Matt Cutts Feeling Wordpress Pain

Matt Cutts upgraded to Wordpress 2.1 last night. It’s clear that it wasn’t smooth sailing - even for a tech guru like himself! When are Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider going to start taking these issues mentioned in Matt’s post and comments seriously?

Chicago Police - My Thoughts on Recent Incidents

The recent Chicago Police incidents that have been caught on tape in Chicago seem to indicate that Chicago Police are poorly managed in terms of priorities and that leads to considerable questionable activities and a lack of accountability in the ward levels to regular citizen quality of life issue concerns.

There is constant finger pointing between 44th ward alderman Tom Tunney and the 19th district Chicago Police with no accountability. While Tom Tunney is responsible for approving the overgrowth of the Clark street bar area, he has done nothing to solve the parking problems and serious quality of life issues that he has created. Then there is Mayor Daley, a mayor that is not solving Chicago’s serious economic growth problems, ultimately his offices set the culture that allows a police force to be mismanaged and overburdened with paperwork to the point they frequently don’t file complaints that citizen’s request.

While the major media blames individual police officers, they should should look much higher at the Mayor and other upper administration management, it’s time for someone to run this city in the best interest of those who live in it.

CTIA Mobile Search Panel

I will not have a blog entry on this panel. With 6 participants of various backgrounds - it wasn’t focused. The sound was also terrible. There was little flow to the conversation. The session was obviously frustrating to the audience as half of them left before it was over.

There was a minimum of three panels merged into one here - white label mobile search, LBS in conjunction mobile search and voice with mobile search. My view is that CTIA doesn’t fully appreciate the importance of mobile search yet and that the mobile search discussions during the Billboard event on Monday were of superior quality.

Lost a Stack of Business Cards

I was waiting for some folks outside of the Peabody Hotel in Orlando today and while waiting I lost a stack of about 30 business cards.

If you gave me a card today please resend your contact information.

If you know of anyone that found a bunch of business cards in this location, please have them contact me. (I’m happy to make the new networking contact).

david_dalka4gsb at yahoo com tag:ctiawireless2007

The Great Debate: Content Versus Distribution - CTIA MEL 2007

Moderator: Tom Wheeler, Managing Director, Core Capital Partners (extremely well prepared moderator - great job Tom)

Speaker #1: Jim Ryan, VP, Consumer Data Products, ATT (Cingular)

Speaker #2: Larry Shapiro, EVP Business Development, Operations, Walt Disney Internet Group

This is an amazing panel - the session is way too fast paced to blog well enough to be worthy of it’s immense quality. I think I have good audio (thank you to the kind and fine people at Roland for providing me a review copy of the Edirol R-09 last week for usage at this conference) Speaking of audio has anyone found a Youtube type service for audio serving other than yousendit or putting it on a peer to peer network? I’ll try to contact you with it if you leave me comment with a valid email address. An audience poll of this session showed 70% of the people thought there was a role for an aggregator in the process (note - an earlier poll showed the audience to be about 30% carrier folks).

ctiawireless2007 Billboard Mobile Entertainment Live 2007

CTIA Wireless 2007 - Billboard Event

I’m sitting three tables from the front left, please stop by and say hello.

Leaving for CTIA Wireless 2007

I’m interested in meeting anyone and everyone in the mobile search industry to learn about what you are up to!!! Drop me a line if you are going.

I’m still seeking a pass +1 for the LG Foo Fighters party on Tuesday.

Lastly, I’m interested in speaking with anyone who can provide me a cell phone that will actually work reliably with my Tmobile cell phone service in my current residence. You are a very special person I’ve been seeking to meet for quite some time!

nonofficial tag (why isn’t there and official tag?): citawireless2007 Orlando

Howard Tong Leaves Newegg

It appears that Howard Tong the likely mastermind of Newegg’s awesome marketing and customer experience has left Newegg and has joined USAutoparts.com as COO (as per his Linkedin profile).

I noticed this today after I was having communication difficulties with a Newegg order and tried to reach out to him and was highly surprised to find he had left the company. It will be quite interesting to see if Newegg’s service level suffers now that he has departed.

Howard if you’re reading this, I wish you the best of luck in your new role and please drop me your new contact information when you have a moment…

Pet Food Recall Causes Surge in Searches for Related Items

Yahoo! released some fascinating pet food recall data in this article. It’s quite interesting to see data like this around significant news events like a pet food recall.

Mobile Advertising Network

Mobile Ad Network, it’s interesting to see the hyper competitiveness of this keyword term as it implies a push marketing channel instead of a pull channel such as mobile search. We’ve trained consumers to search for a decade now, why would they want to regress to push models instead of using true mobile search? They have been trained to pull and will eventually demand the same mobile search experience on mobile devices. Hence, while Mobile Ad Network may be a popular term today, it likely will be replaced in the future with keyword terms based on derivatives of mobile search.

Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO of mInfo Interviewed at 3GSM

Alvin Wang Graylin, CEO of mInfo, Inc., a Chinese mobile search firm, was interviewed at 3GSM 2007:

Bena Roberts podcast

Jan Kuczynski podcast

mInfo also released a 2006 mobile search results survey. The podcasts provide some insight into the China mobile search marketplace.

Strumpette Leaves an Interesting Comment

Amanda Chapel (Strumpette) left a very interesting comment over on Shel Israel’s blog (whatever the name is presently). It will be interesting to see what, if anything, Shel says in return.

