On March 12th at Pubcon, I had the privilege of interviewing Matt Cutts for our video series called How I Use Twitter. Here are the notes:

User: Matt Cutts

Company: Google

Title: the head of Google's Webspam team

iPhone client: TwitterPhone

Follows: About 100 People

Followers: About 17,000 (as of March 12, 2009)

Using since: mid-2008

PC Client: Twitter.com

URL Shortener: Bit.ly

Tweets Out: 6-7 per day

Time spent: Not much.

Quote: “It’s just like a river. If something interesting comes by you can pick it, pass it on, reply to it, and if you’re too busy, it’s OK and nobody is going to be offended by that.”

Tip: Keep your tweet 14 characters short of the max so that people can easily retweet it. (Ben adds: Add up the characters in your Twitter username and then add 5 and that should be enough for a retweet. So, for benfinklea, it would be 10 + 5 = 15. RT @benfinklea )

The second day of PubCon South 2009 opened up with Google’s software engineer, Matt Cutts laying down an SEO joke.

Q: Why did the Blackhat SEO spam the innocent blogger?

A: Because the blogger asked for it!

I will give you a moment.

Cutts, primarily Google’s web spam and quality control go-to guy, asked the second hypothetical fireside chat question of the conference:

Q: How do we get past the spam on all of our content? (Referring to social media, blogs, ratings and reviews)