B. L. Ochman points out why most corporations shouldn’t blog. Of course, this is why blogging is so much about change management and customer experience!
Month: April 2007
Chicago Green Festival Summary
The Chicago Green Festival 2007 was held this past weekend. I went mainly to explore but I learned about new things.
Bill Becker from Chicago based Aerotectures, gave a really interesting talk that explained his unique urban wind energy solution. There is a Youtube video that explains the basic highlights of his 45 minute talk:
Chris O’Brien’s talk about the history of local economies and craft brewing of beer was simply fascinating! The festival says the audio will be up on this site. I hope to be able to read his book “Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World” (the search engine community will be surprised to learn that David Naylor is not a co-author of how to drink beer and save the world)!!!
It’s clear that there were some really interesting bloggers in the crowd. It would have been great to meet them, the festival should have a blogging page or wiki at future events so that people who are interested in certain issues can meet up. A focus on concentrating the discussions and interaction on certainly distinct pockets of interest. It’s also clear that the Green Building, solar/wind energy sessions were more popular than they were expecting. It would be interesting to learn if that means these concepts are more popular in the Midwest?
Lastly, I was only there on Saturday. But regardless of your political views, the story of how Dennis Kucinich met his wife is really heartwarming and I became aware of it due to the coverage of his speech.
Chicago Transit Authority – CTA Bus Tracker
The Chicago Transit Authority announced that they were going to implement this system wide.The CTA Bus Tracker site is located here. No word on how it will be integrated or word on how it will be optimized for mobile web sites. Why stop at buses, why not do the trains too?
Related CTA issues, why not extend the #20 “Northeast loop” to be 24/7 with all the new residences near the Aon building area?
Fixing Akismet Comment False Positives
Robert Scoble posted today about Akismet and the spam filtering features that save him time. But there are times those misclassified posts can cause escalation of a discussion into something more accusatory like deleting comments – that is not fun. For example, Danny Sullivan posting comments on Blake Ross’ blog late last year and the perception that Danny’s comment had been deleted.
I had a similar problem to Danny recently that I was able to fix using the unique learning features of Akismet.
If you are a WordPress blogger and you are having the problem of Akismet treating your comments as spam, please try following the following steps:
1. Go to your blog on the computer that you have had the problems posting comments
2. Make certain that you are signed out of your admin panel
3. Find a post on your blog and post several comments with your email and URL manually the way you would on another person’s blog
4. Login to your WordPress admin panel and mark the “spam” comments then “de-mark spam comments”
5. Repeat steps 1-4 above periodically until the comments stop being marked as spam
I hope that some people currently having this problem find this potential solution to be as helpful to them as it was for me. If you can think of someone who has this problem who is also a WordPress blogger, please pass this post on to them.
Setting up Your Blog to Post to Twitter
Barry Schwartz has set up his blog to post the links directly to Twitter. Very neat. He also made a nice how to post on the subject. Barry is such a posting machine!
I’ll wait to understand his learnings and impact before trying it myself. I look forward to seeing his results on the impact after a few weeks.
Nokia N800 Convergence Product Manger Interview Victor Brilon
While at the recent CTIA conference, I met Victor Brilon and his immensely helpful Nokia publicist. We shared a dynamic conversation that was amazingly informative regarding Nokia and it’s unique ideas regarding the various types of emerging Internet convergence. The Nokia N800 is a device that is clearly “on the other side of the chasm” as Victor proudly describes it. In the time that has followed my visit to CTIA two themes have emerged regarding Nokia 1) They understand the blogosphere and see a significant event in convergence coming and are preparing for these possibilities and 2) The frame I saw when at their booth was one of company who views themselves as “more than just a device maker”. I like that point of view.
Please enjoy my attempt to recreate the magic of my first unplanned meeting with Victor via this podcast. I welcome your feedback on the discussion from yourself and others, especially in regards to your thoughts on the vision for convergence. Thanks!
Listen to the interview: Nokia_N800_Victor_Brilon
Related posts:
10 Ways The Nokia N800 Is Better Than Apple’s iPhone
Justin Dolske’s blog
N800 WOM World
CES 2007
Google Needs to Take Action on Splogs/Adsense
When researching my Dodgeball post below, I was rather disturbed by the amount of splogs in Google’s Blog Search index. Below is a screen print of a nasty scrapper splog wrapped in TONS of Google Adsense Ads. Worse it’s on a Blogger blog (Google owned), so the excuse of we don’t control the content doesn’t cut it here. During Thursday’s earnings call, I’d like to see an analyst seriously discuss this issue with Google.
More Blogger Splogs containing the term Dodgeball were in existence at the time of this post, but have now been removed.