billso.com

As I mentioned in my billso.com article from 2 May 2008, if you are carrying high value items on your airline journey, do not check them with your baggage. Carry the items with you on the airplane.

Matt Mullenweg, the man behind WordPress, learned this lesson the hard way last week when he lost several high-end cameras and lenses on a US Airways flight.

Image courtesy of xrrr through a Creative Commons license.

Related posts on billso.com

• 15 May 2008: Don’t check cameras in your luggage
• 2 May 2008: Never check your computer on a plane
• 11 March 2008: Using Facebook as a lost-and-found department
• 3 March 2008: Building the perfect laptop
• 30 September 2006: Don’t steal my laptop!
• 28 June 2003: Where’s my luggage?

From the Associated Press via Sports Illustrated and Forbes: National Football League commissioner Roger Goddell has announced that the league will enact and enforce tougher regulations regarding technology and spying for the 2008 season. The NFL has allowed radios for offensive play-calling since 1994, but mobile computer and video technology have advanced far faster than the league’s regulations ever anticipated.

The three-time NFL champion New England Patriots have been the subject of intense scrutiny after a staff member was caught videotaping defensive coaching signals during the team’s 2007 season opener. The NFL and Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) are each investigating multiple allegations that the Patriots had been videotaping opposing teams since coach Bill Belichick was hired in 2000.

Former Patriots employee Matt Walsh recently sent 8 video tapes of Patriots opponents to the NFL office for analysis. According to Mike Fish of ESPN, at least one tape included offensive coaches from another team. Previously, it was believed that the Patriots only taped defensive coaches.

What about the FCC?

Most of the discussions I have read about the so-called Spygate scandal have missed an important legal point. The NFL depends upon large multi-billion dollar contracts from US television networks for a significant portion of the league’s revenue and market power. Every regular-season and post-season game is televised. The NFL also owns and operates its own television network, which carries 8 regular season games, many pre-season games, and a 24/7 stream of interviews, documentaries, replays and other NFL content. See this article from CBS Sports for more details.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has specific regulations on how sports may be broadcast in the United States. One key rule is that live televised sporting events must be “free of artifice”. In other words, games cannot be rigged or fixed in any way.

This is one reason that professional wrestling broadcasts use a great deal of taped and edited content. Pro wrestling is marketed as , not a sporting event.

“When we met with [the] commissioner, the discussion was how we proceed in an era when technology is expanding exponentially,” Indianapolis Colts president Bill Polian said. “The question is how do we keep on top of that. This is far less about what happened in the past and how we deal with it in the future.”

Here’s a video and some information about recovering data from hard drives, courtesy of the Data Recovery Group.

From Wired: one of the founders of ICanHasCheezburger.com has revealed her identity, as part of the annual ROFLcon festivities in Cambridge, Massachusetts this weekend:

Until this weekend, [Kari] Unebasami had always elected to remain anonymous, preferring to operate under the pseudonym Tofuburger. “We were getting all these threats from users at [forum] 4chan,” she explained, referring to 4chan’s attempts to claim the cat macro phenomenon. “I didn’t know how seriously to take them. But I’m officially ‘out’ now, and ready to embrace everything.”

Kari and her partners, co-founder Eric Nakagawa and CEO Ben Huh, are preparing an LOLcats book for the holiday season, so her identity would have been revealed on Amazon.com anyway. A quick Google search reveals more information about Kari Unebasami, including her previous employer (Pacific Basin Communications) her Amazon profile, her TechHui profile, and this picture from MidWeek’s night life section.

Kari is from Honolulu. I expect the Star-Bulletin and Advertiser will run the usual “local makes good” stories when they get the time.

As business blogging becomes a key success factor in some industries, business bloggers sometimes face pressure to produce excellent metrics right from the start. Their managers sometimes try shortcuts to success, only to find that the online community can see through these tricks.

SEO 2.0 has posted an excellent list of 10 things a business blog should not do. These include:

Number 1) Writing under an assumed name. I use an old email address (billso) for my domain name (billso.com). My real name is listed on my about page.

Number 9) Requiring employees to read, rank and promote the blog. I do not require my employees or students to comment or rank my blog articles. I do assign blog articles for my students to read with their assignments. My blog articles provide up-to-date examples that my course textbooks cannot provide.

Building reputation and authority

SEO is an acronym that means search engine optimization. There are thousands of blogs and online businesses that offer advice on getting more advertising revenue, more readers and a higher Google rank.

Many bloggers get caught up in revenue generation, as I mentioned in my billso.com article of 27 March 2008. It’s much more difficult to build a blog’s reputation and authority. These attributes can be measured by counting the number and kinds of inbound links to a blog, a blog’s search engine ranking, and quotes in the mainstream media.

For readers, reputation and authority are difficult concepts. It takes little effort to lose these attributes. SEO Chicks has some more good examples of what not to do with a business blog. It’s a bad idea to set up a flog, especially in the United Kingdom:

A ‘flog’ is a fake blog usually created by a PR or online marketing firm for the purpose of falsely representing themselves as a consumer, usually for the purposes of creating a buzz around a specific product or brand. Sometimes this is done as a brand or online reputation management activity.

There’s usually hell to pay when the mainstream media or the blogosphere discovers a flog or a fake.

Related posts on billso.com

• 8 April 2008: Blogging and teaching
• 5 April 2008: Blogging can kill you
• 27 March 2008: Blogging as a business model
• 14 March 2008: Social media in action
• 25 February 2008: Social Media 101
• 11 June 2007: Blogging for a living