Why Most Corporations Should Not Blog

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!

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:

[youtube]rW9p7yBJC0U[/youtube]

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.

Earth Day 2007 - A Search Engine View

Yahoo! - The Y is a spinning windmill and the exclamation point as CFL light bulb. Speaking of those, the site 18seconds.org redirects to green.yahoo.com, a list of activities are listed here.

Google has a floating iceberg logo, if you click on it it leads to a list of relevant links.

Live.com & Ask.com - no change in page layout.

Winner for 2007 - Yahoo! with it’s many links out to activities and education. Congrats Yahoo!

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!

Nokia N800 Victor Brilon Interview [9:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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:

Blogger Splog

Google Disasterous with the Letter D

Apparently Google has considerable trouble in regards to the letter D.

First the Dmarc founders left Google.

Now Dodgeball founders, Dens Crowley and Alex Rainert (please drop me a note if you read this guys), not only have left Google but they posed for a thumbs down photo that they have posted on Flickr, a Yahoo! property. The photo already has over 26,000 views and appears to have a viral element based on the view count growth, the interesting comments on the Flickr photo and a lot of blogosphere reaction. I’m trying to imagine how frustrated someone must be to post of photo of this nature, announce new project associations and state that they are throwing a party “to celebrate our escape”.

Putting my investment management hat on, I’d like for independent analysts to be allowed on the earning call this Thursday. If allowed to do so, I’d like to ask the following question, “Why is Google having such a hard time with HR and staffing issues, whether it is regarding hiring new employees, retaining pre-IPO employees (see podcast) or integrating acquisitions? Has Laszlo Bock’s background proven not to be the right style of leadership and is it time for a change?” The “all big companies are always ineffective” is a major cop out as there are big companies that are admired and in fact some cases adored.

Ideas on what to do with Dodgeball are everywhere you look. The comments on the Flickr photo are fascinating to read. P.S. When searching for these entries on Google Blog Search I found considerable splog/spam (MFA Made for Adsense) sites - Google should work to solve that issue.

Dodgeball Founder Departure - April, 2007 post

Twitter

OK, I finally signed up for Twitter. Please feel free to add me if you’d like.

If you have any tips on how to best utilize Twitter - for networking, recruiting, driving traffic or otherwise - I welcome your contributions to the conversation.

If you are reading this and you either have no idea what Twitter is or you dismiss it, then this post from Rick Klau might be helpful to you in reframing your views.

Virgina Tech Shooting Tragedy - Potential Mobile Implications

Many times during yesterday’s unfortunate events at Virginia Tech, the problem of many of the people needing communication being in transit was discussed.

Mobile text messages(sms) and potential alerts were mentioned on numerous occasions as something that could have improved communication. While I firmly believe in the potential of mobile search and mobile communication combined with LBS to create increases in quality of life and lift ROI, yesterday also showed some limitations. Chief among these is the fact that there were numerous reports of “not being able to get through on mobile phones for hours”. Put simply, in most places, the mobile networks can’t handle everyone trying to use their phones all at once as they did during the Virginia Tech crisis yesterday and other crisis situations of the past. It appears that increased usage of Internet and mobile search services will tax existing infrastructure to it’s limits in many places and I’ve not seen heavy discussion of this issue or potential solutions.

Bleeding edge mobile technical solutions alone aren’t enough. Reliable networks are a must to make mobile search and mobile communication of the type that could have helped if utilized yesterday a reality. Let us ask the leaders of the mobile operators to make those networks a reality around the world using consistent standards that puts the customer experience first. Let’s start the process of addressing these bottlenecks now before the next crisis or surge in usage of services takes place.

Yahoo! Leveraging Flickr Assets Wisely

Today Yahoo! noticed that some photos taken at the scene of the unfortunate Blacksburg, VA (Virginia Tech) shooting tragedy were posted on Flickr and immediately gave them Yahoo! front page placement as both a slideshow (and raw photos).

It would be nice if Yahoo! used Flickr more in this manner - even when it’s not a tragedy.

Live.com Search Interview and Some Questions I Still Have

Rob Murray put up an interview with Derreck O’Connell on searchengineland.com. It was a nice interview but it didn’t get some questions asked that I’d love to know the answers to!

When will Live.com have a blog search engine product offering?

In the main Live.com index, many assert that blogs don’t receive as much weight in index as traditional sites based statistics like Hitwise data. What would you state to them?

What are you doing to limit splogs and made for advertising sites in your index? (Especially since these sites often directly benefit your competitor(s) financially)

There are other questions I have about Live.com, but they are outside the scope of what was discussed here that I wish to clarify right now.

Increase Blog Traffic With YouTube Videos

Easton Ellsworth put together a awesome post on this subject. You should check out his thoughts.

Microsoft: now about 4,500 bloggers

The figure comes from Product Manager Darren Strange. If accurate (I’d love to see a complete list), that means that about 6.3% of Microsoft’s workforce now blogs. Interesting to see the numbers continue to grow.

Wordpress 2.1 Compliant Theme - Customized

Thanks to cshel for customizing this awesome Wordpress 2.1 theme! Bill Slawski also contributed useful ideas. Neil Patel gave me a few tips as well.

Thanks to all of my other friends who contributed feedback. Hopefully this Wordpress theme will work through versions 2.1, 2.2, 2.3,2.4,2.5, etc…

March 31st is the New April 1st

Yep. Making a note to block off 48 hours in 2008.

Matt Cutts Feeling Wordpress Pain - Chapter 2

Yesterday I wrote about Matt Cutts painful Wordpress experience upgrading to Wordpress 2.1. Later in the day his blog was hacked. This once again shows that Wordpress has released vulnerable software in the live environment. When is Matt Mullenweg going to put a quality control process in place to prevent these types of issues? matt mullwenweg enables matt cutts wordpress blog hack chicago gsb