John Edwards Campaign Claims Listening

Ryan M from the John Edwards campaign claims that the campaign is listening to the blogosphere / social media. Sorry Ryan, but the facts speak otherwise. On January 6th, 2007, I posted “How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution”. There was a listing of the major candidates in one section of the post ”Scoble’s posts made me think how can we truly integrate social media into campaigns(and after the election). John Edwards said in his interview with Scoble that we need “a bottom up democracy.” It’s an amazing challenge requiring change in our government not seen in over a generation. The campaigns for President of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrinch, Frank Keating, Chuck Hagel, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Mitt Romney and Tommy Thompson would be wise not to adopt this as a tactic but as a way to redesign government’s interaction with our citizens. Democrat or Republican is not the issue here.”

The post also stated the following “This is a post on how to use social media to improve accountability in political campaign. As such I’d like to learn which Presidential campaigns are actively monitoring the blogosphere. Please leave a comment if you have an official association with one of these candidates and feel free to discuss this post in your own communities.”

Not only did John Edwards campaign not leave a response, sadly no campaign checked in. A simple RSS alert on the candidates name would have caught this post, yet no campaign did. I was simply looking for affirmation that campaigns were truly listening to the blogosphere / social media consistently. Unfortunately, the campaigns aren’t monitoring the whole blogosphere on a consistent basis yet.  


Dell, Starting to Truly Listen

When Dell launched their blog, I left a comment that was deleted (apparently by the PR firm that originally launched it) and I disagreed with those that said Dell was doing a good job with the blog.

Fast forward several months. My Dell Dimension 9150, bought last June, was recently having a problem with the keyboard space bar sticking (they should look into this spacebar failure as it should not occur on a new PC). I left a comment on the Dell blog about the issue. The comment was approved. Neil from Dell called me, selected a new keyboard and had it shipped out right away! During the conversation, Neil also took the time to listen to my past concerns and shipping preferences taking notes as we talked. The keyboard was received two days later.

When combined with Michael Dell meeting with bloggers directly at CES, I can see Dell is trying hard to change. An organization that large can’t change everything in a day, but they are trying to change the priorities. The evidence is now strong that Dell is starting to learn to listen to customers, they should keep listening and innovating from that listening.


Major Ice Storm Predicted from Dallas Northeast to Saint Louis

If you know anyone in a line from roughly Dallas to Saint Louis - please IMMEDIATELY contact them to rush their preparations to completion. If this occurs as predicted, this will be a major event that will paralyze the region for several days, if not weeks. Worse, people will be in an almost complete news blackout as to what is going on.

How nasty can an ice storm be? Just look at these power towers that collapsed under the weight of the ice in Quebec in 1998! Power was not restored fully for months.

You rarely see a more frightening weather forecast than this one from the NWS Dallas/Fort Worth (I truly hope that it’s wrong):

Today: Periods of freezing rain. Some thunder is also possible. High near 31. North northwest wind between 10 and 15 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. Total daytime ice accumulation of 0.2 to 0.4 of an inch possible.

Tonight: Periods of freezing rain, mainly after midnight. Some thunder is also possible. Low around 31. North northeast wind around 10 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New ice accumulation of 0.5 to 0.7 of an inch possible.

Sunday: Periods of freezing rain. Some thunder is also possible. High near 31. North northeast wind between 10 and 15 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New ice accumulation of 0.5 to 0.7 of an inch possible.

Sunday Night: Freezing rain and sleet likely. Cloudy, with a low around 24. North northwest wind between 15 and 20 mph, with gusts as high as 30 mph. Chance of precipitation is 60%.

Preepare for the worst, hope for the best.


Cisco’s iPhone Trademark Post

If what they are saying is true, that this was not about money but an attempt to parter, Apple’s actions are surprising. Why would you launch a product publicly without having an issue like this resolved?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Props to Cisco for posting about this in non-lawyer speak.


“CTA riders are in for a rail mess” per Chicago Tribune

The CTA is creating a real mess with it’s rebuilding of the north side L tracks.

They are planning a severe reduction in service during peak hours. It can barely operate now in a satisfactory fashion, how can the CTA honestly say your travel time may double and not offer alternatives? Where are the increases in:

1) Non-peak service?

2) Clark, Halsted, Ashland and Western buses?

3) Extra shuttle bus service to get people to Lake Shore Drive express buses? Or buses that go from certain stops to downtown to take pressure off the trains?

