Matt, Lisa, Danny, Susan, and Vanessa

Originally uploaded by SmallBusinessSEM.com.

It’s great fun to have a conference in your own backyard. As I said to fellow Seattleite Rand, “isn’t it nice to not have to travel to one of these?”

I’m actually still getting acclimated to Seattle, and had never been to the Bell Harbor Convention Center before tonight. Seems like a good venue so far, and you can’t beat the location — right out on Elliott Bay.

Good crowd tonight for the MSFT networking party, and I came this close to winning a Zune during the prize raffle; just missed by one number. Not sure what I’d do with a Zune, so that’s okay.

Funniest moment of the night came right before the photo you see above: I’m chatting with Matt Cutts, whom I’d never met before, and Lisa Barone comes over to say hello to me — but she doesn’t know who I’m talking to. She starts with the “Great to see you, how are — ” and at that moment realizes Matt Cutts is standing there and she goes totally bonkers over him. You can click the photo to read what happened after that.

I’ll be posting session recaps as best I can during the day tomorrow and Tuesday, and all my photos will be posted on Flickr:

SMX Advanced, Seattle 2007 photos

Special thanks to Karl Ribas for the finely crafted klog! (which can be seen in the photo set above)

[tags]smx, smxadvanced07, smxseattle07[/tags]