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Every once in a while, I do a vanity check and run my name and URLs through Google. I don’t aspire to any level of Social Media Stardom, but it’s nice when someone reads my rants.

This Google gadget by Chris Anderson automates the process, and uses Google’s PageRank system to provide some metrics. I found the gadget in a Wired article called Internet Famous.

When I ran “Bill Sodeman” through that Vanity Validator gadget, I got a score of 54%.

Not bad, considering the scores I obtained for some very well-known bloggers:

• 67%: Julia Allison
• 61%: Dave Winer
• 59%: Ze Frank
• 59%: Robert Scoble
• 57%: Chris Pirillo
• 54%: Gina Trapani
• 54%: Bill Sodeman
• 47%: Cory Doctorow

But there’s room for improvement.

Advertisers in the US are growing more concerned about the planned digital television (DTV conversion in the United States on 17 February 2009. The date is carefully timed - it’s after the Super Bowl, but before the NCAA basketball tournaments.

Unfortunately for broadcasters and advertisers, the conversion comes in the middle of a sweeps month. The Nielsen Ratings service, which calculates television viewership a broad-based sample of American households, has released some surprising figures. Senior citizens seem more prepared for DTV than previously believed. Households with two or more television sets are more likely to have at least one set that is not ready for DTV, despite an endless barrage of television announcements about the conversion plan. Hispanics and African-Americans and younger households are more likely to lose their television service:

Using its ratings panel, Nielsen found that 9.4 percent of households, or roughly 10 million homes, were “completely unready” for the switch as of April 30, meaning that all their television sets would go dark next year. An additional 12.6 percent of households were partly unready.

See this New York Times article for more information.

Related pages on billso.com:

• Digital television

I’ve said it before in 2004 and 2006: email is broken. It’s a great rant topic for my 1200th blog post.

The credibility of email as a marketing medium was destroyed years ago by UCE (unsolicited commercial email or spam). Managers helped destroy email as a business tool shortly afterwards.

Students often treat email as a casual messaging tool, when college is a great opportunity to learn how to use email in an effective and professional manner. Every email user can learn to write better messages.

Help me read your email

It really helps me if the subject fields are meaningful. I get hundreds of email messages every day.

Tell me what class you’re taking. I don’t carry my class roster with me 24/7. I’ve had students email me questions about their assignment without ever mentioning which course they are taking. It’s more of a problem at the start of the term. After the first 2 or 3 weeks, I’ll remember which students are in which course.

Do you need an answer to a question? Then summarize the question in the subject line. If it’s an easy question, I can send a quick reply with my answer. If an answer will take me more time, I’ll send a reply saying so.

Are you asking me to do something for you on a deadline? Put the date in the subject line.

No fancy email

Email is a great tool for written communication, as long as the message is written in plaintext. When I get HTML-formatted email that has pretty backgrounds and fancy fonts - assuming that the message made it past my servers’ spam blockers - my reply is almost always in plaintext.

HTML is for web pages, not mail messages. The writer’s color choices might look nice to them, but these colors might render the email unreadable to a color-blind recipient.

It’s far too easy to hide web bugs and bogus code in an HTML-formatted email message. Some mobile email clients like Gmail will strip the HTML formatting before displaying the message.

I hate “reply all”

I often receive email messages from other faculty members, and the cc: and to: fields are littered with addresses. I love my colleagues, but some of them never really learned how to use the Internet or email.

Some email servers block messages with large numbers of outbound email addresses, as a courtesy to the potential recipients. If one of the recipients presses the “reply all” button, their message gets sent to the entire list. It gets annoying when their reply is something innocuous like “OK” or “I’ll be there”.

Get with the program

Most people who are sending one email message to more than 20 people should consider posting the content to a web page, an intranet, or an RSS feed.

Granted, I do use the mass email function in TurnItIn.com to remind students about assignment deadlines, or to announce a new assignment. I almost always make these announcements on billso.com, but experience has taught me that some students cannot access the web site on a regular basis.

