Overall, I find him personable, entertaining and certainly honest. His honesty got him in hot water (and an unofficial slap on the wrist) last year when his offhand comments at SMX Advanced (Search Convention) in Seattle on page rank sculpting prompted some official “clarifications.”

As noted, and Matt if you’re reading this, I like you. So when I saw your video entitled “2010 Search Predictions” I thought “Right on, dude!”

2 minutes and 44 seconds later, I’m like “huh?”

Comprehensiveness, Relevance, Freshness, Speed – got it, Matt – not exactly Nostradamus, and the clarification on the difficulty of real time search, though interesting, is kind of a moot point after the initial launch algorithms of Google’s in-line ‘real-time results’ were shown to be seriously deficient in spam control. (It’s better or “more cautious” now.)

Matt then goes into his thoughts on the future of SEO.

A ‘fork in the road’, one side ethical “white hat” (or in The Search Agents case, “Orange Hat”) methods, and the other side what appears to be evil-doers focused on ”drive by wins!”

I’m not certain what the ulterior motives might be for spending the majority of the video talking about malware, server patches and site hacking, but that wasn’t my expectations of Google’s search guru predictions.

What about a little more on SERP interface changes, facing the challenge of Binghoo, real-time data sources, cataloging of media types, blended results‘ future and personalization of search ‘experience’?

IMHO the future of SEO 2010 is all about results’ targeting (including personal and geographical) that will create both challenges and opportunities.

Personally I believe 2010 is going to be a phenomenal year for SEO.

Matt, lets chat.