Search Engine Strategies conference: over and out

I came back last night from a very insighful and exhausting conference on the topic of Search Engines, which took place between last Monday and yesterday in Chicago.

The key things I learned from it:
-Local Search: it arrived to stay. It's growing like crazy, thanks in part to the likes of Google and Yahoo! which now return local results when you append a city/location to a search for, say, a business (dentist, plummer, etc.) There's far more control in the user's hands than ever before, and businesses are encouraged to make sure that the listings about them that get displayed on the local results are as precise as possible.
-Personal Search: some initial efforts about this on the horizon. A9 (amazon's baby) and Eurekster and MSN's search coming out of beta soon (BTW, I am no MSN lover, but I encourage you to test it! -including their search product to dig inside your hard drive, which is much more integrated to the OS as expected), are fronting the efforts on this end. Still some more things to do about it, though, and adoption by users at large is still lagging a bit.
-Blogs: any news about them? Well... the general public is catching up with them beyond just being sources of information beyond mainstream media. They are fabulous sources of credibility and a great means to enhance link building efforts.
-Latin America and US Hispanics: a great dissapointment was to see the small turnout at the fantastic session delivered by Juan Fernando (Studiocom.com), Lucas Morea (Latin Edge), Nacho Hernandez (iHispanic) and a rep from TeRespondo.com, the "Overture" of Mexico, Argentina and Brazil.
-Optimized Press Releases: sounds basic? Try it... We learned about them from the master himself, Greg Jarboe, principal of SEO-PR.

For a more comprehensive insight, here's the keynote by Danny Sullivan, Editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, which kind shows the highlights of the things in the industry over the past year and what is on the near horizon.

What else? Well... Chicago was pretty cold... but I can't complain. We were staying at the hotel next door to the conference, so we didn't have to walk out in the cold much.