Found 2009 Call for Participation

Call closed midnight 12/17/2008 PST.

Call for Participation is Now Closed

Thank you to everyone who submitted a proposal to speak at the inaugural Found Conference. We are now reviewing the proposals and and will notify you whether or not your proposal has been accepted by the end of January. Registration for the conference will open in February. To stay updated as the program develops, please sign up for the Found newsletter (login required).

O’Reilly is now planning the conference that will change how developers create web applications to move the Web forward. The world, and business in particular, is moving online. And your customers start with a search. If a website can’t be easily found through search, it is inaccessible to much of its potential audience. While developers have historically thought of search-related activities as the realm of the marketing department, technical architecture is a critical component to customer acquisition through search. As the Web gains complexity with more sites and richer media, developing web applications with search friendliness built in from the ground up is key.

Search-friendly development practices aren’t obvious in the industry today. We’re looking for those who can help build best practices and set standards for web development that make information easier to find through search. Help us make a better web by educating developers on how to build sites that are searchable. Raise awareness in the development community about the technical issues and help make search-friendly best practices part of the standard development process. Start a conversation about how to make the content on the Web more available.

Share your case studies and experiences on how improving a site’s visibility in the search results can bring more qualified traffic and increase conversions. We’re looking for practical advice about building the site right the first time, evaluating a site for improvement, and diagnosing problems. From the strategic (how can the development process be improved? what changes have the greatest impact?) to the tactical (what’s the best way to redirect a page using IIS 6.0?), these sessions will be devoted to the developer, architecting and coding pages.

Session Formats: You may submit to speak in a 50 minute conference session or a 90 minute workshop. The 50 minute conference sessions will be take place Wednesday, June 10 and Thursday June 11 and can be a single speaker, a joint presentation, or a panel. If you have more in-depth content, several 90 minute workshop slots, scheduled for Tuesday, June 9 (the pre-conference day) are also available.

Tracks: Whether you are submitting for a conference session or workshop presentation, please choose the track which BEST fits your submission from the choices below.

  • Architecture
  • Process & Diagnostics
  • Structured Data
  • Metrics

Deadline: Submissions must be received by 11:59pm PST December 17, 2008 to be considered for the program.

Main conference topics

  • Technical Site Architecture: How do search engines crawl, index, and rank pages, and how does that impact how you build pages? Platform considerations are key here. Microsoft stack (asp.net/IIS), LAMP stack, Flash, Ajax—whatever technologies you use, best practices can help ensure search engines can find, extract, and rank the content.
  • Process & Diagnosis: How can you build search-friendly design into the web development process? For an existing site, what’s the best way to retrofit and how do you prioritize what to tackle first? How do you assess sites and what are the most effective methods for diagnosing issues?
  • Verticals: We’ve hit information overload. Everything is online and web pages compete with other forms of media. What’s the best way to incorporate media such as videos and images into websites to improve search acquisition? And how can search verticals (such as local/geo and shopping) be leveraged for greater visibility?
  • Metrics: What metrics are really important to prove ROI for search-focused development resources? How many new customers can search bring to a business?

Themes

The Found conference is focused on actionable information that web developers can use right away to increase the search-friendliness of their applications while not sacrificing usability. Themes include:

  • Technology-specific tactics (such as asp.net, IIS, Apache, PHP, Flash, PDF, Silverlight, Wordpress)
  • Tools (diagnostics, search-engine tools, plugins)
  • Off-site techniques (feeds, APIs)
  • Process (best practices, working with marketing)
  • Metrics

When describing your talk, keep in mind that case studies and real-world examples are encouraged. We’d like attendees to walk away with actionable data they can use right now. What will attendees learn? Why is this topic important?

Sponsorship Opportunities

For information on sponsorship opportunities at the conference, contact Yvonne Romaine at yromaine@oreilly.com

Media Partner Opportunities

Download the Media & Promotional Partner Brochure (PDF) for information on trade opportunities with O'Reilly conferences or contact mediapartners@ oreilly.com

Press and Media

For media-related inquiries, contact Maureen Jennings at maureen@oreilly.com

Found Newsletter

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Speaker/Program Ideas

Have a suggestion for a speaker or topic at Found? Post a message on the Found Wiki or send to found-idea@oreilly.com

Contact Us

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