To not plan alternatives is both irresponsible and shows the complete lack of customer service focus. Why haven’t the alderman of these wards demanded a better alternative plan? Why didn’t the CTA think of this themselves.


Gmail Allowing Spammer Mass Usage

Yesterday I put a few items on Craigslist. This morning I had considerable spam. What is surprising about that is that all of it was from Gmail accounts. Doesn’t Google have controls that prevent mass emails from being sent from Gmail?


iPhone

Why not 3G now?


Bill Hanekamp talk about Microsite.com

Jason Jacobson at the Chicagoland Entreprenuership Center invited me to see a presentation on Microsite’s this morning by Bill Hanekamp. I left the conversation believing that microsites are an underutilized tool that help enable potentially viral and social media content. They are underutilized most in the B2B world where you do some interesting things to build traction with prospects of long-sales cycle and complex products and services.

Thanks for inviting me Jason!


Yahoo! Unveils OneSearch - New Version of Go for Mobile

See the details here. If Ojas Rege would like elaborate in an interview on this blog, it would be welcomed. Thanks!


Fred Wilson Dislikes the Techcrunch Dead Pool - Too Bad!!!

Fred Wilson doesn’t like the Dead Pool over at Techcrunch.

A friend of mine communicated a better idea for him and other venture capitalists. Why not spend more time looking at original ideas - real detailed business plans with actual revenue models? The dead pool would be a lot smaller if people did hard work instead of chasing “existing businesses” which are little more than a web site with some content. So why not spend more time looking early stage companies that have real, independent, revenue producing business models with strong strategy? You’ll find your industry default rate will go down. Don’t know where to find these fledgling companies? Just ask me (my referral fees are quite reasonable).


Banana Republic

I recently had an issue with an experience with Banana Republic (a division of the Gap). While they were nice enough to send me a gift card for my inconvenience, I was surprised that the letter sent with it wasn’t personalized describing the measures they would be taking to prevent it from occurring with another Banana Republic customer in the future.


Education is Becoming Prepared - Is Your Hiring Process?

From Page 52 of Time, in an article about education, December 18th, 2006: “Jobs in the new economy-the ones that won’t get outsourced or automated-”put an enormous premium on creative and innovative skills, seeing patterns where other people see only chaos,” says Marc Tucker , an author of the skills-commission report and president of the National Center on Education and the Economy.

It’s interdisciplinary combinations-design and technology, mathematics and art-”that produce Youtube and Google” , says Thomas Friedman, the best selling author of The World Is Flat.

Yet human resources, hiring managers, executive recruiters, candidate sourcers, chief marketing officers and  chief financial officers haven’t yet mastered the art of finding this skill set of thought leaders seeing big picture patterns and seek out one dimensional candidates with “experience”.

What has to happen to integrate these skills into a recruiting and hiring mindset of what is this person capable of rather than a limiting belief frame of compliance? A discussion of how to recruit these types of skills more proactively is certainly welcome in 2007!


Technology Evangelist Launches Mobile Complaint Site

Ed Kohler wants you to know that they now have a mobile complaint site.


CES update

Robert Scoble held a blogger lunch with Bill Gates at the Consumer Electronics Show, the video can be viewed below and takes 42 minutes to view - I tried to embed it but that link text from Podtech doesn’t seem to be working.

Ed Kohler from Technology Evangelist wants to hear your questions about CES.


Helpful Wordpress Tip + 7 Wishlist Items + 2.0.6 Released + Feedburner Related Bug

Wordpress 2.0.6 released! As many of you are aware, I recently struggled with a Wordpress problem that prevented me from sending outbound trackbacks. Due to my good friend Stephan Spencer’s help, I was able to finally locate a problem which dozens of other people had tried to locate but could not.

What was this problem? It turned out to be quite simple, I had a dead pinging URL entry in my Options>Writing>Update Services entry which caused the posting process to bog down. It appears the outbound ping trackback is behind Options>Writing>Update Services pings in the order of the execution and therefore the outbound trackback never was making it out (this is my theory). I’d urge Wordpress to investigate this and see if it would be possible to reorder this so the outbound trackback was sent even if there was a dead ping entry in Options>Writing>Update Services. If you are having trouble sending an outbound trackback remove everything in the Options>Writing>Update Services try to see if that works. If it does, you have a bad entry in Options>Writing>Update Services needing removal.

My current Wordpress wishlist:

1. Test your code fully before releasing a new version please. There was a significant glitch with Feedburner.

2. Start to incorporate major plugins (Feedburner, Podpress, Trackback Validator, Viper’s Video Quicktags, etc) into the core software functionality. If Feedburner and other major plugins were incorporated into testing, the problem above would not have occurred.

