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Well this is not turning out to be a good day. I certainly got out of bed with all the expectations of it being a wonderfully productive day but even before breakfast it was turning to crap.

Now I've just wasted a whole bunch of time installing a second graphic card/third monitor on one of my machines and I just can't get it to work. Oh sure, it's all meant to be plug and play but when the new card comes with no drivers and then the computer refuses to locate the drivers once they've been downloaded and installed I just know that I'm not going to win.

And to top it off, it's raining again and today was the day for the guy to come and do our lawns. Obviously it's now too wet for him to turn up and the grass is so long the next remake of Tarzan could be filmed in our backyard.

If it doesn't stop raining in the next day or so a lawnmower just isn't going to be able to cope. I do hope the lawn guy has a combine-harvester tucked away in his garage because he's going to need it here.

At least the weather is good for someone
While it's raining here ... and has been on and off for well over a week ... in Britain it's snowing and people are having trouble getting to work. One big car maker in Britain has even had to shut down its production line for a day or two because production workers are staying home rather than trying to get through the snow and ice.

But for a site called IllicitEncounters.com ... a dating site for married people who want to have some extra fun ... the cold weather in Britain has been fantastic. Evidently being stuck at home with nothing much to do has led to a lot of bored people thinking about an affair or two on the side so they're hitting the site and joining up ... and at 40 pounds for 30 days membership, it ain't cheap.

In the last six days 2,567 new members have joined the site and that's put such a strain on the site that the owners have had to hire extra help to cope with the domain.

So what are your traffic figures like at the moment and if your traffic is up are you converting all those visitors into cash in your pocket?

Are SEO conferences dead?
So the mighty Shoemoney has decided that search engine optimization is dead and he even quotes Google and one of the leading lights in the SEO field for support for his argument. He further suggests that the big SEO conferences are dead and it's a waste of time and money to attend them.

Hmmm ... well if you believe that SEO is dead then I've got a nice bridge in the middle of the desert of your choice that I can sell you for a bargain basement price. Sure search engine optimization is getting harder and harder. To get a single website to rank in the top 10 in any of the competitive search verticals isn't impossible but you're certainly not going to get the site there without quite a bit of SEO work.

On the other hand he may just be right about the conferences for many of the leading SEOs that I know are withdrawing from the public arena and are keeping their techniques and practices completely to themselves so they're not going to be giving away any trade secrets at conferences.

It seems that the number of knowledgeable people who are prepared to speak at the conferences is growing smaller and some conferences are starting to plead for people to speak. I noticed that Danny Sullivan was making a public appeal for speakers at SMX today and if he's doing that then there is a problem getting presenters.

Of course when the big names stop going the people who want to feed on the crumbs that the big guys might drop at conferences won't go either because there'll be nothing there for them.

So don't think for a moment that search engine optimization is dead ... because it's definitely not ... but it might be an entirely different matter when it comes to SEO conferences. They're still going to charge lots of money but the quality that may have been there once will have disappeared.

And now I'm off to fiddle around with this graphic card again. Somehow I'm going to convince it that plug 'n play really does mean that it just gets plugged in and it works.