to them. Remi is Blogger at MarketingFacts.nl interactive marketing, about the search industry.
	Richard McManus Freelance Web Consultant, from Wellington New Zealand, who does analysis,research, writing and product development work for Silicon Valley Internet and digital media companies.
	Rick Hallihan I'm a software and systems engineer from Maryland. Experience in Software Development and Systems Engineering in Windows and Linux environments.
	Robert Ashby 7+ years in client and web search development and indexing strategies, currently working as Director of Search for Expedia.com.
	Schuyler Erle My most recent claim to notoriety relates to the excessive quantity of strong opinions I have on the subject of digital cartography, which have prompted me to co-author a couple of books for O'Reilly on the subject. The best place on the web to get a sense of where I'm coming from is http://mappinghacks.com/, though (to my embarassment) most of the activity on the site of late has been from my esteemed co-authors. Boston
	Shelly Farnham Formerly of the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research, recently became a free agent. :) My area of expertise is social technologies: communication, social networking, social coordination, community development. I'm a social psychologist by training though I wore many hats (design, PM, usability, development) during my six years as a researcher at Microsoft.
	Stef Magdalinski My first paid computing work was writing financial software in Single Application Environment Excel 1.0 on Windows 2.1. I'm currently proto-CTO of a couple of startups, and I live in London, UK
	Ted leung Aside from my day job working on Chandler, I'm interested in information overload, personal productivity, deeper integration of microcontent into desktop applications, and breaking out of the computing status quo. Bainbridge Island,Seattle
	T David Programmer KMR Enterprises. I've been programming professionally since 1999, but actually started programming in the Vic-20 days, anybody remember COMPUTE! ??? Peek, poke, peek. Washington State
	Tom VanDer Wal I have now been living just outside Washington, DC for 12 years and it has yet to seem like home. Some of my work is in the DC area, but most is in the Bay Area, the PNW, New York (and other East Coast cities north of DC) , and Europe. I feel more at home in these areas than where I live. The web brings all of this closer.
	Tristan Louis Tristan Louis is an author, entrepreneur and blogger who has run the site TNL.net since 1994. He was the initial founder of internet.com, co-founder of earthweb.com and has worked on many start-ups in the Internet industry since 1993. Mr. Louis has written for many American magazines and is often quoted or presenting at conferences on matters relating to search, digital media, and general internet and technology trends.
	Walt Crawford Senior analyst at RLG, frequent writer and occasional speaker. California