Her comment (as many interesting comments do) caused me to take a closer look at her blog. I started with her bio, it’s chatty and flirty. When I learned that we use the same brand of shampoo, I felt a slight bonding, then scratched my head asking why I should even care. A little further down in her bio I got envious. Though she does not rank in the top 10 on Google for the term (yet Jeff Jarvis’ feed does - that is just so wrong), I’m jealous of the way she talks about her “perfect perky boobs“, it seems likely that if I wrote anything about the perfection of any my body parts, no matter how much truth there might be to it, I’m sure my RSS counter would likely read zero or have negative numbers the next day. So I don’t, or did I just now?

Anyway, make sure you check out her comment on this post, I find it most interesting.

CIMA Chicago March Dinner

I’d like ot thank Julie Eckert, VP of Sales from Heavy.com, for having me as their guest at the event.

The Panel consisted of:
Jory Des Jardins - BlogHer
Ed D’Onofrio - Feedburner
Bryce Emo - MySpace
Danielle Wiley - Edelman Interactive
Nick Schmidt - Vlogger and Marketing Analyst, Project Elliott

To me the most fun of the event on user generated content was watching the vivid contrast between Jory Des Jardins and Nick Schmidt, who has an amazingly candid and blunt style. Yet, they were the only pure bloggers on the panel based on what I saw, so they had that in common. Thanks to Dan Conroy from Did-it for sharing time with me as well.

Infospace Cancels JPMorgan Global Internet Conference Appearance

Infospace (INSP) was scheduled to appear at the JPMorgan Global Internet Conference today. It appears that they have canceled the appearance as the timeslot has passed and they are no longer on the schedule.

Tom Sandell, the CEO and Senior Portfolio Manager of Sandell Asset Management Corp., holder of 8.8% of Infospace, stated in a press release today that “We believe that InfoSpace shares are materially undervalued and the board and management should take immediate steps to improve that value. If the company and the board are unable or unwilling to take these steps, we think the company should be sold. As the company’s largest shareholder, our interests are directly aligned with the rest of the shareholder base in seeing value maximized and we may seek representation on the board to protect those interests.”

For more detail on Sandell’s valuation assessment, visit page 23 and 24 of this SEC pdf filing.

In your opinion, who would make good acquirers of Infospace and why do you think that?

Volvo C30 Designer Blog and More On Listening

Simon Lamarre has an interesting blog on the new Volvo C30. In it he has an fascinating post where he shows how different his interactions with the media and actual customers are in terms of their concerns and conversations. It brings up an interesting question - are cars being designed for consumers that actually purchase them or for mainstream press? Should car companies go directly to customers first? Would a car company that built cars for people by listening to blogosphere and other feedback lead to better cars and a competitive advantage for that brand?

This is certainly interesting to ponder as for me as Acura made a great car that I’ve owned for over a decade that I love and they now don’t make any models with appropriate headroom - even though they cost three times more! Based on my first experience with the Acura brand, I should have been a customer for life, but their engineers are not listening.

One more note on Volvo, as I mentioned last week they are doing so many things right at present but it’s clear that thy need to close the loop by actively listening to and acknowledging blogosphere feedback. I was surprised that they weren’t based on the other factors that I had seen in visiting the dealer.

The automobile company that figures this out will create a unique competitive advantage.

Jonathan Krackehl From Real Magic TV Reenters My Life

Jonathan Krackehl, a magician and someone I used to talk to almost everyday during the musicfrisk.com era, suddenly reentered my life today after a multiple year absence. It’s almost surreal that he enters my life again now, when music content is reemerging as an important factor again in my life. I look forward to reconnecting with him when time allows.

SXSW2007 - Wishing I Was There

But alas, I’m not at SXSW in Austin. If you aren’t either, there are some recordings here.

NIN-Trent Reznor and Viral Marketing

Trent Reznor and Peter Murphy have both long been linked as Trent credits Peter for breaking him into radio (see end of Youtube video below). Matt Cutts pointed out some of NIN’s best practices pointing to Bill Slawski’s post on Indsutrial Music Marketing. I’ll add another example. Last year, Trent and Peter toured together and did some pre-show perfomances together in various places. They were on a page where you could download them. Due to that they are now on Youtube. I post Trent singing the Bauhaus classic “Bela Lugosis Dead” and Peter Murphy’s “Strange Kind of Love” for your enjoyment.

The Consumerist Vanishes From Technorati Again

Ben Popken’s blog the Consumerist has had this problem where it is not showing up in Technorati for quite some time.

Ben writes an amazing and passionate blog with outstanding content, much of it contributed by users. Ben was quite helpful to me when my Mom had a recent Comcast problem and got me in touch with the right people to fix the problem. Stated simply, he is a blogger that cares about much more than just himself and truly cares about creating a world where the consumer is treated both fairly and with respect.

We’ve written to Technorati and they’ve in fact added his blog - but Technorati has some programming glitch that keeps dropping his blog out of their index shortly thereafter no matter how many times they add it back. Based on that brief glimpse that Ben and I saw, The Consumerist was on the verge of becoming a Technorati 100 blog. Enough is enough, Technorati needs to fix this permanently as this blog is too good and too popular not to be properly indexed by Technorati.

Chicago GSB - Nobel Prizes

I found this old “ad” from an April 1st issue of Chibus, the Chicago GSB newspapertalking about the nobel prize…I think alumni would also like to see a much higher level of service from the Chicago GSB.

chicago gsb