Yesterday I made the bold (sarcasm) prediction that Matt Cutts would do a live Q&A in the near future. Well, it turned out to be right.
Yesterday at about 1pm (EST) Matt Cutts of Google tweeted that the Google Webmaster YouTube Channel was just about to hit 5 million total views. Matt said "How should we celebrate?" In response to that, I said, do a live Q&A via YouTube, which Matt replied "I don't know; doing a live Q&A sounds like a lot of work, don't you think? Although that would be pure awesome." Seconds later he tweeted=:
I think we're going to try a live video stream RIGHT NOW!
And there it went, Google reached over 700 concurrent people watching the live Q&A, a total of over 1,000 users watched this live. Amazing numbers for something last minute. It aired for about two hours and Matt maybe got through a quarter of the questions submitted.
I am a bit surprised to see the live Q&A was not published yet in the archives. In fact, people are asking if it will be published in the Google Webmaster Help forum.
I secretly captured a snippet of the video where Matt spoke about Panda. Here it is:
Matt McGee was taking notes and published them at Search Engine Land.
I do suspect Google will be doing more of these live Q&A events. It worked out so well.
My favorite part was when Matt Cutts messed around with the screen sharing and video capture to make it go in an infinite loop. Here is a picture of that:
Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.
