The Thursday (2nd day) keynote for PubCon South 2009 was given by Matt Cutts, head of the quality assurance team at Google. He was introduced by Brett Tabke.

Before launching into his usual Q&A, he introduced us all to Google Friend Connect API.

The final session of PubCon last week was the Search Engine Smackdown, with representatives of each engine giving a “State of the Engine” address, and then answering questions as a group. On the panel were Matt Cutts of Google, Sean Suchter of Yahoo, and Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search. It was moderated by Brett Tabke.

Rather than a smackdown, it came across more like a pillow fight. Matt’s 2009 trends were interesting, however:

• Blackhat moves toward the outright

…

The final round of Interactive Site Reviews at PubCon included a panel from the search engines themselves. It was moderated by Greg Boser and included Matt Cutts of Google, Nathan Buggia of Microsoft Live Search, and Tony Adam of Yahoo Media.

Instead of taking notes, I decided to shoot pictures instead.

If you know of good coverage of this event, drop me an email or add it to the comments of this post.

Wednesday night at PubCon, Rand Fishkin and the SEOmoz team hosted their second annual Search Spam Party at PubCon.

The theme of the party was a clever spin on the Werewolf game, with a custom deck of cards with the following substitutions.

• Villagers are White Hat SEOs
• Werewolves are Black Hat SEOs
• The Seer is Matt Cutts
• A Danny Sullivan character is added, that can protect one person per turn

So, the pictures you’ll see…