I’ve been looking forward to SphinnCon Israel for a month now … to the best of my knowledge, one of the highest-profile search conferences we’ve had in Israel so far.

it’s rare that I leave the house, let alone go to a spiffy conference in the big city with cool people who don’t wear pajamas all day and who feed me great food and tell me how much they like my work and don’t I look a little like Tom Cruise and would I like another free t-shirt and how would I like to take on this huge freelance gig that only someone like me could do and sure you can have options with that and … and …

Yeah, I’m excited. I don’t really think most of those things will happen, but there are some great speakers planned and I’m hoping to meet a couple of people I currently know only via email or their blogs. The chair is Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Roundtable and Rusty Brick, and speakers include Sam Michelson, Eli Feldblum, and several other people with impressive sounding titles.

Although I spend much of my day-job-life running PPC campaigns, and I’m sure the panel on PPC will be good, I’m most interested in the session about social networking. I get it on an intellectual level, but I’ve never been able to put it into practice usefully. So many of these sites have a very high signal to noise ratio, and I lack the patience to sift through the dross and find the gold. Although I must admit I’ve seen some nice occasional spikes of traffic from Stumble Upon, so I’m obviously missing something. That said, feel free to Stumble this and I’ll test my hypothesis again.

I had vague thoughts about live blogging the conference, but have decided against it because

  • I’m a lousy typist, and
  • If there’s WiFi available I’ll end up answering email when I should be listening instead.

And more importantly, Miriam Schwab of illuminea is going to be there and has hinted that she’s going to live blog the event … I suspect she’ll do a much better job than I will, so I’m going to leave it to the professionals.

I’ll be ducking into a phone booth right before the conference, removing my online superhero pseudonym disguise, and going as my real self … so if you suspect you recognize me, pop over and say”Hey, aren’t you Tuppy Glossop?” I’ll be honored to buy a drink for the first person to do so!