If you’re like me and do most of your industry specific research online, you probably have a set of blogs and web sites that you trust and rely on more than any others. For a long time, I wished that I could do a Google search within just those trusted sites because I knew that all the results would be reliable.

That ability is now available with Google’s Social Search feature. Right now it’s only available by activating it in Google Labs and of course you must be signed into your Google account for it to work.

It’s been a busy past week or so as I’ve been scheduled for more speaking opportunities. It will be a nice busy winter as I get to do some traveling and meeting new people. What could be better?

If you’re interested in hearing me speak, come attend any of the fabulous conferences/seminars below.

PubCon Las Vegas – November 10-13, 2009
Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada
www.pubcon.com
SEO Design & Organic Site Structure – November 11, 2009

Affiliate Summit West – January 17-19, 2010
Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada
www.affiliatesummit.com
Site Clinic by the Women of SEO – January 19, 2010

I think I’m becoming a social media snob.

Thanks to the power of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, I feel pretty confident that I’m hearing about the latest world news and pop culture.

Take yesterday for example. From the moment I started watching the live stream of #balloonboy. I watched the live stream, I watched people talking on Twitter about it, I looked into the links talking about the “science-obsessed family” who had recently appeared on the TV show Wife Swap. I didn’t watch Larry King, but I was on Twitter to watch thousands of people start tweeting “OMG did you hear balloon boy say it was all for the show”. This morning I watched the discussion and videos of #balloonboy vomiting twice during live interviews.

If you read my earlier post about the implications of not having done search engine optimization, you’re familiar with my anecdote about looking for an auto body shop to fix my car.

I did want to look into the franchise shop I mentioned, Boyd Autobody. So, I did a search in Google and here’s what came up.

Wait, what?

Yikes!!

Warning: I’m about to ramble which means this could turn into a rant.

Sometimes I think that being a search engine optimization specialist works against me. Sometimes I wish I was ignorant about how indexing and ranking happens.

Let’s take an example.

I hurt my car (pause for tears – anyone who knows me knows how much I love my car). It’s going to require some body work. Now, I know a few places in the city from driving around and seeing them. Especially the franchise shops like Boyd Autobody (who, by the way, could stand a new web site and some marketing and online reputation management help – but I’ll save that for another post).