I’m could go off on a rant, but most of my students do use email effectively. These articles from about.com and Microsoft have some great tips for those who are interested.

Last night’s City Council vote on the mass transit project did end up in a deadlock, as I indicated might happen. See the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for articles about last night’s meeting, and see my comments from yesterday in this article on billso.com

Without Council chair Barbara Marshall, who missed the meeting because of a “family emergency”, the council was split 4-4 between rail and buses. Council members have scheduled another vote for next week to either approve all three technologies or recommend nothing. In either case, the mayor will make the final call. He has always favored steel-on-steel rail.

Mayor moves ahead

In a press conference after the nine-hour council meeting, Mayor Mufi Hannemann announced his decision:

“It’s clear that the City Council is in a state of chaos and confusion… I’ve directed my director of transportation services to begin inserting steel-on-steel as the technology in the draft environmental impact statement.”

The deal that created the special advisory panel stipulated that if the council did not select a specific technology, the panel’s section would prevail. The panel recommended steel-on-steel rail by a 4-1 vote.

Too little, too late?

As both newspapers pointed out this morning, the Council’s vote next week is their last opportunity for input on the system’s cost, mode and noise. Barbara Marshall avoided direct blame for the rail vs. bus question by skipping the meeting.

Council member Romy Cachola continues to complain about potential noise and property value issues in his district. However, he is the council member who insisted the proposed route be shifted to his district and away from Pearl Harbor and Honolulu International Airport. The route can be shifted back, of course. THe Department of Defense and the airport would welcome an alternative to crowded parking lots and automobile gridlock.

Meanwhile, dissident council member Charles Djou is outraged that the city is buying public relations firms as part of the proposal. See this Star-Bulletin article for more details. One of these firms is led by former US Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta. He favors rail:

“There’s nothing like dependability,” Mineta said, voicing his support for rail. “There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel.”

Related posts on billso.com

• 15 April 2008: Council members discuss mass transit research
• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 20 March 2008: Like a fifth wheel
• 21 February 2008: Delhi catches monorail fever: Is Honolulu next?
• 6 February 2008: Hawaii has highest car ownership costs in the USA
• 21 June 2007: Mayor: state could pay for airport mass transit line
• 19 June 2007: City council, planners still arguing over mass transit routes, modes

According to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters, Delta and Northwest Airlines may announce a merger within the next 48 hours. The New York Daily News had a similar report yesterday. Last month’s merger attempt failed when Delta’s 6000 pilots rejected the proposal. DAL and NWA may press ahead this time, regardless of the pilots.

The merger would create the world’s largest airline. Delta and Northwest have been linked for years through code sharing and marketing agreements.

No word on what the combined airline might be named. Creating a new brand is risky and expensive. The usual pattern is for the stronger airline to provide the branding, although America West decided to adopt the US Airways brand after their merger. TWA didn’t exist for very long after its merger with American.

Both airlines fly into Honolulu. In this morning’s Honolulu Advertiser, there’s a long front page article about a possible reduction in the airport’s modernization plans. Honolulu needs a better airport. The current facility wasn’t built to handle long lines of passengers in the security screening areas. Moving sidewalks, more buses and a train system are key success factors for large international airports. No one flies to Honolulu to visit the airport, of course, but the airport is the first and last thing that visitors to Honolulu will see before they leave the state.

Sure, there’s a 14% dip in passenger seats after Aloha and ATA closed down. Other airlines will fill the gap. Hawaiian and United have already added flights. I’d expect a combined DAL-NWA would follow suit.

Related posts on billso.com

• 8 April 2008: Aloha cargo flights disrupted - is Hawaii’s economy next?
• 3 April 2008: ATA Airlines shuts down
• 2 April 2008: Aloha cargo sale and neighbor island mail service in jeopardy
• 2 April 2008: Still on track?
• 30 March 2008: Aloha Airlines shuts down