The conference wraps up today and I have a dilemma. I really want to go over to Universal Studios to hang out but I looked over the agenda and there are no sessions that I can say “That’s a good one to skip”. That’s the best endorsement I can give for any conference. Hopefully we’ll stick to the timeline and wrap before 4pm so I can get myself a fake plastic...

Just some random observations today: A friend of mine that works for a Fortune 500 company asked for some brainstorming on a contest: whoever comes up with the best name for the company store wins a trip for two to Europe. From my hotel I can see Vivid Entertainment (they make enough on adult films to have a building near Universal Studios), I thought “Wow, that’s right across...

Lots of stuff going on this week, but I did want to take a second to reflect on the importance of always trying to improve marketing tactics, always getting as close to 1-to-1 communication as possible. I’ve purchased from 1-800-Flowers before, because (don’t tell my wife) I look at flowers as a commodity. Granted, I do know enough about Winston Flowers in Boston (the...

Get your latest dose of 10 minutes of News, Talk, and Entertainment in the Audio Form from the newest episode of The M Show, the Best Business Podcast. In other good news David Meerman Scott’s new book is coming out, here’s the all-star list of new media folks that he’s thanked. Plenty of great reading in this list: Robert Scoble Scobleizer Adele Revella Buyer Persona Blog...

Covering the dry technical stuff first. From everything I’ve seen over the past couple of days I’m boiling widgets down into three types: Type 1: These are additions to web pages, most often tools over in the sidebar that provide some additional functionality, most often for a blog or (shudder) a MySpace page. A classic example would be a flickr widget, it grabs some photos from...

Have you ever had a day where you just can’t pull it together? Like my yesterday. The 9-5 was fine, but I was going to a meeting that night and it was one of those deals where everything went wrong. I thought I would try Route 2 instead of 95 and that meant 30 minutes lost waiting to get through a traffic light. That meant showing up late (but fortunately not late enough to look...

Some interesting discussion about widgets tonight but I’m too tired to try and wrap it all into a coherent post. You can get a good primer from today’s Marketing Over Coffee which is taking shape nicely. More tomorrow. Popularity: 1% [?]

I felt like I slipped into an alternate universe this morning when Chris Pirillo had a post where he is seems to be channeling David Meerman Scott (who has a new book out this month). If David announces Gnomedex East I’m going to have to grow an Evil Spock goatee. Popularity: 1%...

Tomorrow night some of the greatest minds in business and technology (and yours truly) will be talking about widgets. David Beisel (who just announced a move to Venrock) will preside. I have to admit that I’m old school and have been loathe to use widgets. I’m even not really comfortable with snippets, but do use them because the benefit is too great. For those who don’t...

For the past couple of weeks it’s been all about the lists. List management is ultimately the blood supply of all your marketing efforts. Anyone doing direct marketing knows that the company usually kneels to the ultimate power of “the house list”. The best part of an organization that grows quickly is being able to farm the list management out to a database specialist. I...