You have reached the website of Pierre Far.
About me in 10 seconds: I have a PhD in bacterial genetics from Cambridge University, England, and I'm a Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google.
Me around the web:
Public speaking as a Googler
Events you might have heard me speak at include:
Think Visibility
I'm scheduled to speak at Think Visibility conference in March 2012. Topic still to be announced :)
International Search Summit
I'm scheduled to speak at the International Search Summit in London in May 2012 about the expanded Google support for rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for multilingual and multiregional sites.
g|jordan 2.0
g|jordan 2.0 was a Google event held in Amman, Jordan in October 2011. I answered webmaster questions, gave demos of Google Webmaster Tools, and also helped answer questions in the Ask a Googler session.
a4uexpo London 2011
As a Googler, I ran an Open Q&A for webmasters with my colleague Kaspar Szymanksi at a4uexpo London 2011.
Media Trust Think Mobile event
I spoke at Media Trust's Think Mobile event in March 2011 giving tips about how to build mobile-friendly websites.
Public speaking before joining Google
Locate, Collate and Aggregate at JISC CETIS Conference 2010
I spoke at the Locate, Collate and Aggregate session at the JISC CETIS Conference 2010 in Nottingham. I will be discussing the experience in building an open educational resources (OER) repository with content from multiple sources.
Mozilla Drumbeat Learning, Freedom and the Web Festival, 2010, Barcelona
I helped run the Open Content Studio at the Drumbeat Festival in November 2010. Topics discussed included the future of open educational resources (OER), how to improve the discoverability of OER, particularly OCW, and helping write a Creative Commons-licensed textbook on web development.
The Open Content Studio was a collaboration between Flat World Knowledge, the OpenCourseWare Consortium, Connexions, and me as OCW Search.
MongoUK 2010
I spoke at the MongoUK conference on 18 June 2010 in London about my experience building a full text search engine for MongoDB using Sphinx.
My slides are on Scribd: MongoDB Full Text Search With Sphinx.
SES London 2010
I spoke at the Automating Twitter session at Search Engine Strategies 2010 in London on 18 February 2010.
My talk was about analytics for social media marketing. Whenever you launch a marketing campaign, you need to measure it in detail to understand its performance. The presentation covered some of the important actionable metrics you need to track, with code examples of how to track them. Other key topics covered were filtering, automation, and reporting, all of which feed into experimentation to find the most effective marketing messages.
Websites I built
My current sites:
- eKstreme.com: SEO tools and general web development and marketing blog from my pre-Google days.
- This site :)
Previous sites:
- My science news blog: a hold-over from my PhD days. Sadly had to shut it down.
- OCW Search: a search engine of the full course contents of OpenCourseWare materials from the top universities around the world.
- Cligs: I built and marketed from scratch a URL shortener aimed at professional internet marketers. It did real time analytics, geotargeting, and social media monitoring. I sold it in late 2009 to Mister Wong.
- Font Fox: I used to be a typography junkie, and Font Fox was a place I collected my favorite free fonts. It was the first site I ever sold.