Fantastic blog post by Mike Dobson on Tele Atlas and how they are accruing datapoints from people using their (Tom Tom) GPS devices.

I’m not even talking about posting here – I’m talking about since I got real work done. I mentioned this when 2010 rolled by, but for roughly the past 12 months I have been pretty unproductive. I’ve done some random consulting here and there, but nothing to call mine own.

So this week finally marks my return. There are now 3 projects I am actively working on. Two of them are completely mine, and one is a bit of a JV. One of them is strictly local, one of them has a local flavor, and one of them has nothing to do with local.

Fun times ahead.

You can watch it all online for free at CBC.

I bought a one-way refundable ticket from NYC to Toronto. 7 days before the flight I went through their AA Refunds website. It told me there was no information on my ticket, and thus it could only “watch” and let me know when an update came.

Checking every 24 hours, 3 days later a “Manual Review” was added.

And that was it. The phone number on provided just tells me to use their website. No refund seems to have been processed, and using the refund site now shows no information on my ticket. Customer Support keeps telling me there is nothing they can do. A refundable ticket that can’t be refunded.

Thoughts?

Looks like it’s going for a decent chunk of cash. Not bad for a site that pretty much runs itself.

So I’m going through their list, and Jim Jones keeps showing up. Clicking on details, here are the categories he is included under:

Advertising, Art, Automotive, Business, Celebrity, Comedian, Education, Entertainment, Family, Fashion, Film, Finance, Food, Gadgets, Health, Lifestyle, Management, Marketing, Music, News, Parenting, Politics, Real Estate, Science, Small Business, Sports, Technology, Video Games

At the maximum allow 5 categories per account. Letting someone blanket every single category is plain stupid.

Just see it in action.

A while ago (really, a while ago) I pointed out GenieKnows and how they were hiding links in blog comments using a smile emoticon.

So yesterday I ran into some news about how they had relaunched, were doing a lot of traffic, and so forth. I was very surprised myself when I saw that Compete.com showed them with 2.3 million visitors a month – not bad! Even more impressive was that all the traffic began a few months – what a spike!

Of course, things were not as they seemed. Compete is nice enough to show us a breakdown of traffic by subdomain – in this case, it seems like feed.genieknows.com was their main traffic conduit. And some simple searching brought light on their methodology: annoying spyware that hijacks your URLs.

Just wonderful stuff.

Surprised no one noticed this – TripAdvisor now does Enhanced Listings. The price is up there, but not bad considering TripAdvisor claims 25,000,000 visitors a month.

I used to be really good at soccer. I wasn’t tall – but I was pretty wide, which made me a solid right fullback. I was a no nonsense player – no flash, no glitter – I got rid of the ball as soon as I could. Then ten years ago I partially tore my ACL. It wasn’t painful – just frustrating. Just over a year ago I started to play soccer again – and this time fully tore my ACL (while cracking both menisci … one so bad it flipped into the joint). Soon after I decided that I was not very happy with what I was doing, and started to make wholesale changes.

I’ve had very little to do with iBegin for the past 6 months, and as of this year pretty much down to zero. A few people already knew about this, but in general I’ve been pretty tight-lipped about it. I personally have spent the past few months catching up on reading, exercising, and just watching sports/movies/etc. I’ve gone from hyperlocal (neighborhood) to local (Toronto) to quasi-local (multiple cities) to stupid-local (full country). In retrospect I think the winning solution is to stick to “local” – even today, more than 25 months after iBegin Toronto was ‘turned off’ the site garners 10,000-15,000 pageviews a day.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Plato to read.