Best Blog Post of 2006 (non-search engine related)

On October 9th, I wrote this about Kathy Sierra’s “Knocking the Exuberance Out of Employees”.

It’s a great post and it relates to a lot of problems in the business world in terms of having innovative customer service. Let’s hope her post prompted some people to realize that operating in this manner is a mistake.

Congrats!

The Growing Conversation Debunking the “Social Media Is Dead” Post by Steve Rubel

Karl Long has a great post on this where he encourages others to chime in on this issue. Follow his links.

If you are pressed for time, Jeremiah Owyang has a nice summary of the blogoshere reaction.

I think the issue of leadership that is able to constantly adapt to change is going to get bigger and bigger and eventually a new breed of corporate leader will be brought in, one who listens and constantly innovates.

I’m Superman, yet more Green Lantern than Calacanis or Arrington!

Historically, I rarely take part in the everybody is taking a survey surveys. Yet this superhero one seemed fun. I seem to rank highly as a superhero, maybe I should try that instead of search engines, mobile search marketing or financial services!

Like Steve Rubel, I’m Superman (apparently)! Yet, I’m more Green Lantern than either Michael Arrington or Jason Calacanis. Do those that know me find this accurate? I’m curious.
Your results:
You are Superman

Superman		90%
Green Lantern		85%
Iron Man		85%
The Flash		75%
Spider-Man		70%
Robin		67%
Batman		65%
Supergirl		65%
Hulk		60%
Wonder Woman		55%
Catwoman		35%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Test

Q&A With Jimmy Wales On Search Wikia(wikiasari)

Ever since the Times of London first reported Jimmy Wales intention to start a search engine, the blogosphere has been ablaze with speculation and misinformation about the concept (which is much earlier stage than first reported).

While considerable questions remain, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land did a good job getting some clarification from Jimmy and then giving his opinions as only Danny can.

I think the thing that everyone overlooks here is that Mr. Wales says in response to Danny about ads, “There are no immediate plan to sell ads, so for now we’re not too focused on that. If we don’t build something useful, selling ads on it is sort of a moot point.”

In my opinion, what the search industry should be most worried about is if Mr. Wales built a “good” search engine which was not at all focused on monetization. Now that could be actually quite disruptive if searchers were to migrate to it under some purest movement of some sort. I think the odds of that are considerably more significant than a great search engine killer emerging here.

Microsoft Sending Out Laptops with Vista Loaded to Some Bloggers

Here is one of them. I wonder why they didn’t just send out update disks to a larger audience? Anyone have insight on that?

Switching Search Engines is Easy…

“Google’s monopoly power is less threatening than Microsoft’s because changing operating systems is hard, while changing search engines is easy…” - Blake Ross, co-founder of Firefox in his post Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose.

Interesting read.

Merry Christmas!!!

It’s interesting to note that Google’s 2006 Christmas transition logo shows someone making a gift themselves. If everyone made all gifts themselves, search engine marketing would cease to exist, so it’s more that a bit of an interesting choice for them to show, don’t you think?

Costco - Now Customer Listening?

In September, I made a post about my feelings about Costco (COST). In it I posted about some items they needed to restock and the need for a change in culture focused on customers.

Costco has now restocked one of these items, the Texas Garlic Toast (after dropping the high end product consumers rejected). I hope it is a sign that they are starting to focus on the customers needs and would like to encourage them to focus on the remaining concerns in my previous post in 2007. In addition, the Lincoln Park Chicago store needs faster register checkout.

Google Indent Glitch?

Google appears to have a glitch in the search results for #1 Google Indent rating groupings. Frequently, an item in the first grouping is showing up as the number two search result as well! Hopefully, Matt Cutts, Adam Lasnik and the team will find the glitch in short order, they are typically on top of things like this once brought to their attention.

Examples include: Harvard Business School (pictured), Stanford GSB, MIT Sloan, Dartmouth Tuck, NYU Stern, Yale, UNC - Chapell-Hill, Chicago GSB - that should be enough of a sample size to debug the issue…

Great Last Minute Gift Ideas

The Never Eat Alone Blog (Keith Ferrazzi’s blog) has numerous good ideas for networkers.

I’ll add one of my own: Give the gift of your personal time to offer to help someone achieve their goals - that gift is priceless!

