All Things Cahill

Sprint Nextel Corp. has told about 1,000 disgruntled cell phone customers they will no longer be their cell phone provider. From the Houston Chronicle: Analyzing customer accounts, Sprint identified about 1,000 over the past six months to a year calling customer service centers at a rate 40 to 50 times above average, and the roughly 40,000 monthly calls strained Sprint’s ability to serve other subscribers, said Sprint spokeswoman Roni Singleton. An interesting move for a company that’s had trouble signing…

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Despite all the discussion, search engines are simple things.  They read web pages, decide what they are about, then categorize and rank them. As business owners, we need to ensure that we’re getting good results from search.  The problem is, if we aren’t, we’re probably never going to know the opportunities we’re missing out on. Take a few minutes to examine how your site is found by Google and MSN, the two primary search engines.  Here’s how you do it:…

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a departure for us, but interesting stuff… Dig deeper: Live Archive MP3 concert recording: 2007-06-15 Bonnaroo Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Tribe_Sector_9 Artist Homepage: http://www.sts9.com/

In a paper entitled “Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups” published in the Journal of Social Structure, the authors, Howard T. Welser of Cornell University, Eric Gleave of University of Washington and Microsoft Research, and Danyel Fisher and Marc Smith of Microsoft Research assert that 2% of the online forum or usenet culture consists of “answer” people who spend a disproportionate amount of time answering questions for the online public at large. We identify a structural…

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I can’t get enough of this song.  Originally released on Shooting Rubberbands at Stars in 1988, this is from the Fillmore, San Francisco, October 17, 2007. Dig deeper! Select Live Archive Mp3 Download: 10/25/06 Martyr’s, Chicago, IL, the last show of their tour.  Available for free in streaming and full download.  This is an audience recording, so there is crowd noise, but it’s good for an aud. Artist Homepage: http://www.newbohemians.com/ Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edie_Brickell_%26_New_Bohemians

Like veritable plaques visited on the house of Blogdom, Splogs are fast making blog search irrelevant. For those unfamiliar with the term, the definition from Wikipedia: Spam blogs, sometimes referred to by the neologism splogs, are artificially created weblog sites which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites. The purpose of a splog can be to increase the PageRank or backlink portfolio of affiliate websites, to artificially inflate paid ad…

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Rob O’Regan posts today that the Iphone’s success will largely hinge on the cell phone provider ATT Wireless (formerly Cingular, the carrier I use).  Wireless carriers in general have shown a remarkable ability to not care about their customers, opting to put far more effort into acquiring new ones than retaining existing subscribers. When you get a dropped signal while making a call or surfing the Web from your phone, you blame the network provider, not the handset maker. But with…

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I was talking with Scott Bradley yesterday and we got onto the subject of online selling and how it’s not always appropriate for every website.  If you’re one of those businesses, you might be led to think that would devalue the need for a website.  Nothing could be further from the truth. How do your customers find you today? Yellow page ads are fast becoming a thing of the past.  They’re still important for some businesses, most notably service businesses,…

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Technorati has for years provided blog search and blog authority ratings.   They’ve traditionally been known for having technical glitches, from their site tending to be slow, or completely down.  But for the most part, bloggers adopted them as the de facto measurement tool for how well read blogs are. Since their recent update, in which they revamped how they rank blogs, as well putting a shiny new look on their site, things appear to have headed down hill. First off,…

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I was talking with a business owner the other day who seemed like they really got the concept of creating a consumer community rather than simply “fishing for customers.  They were doing events in their store aimed at educating their customers on their products, and have always taken a proactive customer service approach.  He mentioned they were redoing their website and said “I’ve got a student working on it.”  I bit my tongue and continued to talk with him. So…

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