Month: July 2007

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Potential Chicago Cab Strike July 31 – How to Get to adtech(ad:tech) via CTA

With today’s possible cab strike in Chicago, I thought it would be a good idea to post CTA bus options to arrive at the west end of Navy Pier. Please note that even with these bus options, it is a10 minute walk to the east end of Navy Pier where the Festival Hall is located. I highly suggest taking the bus instead of walking the entire distance and wish the actually CTA stopped at Navy Pier East Entrance #2. Please check out my current question on Yahoo! Answers regarding Navy Pier.

Here are some tips on how to navigate via CTA to Navy Pier. Cash fare on the CTA is currently $2. This is a pdf map of the areas described below.

From the Sheraton: the #29, #65 and #124 buses stop in front of the Sheraton on Illinois and terminate and 600 East Grand Avenue, this will save you three blocks of walking.

The number#124 bus starts in the West Loop at Union Station, Ogilvie Transportation Center and terminates at 600 East Grand Avenue.

If traveling from Midway Airport, take the Orange line to Roosevelt, walk down the stairs and travel one block west to State Street. Take the#29 State bus northbound to 600 East Grand Avenue.

If traveling from O’hare Airport, take the blue line to Monroe, walk up the stairs, then walk one block east to State Street. Take the#29 State bus northbound to 600 East Grand Avenue.

For those staying at a hotel a bit further north, the #66 bus travels east on Chicago Avenue, then south on Fairbanks to Grand to 600 East Grand Avenue.

For those of you attending ad:tech, I have the following high level networking objectives and look forward to speaking with you (please drop me an email contained on my Bio page):

1) I’m seeking anyone with senior contacts at major search engines

2) Anyone with ideas or connections to publishers, advertisers or investors regarding mobile search and mobile advertising.

Have a great show!

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Blogher 2007 is Happening Now!

I’m here at Blogher (blogher07) in Chicago to network with the awesome people, I’m especially interested meeting people working in the mobile search marketing start ups and traditional search engines like Ask, MSN/Live and Yahoo!

I’ve already met some fun and compassionate people! This conference is unique to me in that it’s not so much about me learning about new online marketing or blogging techniques. It’s about learning about different points of view of looking at the world. There are about 800 people here and it’s a bit overwhelming in terms of effective and targeted networking. But everyone is very open – I wish women everywhere communicated to me in the frank straightforward manner that I’m experiencing here.

I’m sitting in a session on branding. Many of the people I know in the room are IM’ing me. Here is a nice summary of the session from Felicia Sullivan.

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Wordcamp 2007 Future State Wishlist for WordPress 2.3

The 2nd annual Wordcamp, a gathering of WordPress users, will take place this weekend in San Francisco! The agenda looks quite interesting and I wish I could be there amongst some of the Internet marketing speakers, not blithering idiot blog readers. It’s awesome that every business keynote speaker is a WordPress user! I hope some folks will come here and post live stream URL’s Saturday morning so folks can tune in.

It’s also interesting to note that Google blog search shows 583 posts on this while Technorati shows 541. You might want to check out my post on “The Death of Blog Search” and politely encourage Mr. Matt Cutts to put the blog search on the home page of Google. 😀

I do think the conference falls short on what is truly needed – a long, heart to heart conversation about he overall health of WordPress platform and it’s future direction and stability, driven more by usability and stability needs than it is at present.

So without further delay I say hello to my fellow WordPress users and present my WordPress wish list for the era between now and the next Wordcamp in 2008 – I strongly encourage blogosphere discussion of the current state of self-hosted WordPress and desired future state of WordPress.org.

Current state of self-hosted WordPress:

– Lack of stability/testing of newly released versions – over the past year, see WordPress (version 2.0.6) and plugins see Podpress (version 7.7) have been released to the user community that broke feedburner feeds.

– Lack of testing of security in new WordPress versions – See WordPress 2.1.1 dangerous, Upgrade to 2.1.2

– Constant changes in WordPress’ core structure are frequently not backward compatible with old plugins. This often causes immediate and time consuming break downs and make upgrading WordPress a major chore instead of the low maintenance joy that it should be. (I’m presently running WordPress 2.1.3 because Podpress apparently has several conflicts with WordPress version 2.2.1 in an effort to prevent this)

Proposed self-hosted WordPress User Bill of Rights:

– As a WordPress self-hosted user we both respect and understand your time is valuable and that you deserve to have a low maintenance experience when installing plugins or upgrading versions and that the WordPress open source community should prioritize changes based on user suggestions based on functionality.

– Users have a right to expect fully tested software before release and appreciate those efforts greatly. We realize and hope for less frequent, more stable releases are strongly preferred as more and more WordPress users utilize WordPress for mission critical functions and do not have time to debug these items.

How do I suggest we get to this desired future state and what’s on my wishlist?

– Make releasing stable versions with coordinated releases of all plugins a priority for each new release. Maybe even develop a robust testing checklist?

– Integrate popular plugins into the core functionality of WordPress to prevent the above problem. Ideally, I’d love to be able to post podcasts, videos (especially Youtube) , pictures and other media without reposts and glitches. Plugins I’d like to see integrated include Viper’s Video Tags, Podpress, Trackback Validator 0.7.1 and Feedburner Feed Replacement 2.2

– Make RSS feed compatibility – images, videos and formating an area of focus. I have one friend whose images do not consistently show up and I had a major formatting problem for a long period of time due to the Podpress 7.7 feed problem of which I was not aware.

– A WordPress dashboard allowing people to check if all plugins currently in use are safe for the latest version based on a centralized database of reports of issues.

– Make it so trackbacks are standard in all WordPress themes.

These are my main areas of concern, I’m sure you can think of others that I may of left out, but I just wanted to post my top few items. Again, I’d like to hear from others on their desires for the future of the customer experience and advancement of WordPress.

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Techcocktail 5 John Barleycorn Wrigleyville Pictures

It was great to see everyone last week at Techcocktail 5 in Chicago. Michael Carruth from Digital Bootcamp sent me some really cool pictures of me with Chris Hill from Perkspot (first picture) and Aza Raskin from Humanized so I thought I’d share them with you. Big thanks to Dan Ushman from Midphase Web Hosting for generously sponsoring both this event and the recent Barcamp Chicago where Matt McCall recently spoke on venture capital tips.

See you around town sometime soon!

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Post an MBA Alumni Job or Career Posting

Why post that experienced level Top 10 MBA business school or retained search opportunity to the masses when you could contact already well connected innovative thought leaders in Internet, search engines, mobile commerce, investment management, private equity and venture capital directly via the blogosphere?

Thanks for dropping by via your search engine of choice.

Comments on this post are now closed due to job spam. You may contact David with your MBA level jobs and he’s happy to talk to you about them.