Danny Sullivan leaving!

Wow - This is a bit of a shocker.

Anyone who took a look at my computer desktop in the last month would have seen the guy in this picture peering up out of the haze of forgotten files and shortcuts.

Am i having an affair with a short sited geek (and here i use the term 'geek' in the most complimentary of ways)?

Uh... no. This is Danny Sullivan, the center of the search engine marketing universe. [Aside: Weirdly... in a foreshading kind of a way (?), Danny Sullivan actually was the name of the first boyfriend i ever had. We were crossing guards together in grade 4. Something about that crossing guard outfit...]

But having a picture of this Danny on my desktop was my humorous (to me anyway - nobody else ever got it) way of kind of imagining Danny looking out over my work... suggesting i add a keyword here; a link there; cheering me on; maybe adding a little subliminal tidbit of advice. Okay... did i mention yet i've been working a lot lately?

Luckily, he never actually emerged from the screen in a moment of hallucination... but he did just announced that he is leaving SearchEngineWatch and the Search Engine Strategies conferences. You can read more about about his reasons for leaving at his blog: http://daggle.com/060829-112950.html.

I think the very best comment of the day (from this site: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-earthquake-danny-sullivan-leaving-sew-and-ses/#comments) is from Scott Thompson, who writes, "Now that Danny is gone I guess it’s time to give up all this SEO nonsense and start playing video games again. I can’t wait to go outside again and see the sun. "

My not-so-genius prediction.... the Chicago SES conference -- the last one he'll appear at -- will be sold out very very quickly.

Thank-you Danny for being a geek amongst geeks.