3. In my last wishlist in August, I posted the following: “I’d like all of the funtionality of being hosted on wordpress.org - when I signed up I did not know of these differences and quite frankly it’s a disappointment as I want my own domain. I hope you seriously listen to this. To get corporate users to adopt Wordpress this would pretty much be mandatory!” My wish has not come true yet.

4. Make eliminating Askimet “False Positives” a top priority. It has the potential to create serious problems in the blogosphere.

5. Create a solution for the Options>Writing>Update Services issue so that no Wordpress user ever has to deal with the issue I dealt with.

6. Release 2.0.7 and announce what steps you will take to prevent a version with a bug being released again. please show us your innovative learning culture is focused on the customer experience.

7. I hope that Wordpress chooses to actively listen and acknowledge known concerns and post future wishlists transparently on their blog in the future for community feedback.

Thank you for listening, I welcome additions and expansion of this list and the creation of happy bloggers everywhere!

UPDATE: Item 8 - Have embedded video work with WSYWIG editor without conflict!


Podtech A Few Things That Need Adjustment

I listened to some great Podtech shows this morning by Jennifer Jones and Kamla Bhatt. There is no email contact information for either person on the site at this time. Especially considering Jennifer Jones runs one of the verticals on the top of the site this is surprising as I’d like to reach out to her.

On another front, I know sound volume normalization can be challenging, but some reasonable range should be a goal. Especially with the feature that starts to play a new podcast when you are done! I’d urge Robert Scoble and others at Podtech to try improve in this arena.

Lastly, I’m confused by some of the offerings on the about page. It states:

PodTech’s suite of morecasting™ services help companies reach targeted audiences of influencers and strengthen customer relationships.
PodTech delivers a complete package of customized social media services including:

What exactly is meant by a “blogging campaigns”? Is this outsourcing and helping with other entities blogs? I think this is what they mean. But I could see where someone could read this as blogging campaigns on Podtech itself, which would just be PayPerPost. The page should be more clear about what this service is so that it is not misinterpreted!

Overall, Podtech is becoming a good resource, with these small changes it will become even better.


TiE Global Chairman Apurv Bagri Interviewed on Podtech

The Indus Entrepreneurs, better known by its acronym TiE, hold great events here in Chicago on a regular basis.

I’ve not yet integrated with it’s global community however as (to the best of my knowledge) the organization does not have a global message board. I would love to interact with the people of TiE internationally (hey, drop me a note if you read this!) as it is a great community.

Podtech’s Kamla Bhatt interviews TiE Global Chairman Apurv Bagri here.


How to Forge a New American Mandate Via Social Media Political Revolution

Robert Scoble’s political journey with John Edwards recently bought back memories of when I once worked on a Presidential primary campaign in 1992. It’s hard and one of the most tiring things you could ever volunteer to be a part of! Regardless of your political beliefs (I’m generally a politically interested independent issues driven voter), you can’t help but gain respect for anyone willing to put themselves through the grueling election process once you’ve seen it up close. Scoble’s posts made me think how can we truly integrate social media into campaigns(and after the election). John Edwards said in his interview with Scoble that we need “a bottom up democracy.” It’s an amazing challenge requiring change in our government not seen in over a generation. The campaigns for President of John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Tom Vilsack, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrinch, Frank Keating, Chuck Hagel, Mike Huckabee, George Pataki, Mitt Romney and Tommy Thompson would be wise not to adopt this as a tactic but as a way to redesign government’s interaction with our citizens. Democrat or Republican is not the issue here. Oddly it came at a time where another conversation begged to be mashed up with it, so here it goes:

Robert Scoble stated: “As for how bloggers can play in this process? I think we just are going to come up short in coverage of campaigns when compared to the mainstream press.” I agree with almost all of what Robert did on the trip (based on what I’ve seen so far). That said, I think Robert had his PodTech/video blogging hat on a little too tightly here when making this statement that covered his listening ears!
Seperately, Karl Long in his debunking of “Social Media is Dead” stated: “To me the difference between social media and “the media” or “big media” is control and influence. Social media is primarily controlled by the participants, by the viewers, readers, listeners etc. where as traditional media is primarily controlled by an organization with a narrower agenda like a corporation, or a political party.”

So how do we build a mandate to create government listening via social media to take election control out of the hands of money and the media elite? Likely through a series of incremental steps towards a social media society. Call it “average Joe accountability politics” (Open to better names if you’d like).