Networking tip regarding the Cardscan gift idea: When designing a new business card always check to see that it would work well in a card scanning device before printing them. Seems obvious, but you’d be amazed how many people do not consider this!

Andy McKee Featured on Youtube Front Page!

I first met Andy McKee at an acoustic music festival in Kansas in 2003. He is among several awesome fingerstyle guitar players including Tommy Emmanuel (see my Tommy Emmanuel interview), Neil Jacobs, Brian Henke, Peppino D’Agostino and others that don’t get mass media exposure. For several years these great players have labored with little or no media love. Yet when they play - some people will drive hundreds of miles to witness the art. It is a strange contradiction indeed.

One of Andy’s videos “Drifting” made it onto the front page of Youtube this week and has now received over 700,000 views! While it’s great that this occurred, it’s a sad reminder of a broken music industry that categorizes people much the same limiting way online recruiting does, not being seen by all of the people who might be interested in the competencies and skill set that a person offers! It’s great when you start to see these barriers and limiting beliefs starting to be broken, hopefully 2007 will be the year we see this happen in not only music, but also recruiting as well. If you like this video be sure to check out his remake of Toto’s “Africa”.

Google’s Mobile Ad Guidelines Page

I recently noticed that Google started a Mobile Ads guideline page. The following is of great interest to me:

“Follow proper grammar conventions.

You may use common text message abbreviations.”

I’d like to see some more detail about what is meant exactly by “You may use common text message abbreviations.”

The #1 result for “text message abbreviations” in Google currently has this web page. In a world where relevance is critical to click through and conversion rates, is an ad that has abbreviations that a viewer doesn’t understand certainly doesn’t meet the relevancy requirement as that viewer certainly won’t take action on an ad that he or she can not interpret. My preliminary thought is that this should allow the user to self select the type of mobile search marketing ad style that they are most comfortable with and this likely will have a strong correlation with the age of the user/ad viewer. But it also means that eventually you might need more than one style of mobile text ad, one with abbreviations and one without abbreviations. This is certainly an interesting area that I’m will likely see new standards and metrices over time.

What do you think the standards should be? I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts and discussion of this issue.

Networking Insight

It was such a great pleasure to see my good friend Jason Jacobsohn at the Chicagoland Entrepreneurship Center holiday party last night. That community does so many positive and good things and I’m glad I know many of them well.

He also launched a new blog this week, “Networking Insight” this week which I encourage you to check out. He did a good job of thinking about the blog before launching it - I’m sure he’d love to get your thoughts, encouragement and ideas.

Digg Adding Podcasting Section

Techcrunch is reporting that Digg will add podcasting and other new features today on it’s 2nd birthday. Happy Birthday Digg!

My only concern is that since podcasting has a higher rate of “user-generated” content, wouldn’t this category be more susceptible to gaming?

Google Changing Monetization Strategy?

Robert Scoble had an interesting post on this issue. I’ve got to ask one question though Robert! In Naked Conversations, Robert talks about how you should point to your competitors and even talking positively about them. How is a likely non-relevant ad on a map on your web site more of a threat than you saying “company x does well with blah-blah”? I don’t get the logic here, am I missing something?

My friend Neil Patel

Neil Patel responded to Andy Beal’s call out to learn about “5 things you don’t know”. I’ll add something you don’t know about Neil Patel. Since I think we are up to #6, I get to do #7!!!

7) Neil drank while underage at a Google party in Chicago in 2005 that he wasn’t even invited to! (you got to love the resourcefulness)

OK, I know a few other things, but I’m not telling!

Duplicate Content (again)

Last week, I talked about how duplicate content was a big issue at the SES Chicago conference.

Robert Scoble is up in arms about how some of this is handled. How is this splogger monetizing his traffic? Adsense does not appear present which can be a root cause.

I disagree with Robert that filtering and retooling web search for every new type of splog is the way to go. I do think that finding and cutting off monetization methods is the best long-term solutions. This, of course, will not be easy.

UPDATE: Someone pointed out that this splog is a linking authority splog, interesting concept.

My Recent Article in Website Magazine

Some of you may find my recent article, “How to Become a Conference and Networking Influencer“. Includes quotes from Jeffery Meshel and Keith Ferrazzi. If you have other tips you’d like to add, please leave a comment, I’m sure others would like to hear them.