/adam Nuggets, bits, bobs, and other unseemingly disconnected dots.

This is the coolest app yet i’ve seen for the iphone. I’ve been stalling on getting my 3GS, but now i have to.

This is whacked… multi-touch sillyness for all your twitter obsessive needs…

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2009/tc2009047_031301.htm?chan=rss_topEmailedStories_ssi_5

Ok… my voice over is pretty silly on this one, but without it, it was going to be pretty boring to see just a long line of impatient people who were missing the first series of sessions, because they were stuck in line to get their badges. Badges.. we don’t need no stinkin’ badges is what they must have been thinking. There’s a punchline at the end, i couldn’t have scripted any better.

taser meeting

I was in Scottsdale, AZ this week, and as i walked out of the lobby of the hotel, there was this sign. I thought hard about taking a quick detour, and learning all about the latest in tasering techniques. Just didn’t quite make it.

recovery.gov

UPDATE: recovery.gov removed its robots.txt file, and opened the site to crawling within three hours of the story. (Government response time gets a +1).

Ok, I’m pretty surprised, but the new Obama administration and “robots.txt” are mentioned in the same article. Given that I work for a digital marketing agency who’s roots are in search engine optimization, I can’t say I ever expected to see those two items in the same article on CNet. But there it is. Especially given Eric Schmidt’s ties to Obama, it will be Interesting to see if things change on recovery.gov – to create a site with greater visibility.

I spoke at the AlwaysOn OnMedia Conference at the Ritz-Carlton in NYC this week. I was on a panel called Beyond Behavioral Targeting”, which was a good deal of fun. You can check out a summary by the moderator of the panel here.

I’m speaking on a panel this Wednesday (Nov 5th, 2008) at Ad:Tech. The topic is search and social synergy, and i think it should be a good one. It’s being moderated by Dana Todd, CMO, Newsforce, Inc. and includes:

• Mike Grehan, Global KDM Officer, Acronym Media
• Julie Sun, Senior Manager, SEO, MTV Digital Media
• Danny Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, SearchEngineLand.com
• and me, Chief Strategy Officer, iCrossing

We’ll be talking mostly about how the relationship between social media content and search visibility. How the two interrelate, which kinds of social media are more visible than others, and more. You can read the full panel description on the Ad:Tech page for the panel. Looking forward to it. If you’re attending, come to the panel – and feel free to say hi.

Please fix the iphone

More and more we see social media migrating from being a bolt-on, campaign-like thing that brands engage in, to something a bit more integrated, a bit more substantial. Case in point, and much talked about is Dell’s IdeaStorm site. Ideastorm is place for Dell customers to make suggestions about product improvements they’d like. In Digg fashion, other people can vote those ideas up or down, and the most popular ideas rise to the top. Yes, its a seperate site. What I mean by integrated, is that Dell owns this site, and it’s people monitor the site, and update the status of each suggestion as they try to act against them. “What?” you say, “Dell actually listens to its customers and makes changes and enhancements to products based on what people post and vote on? How could that be? How could just a big company actually listen that well?” Exactly. This is real social media.

Interestingly, Apple is having this done to them, or for them. Pleasefixtheiphone.com is a site not owned or managed by Apple. It is owned and managed by some devout iPhone fans, who just wanted to see the phone made better. They turned to an Ideastorm-type model, and to the iPhone-using community to help make that happen. Currently, they have over 800 ideas, and over 100,000 votes on those ideas. Do you think Apple should be listening? My suggestion: Apple should launch their own (or partner or buy) pleasefixtheiphone as an installable iPhone app, available on the app store, and then take the ongoing voting and feedback into consideration.

I know Apple is famously bucking the “open” and “social” trends… and yet we love them because the products are just so darn good. But looking at the wishes… add Flash, make the Email app rotate-able so i can type in the landscape keyboard… are all realistic features that shouldn’t be hard, and should make users even more evangelical about the product and the brand.