In Paul Tsongas’ 1992 campaign book, “A Call to Economic Arms: Forging A New American Mandate”, a pre-Internet era publication, still stands as one of the most comprehensive documents a Presidential candidate has ever published about what they would actually try to achieve after being elected. I urge you to familiarize yourself with this document as it A) is amazingly relevant after 15 years (many of the problems remain) and B) Paul argues in the document that a mandate is necessary for a new President to press through a change agenda.

The end of that 72 page document contained the following which serves as a platform for empowering the masses to have their voice heard. It serves as a blueprint for innovation minus the blogs and social media tools of today:

We will be what our culture empowers us to be.

To strengthen our common culture must be our common mission. Recognition of, and dedication to, that mission is the mandate of our leadership. It doesn’t lend itself to ten point programs and quarterly reviews. It will be a discussion that will never end. It should never end. The journey to renew America’s spiritual base will take us back through our history to harvest the wisdom of that history.

We will revisit our ancestors’ thinking and learn once again to pay homage to the basic values that made America. Those values, long since articulated, will then serve as our safe passage to the future.

In our collective veins flows the blood of those who crossed the Bering Land bridge. Of those who endured deprivation during the winter in Plymouth. Of those who suffered in the holds of slave ships and on the decks of immigrant ships. Vietnamese boat people. Hungarian freedom fighters. Salvadoran refugees. On and on.

Above all, there flows the blood of those who died for America. For our freedom. Not so we could be cynical, or uncaring or second best. But in the belief that we would be worthy of their sacrifice in how we lived our lives and how we honored our country. This is the New American Mandate.

VII. Return to Purpose

Adversity tests the character of individuals. It also tests the character of a people. We are now being challenged by outside forces that seek to erode our standard of living and by others that portend environmental and energy cataclysm. In addition, we are challenged by internal forces that are undermining the fabric of our social order.

What would our ancestors have done? Simple. They would have accepted the challenges and pushed ahead secure in the knowledge that their destiny was within their control. Avoidance was not what they were all about.

So it must be with us.

Facing our challenges forthrightly is how we honor the labors of our forebears. It is our moral imperative.

But, more importantly, it is the source of our hope. We are a blessed America. It is our will and determination that will deliver us. Let us, again, unleash the spirit of the American people and again secure our future and the future of our descendents.

Let us return to purpose.

This is a post on how to use social media to improve accountability in political campaign. As such I’d like to learn which Presidential campaigns are actively monitoring the blogosphere. Please leave a comment if you have an official association with one of these candidates and feel free to discuss this post in your own communities. Thanks!


Mobile Site Indexing Possibilities

William Slawski recently analyzed a Google patent application and discusses the implications for mobile site indexing.

Definitely worth checking out.


Askimet Comment Issues

On Monday, January 1, 2007, there was some kind of problem that classified any comment I made on a Wordpress blog (Techcrunch, Scoble, my own blog - David Dalka - Chicago GSB, etc) as spam. Yikes!

The problem seems to be fixed as of this morning but it’s disturbing to me as it’s obviously happened to others before and the process to fix it is not transparent. I don’t know whether it was my name, e-mail or domain that was a problem, the IP address didn’t appear to be the problem as I used an Internet connection on another ISP and got the same result.

Last week, this issue caused Danny Sullivan to post this regarding a conversation with Blake Ross:

“For some balance, below is the comment I added to Blake’s post. Akismet seems to have eaten it initially, as it routinely does to my comments on blog that use that system to catch comment spam [I commented about this here. Can't see it? Ironically, it was probably eaten].”

Open Issues:
1) The trouble ticket on askimet.com was not an optimal experience as I never received communication back - the concern is the feedback form itself looks like a comment form on a blog - was my trouble ticket treated as spam too?
2) I still don’t know what caused this or why it happened
3) I’m not at all confident it won’t happen again

If people like Danny Sullivan and myself are having significant trouble with this problem, imagine the frustration of the average blogger, who likely has no clue what Askimet even is let alone the organizations involved. The post by Matt Mullenweg seems to be a cop out(I hope this is not the case). False positives in any number regarding spam are simply unacceptable. They can cause frustration as a poster, they can cause also serious damage to your reputation if people wrongly think you are deleting their posts. This is an unacceptable state.

Is Wordpress listening to what customers want? I don’t know and will take a wait and see attitude. So let’s wait a month and see if this problem still exists before drawing any conclusions.


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