Drilling Down on Local 2008 starts tomorrow, and if you are coming, be sure to come say hi to us at our booth. Always happy to meet people who read this blog and/or follow iBegin.

I would have posted this a while ago, but I was hit with a stomach bug/fever like I’ve never been hit. It literally conked me out for the past five days or so - never had something hit me so hard

Anyway - if you do come, be sure to come say hi!

Post on why not submitting to iBegin.com is a bad idea!

So with iBegin Share v2 coming out soon (stat tracking), we thought we would go ahead and support the Open Share Icon project. But one thing is off - the official website.

The Feed Icon has the pretty feedicons.com site, OPML has an equally purty opmlicons.com, and even the Geotag Icon has a functional geotagicons.com site. And I am quite sure that Sharing is a far more common activity than using OPML or geotags.

If you guys want, we can gladly make a website for it

Yesterday, I was out and about doing some chores, when I got hit with a hankering for a grilled chicken sandwich. Heading on over to the nearest fastfood joint, I opted to park and go inside instead of going through the ridiculously long drive-through.

When I got out I looked at the line and realized I would still have been #4 if I had gone through the drive-in.

But it got me thinking - there are all these articles on reducing pollution and being smarter about using gas - isn’t the idling in a drive-through a lot of wasted gas? At lunch time those lines become long - cars just idling with their AC on (hey its hot) must not be the greatest use of gas.

So am I onto something? If everyone parked and went inside, would there be a noticeable impact on pollution?

And please I don’t want to hear about global warming in the comments. Pollution is disgusting, and cutting back on it is just good for our lungs, plain and simple.

So finally - after months and months of slogging, writing, re-writing, and whole lot of annoying, we get to release the latest version of Blog Flux.

There were two main things we were targeting - bringing more cohesiveness to our separate ‘parts’, and to start building a proper community. With over 150,000 registered users, we should have been doing more than we were.

One of the most time-consuming elements of this was the design. There are almost a hundred ‘unique’ pages in terms of design, structure, and appearance. All of these pages still need to keep a cohesive look to keep the user experience simple.

So what is actually new?

Blog Flux Talk - custom built message board system from the ground up.

Blog Flux Articles - name says it all.

Quizzes - always a favorite with bloggers, about time we launched our own

Still more to come (as always), including a hosted version of iBegin Share, but right now I think we are on the right track.

I constantly run into an obviously stupid design element - the lanyard.

Too often you see someone and you have no clue what their name is or who they work for because their damn name tag has flipped around. The two solutions are: 1) Ensure the name tag doesn’t flip around [impossible] or 2) Have the name on both sides of the damn lanyard [the stupidly obvious solution].

It absolutely stuns me how an obvious $5 solution (double sided plastic, or just tape the damn name on the other side) eludes the otherwise-brilliant people who run some of these conferences.

Come on organizers …

So I’m at the tail end of LeadsCon, getting ready to go home.

To me, the best two sessions were ‘Keynote Address: Lessons From the Leaders’ and ‘Uncovering Local Lead Generation’

The first was an interesting story - how things were done, how much FreeCreditReport.com cost (hand regged!), and so forth. Personal stories of success and development are always good.

The second was interesting in the sense of mechanics - the background work required to make local lead generation work. What is expect from businesses, and what is expected from consumers, and match the two.

The rest in the middle, while executed well (I much prefer talk sessions than podium preaching), was boiled down to two core issues:

1. Teeth gnashing at what meanies the FTC are and how they hate us
2. Teeth gnashing at the mortgage industry explosion, and looking forward to the housing market coming back

It was, in my opinion, far too retrospective, when it should have been more forward-thinking. What I got (and remember, this is my perspective), was that the only new thing was lead scoring.

My intent in coming was of course locally-oriented - local lead gen, while a tougher nut to crack than the traditional ‘financial’ categories (mortgage, debt, loans, financing), is also potentially far more lucrative (higher margins, repeat customers, word of mouth effectiveness). Yet every single established company I talked to had the same boiler plate answer - we think it’s great, it’s on our list of things to do, but not in the year 2008.

It reminded me a lot of the domainer industry. All those PPC companies are basically the same (their ads come via Google or Yahoo), and they all sell the same services. Instead of trying to evolve the market in new ways, it seems like everyone is content sitting on their laurels fighting each other for the same leads, instead of trying to work on new areas where there is no competition.

Yes there were most definitely some individuals who want to try new things, who are looking at new types of leads. But the local space requires scale and operations - a one man operation won’t make much of a dent in local lead gen.

At the end of the day, this just elucidates the level of disconnect happening between some of the major industries I travel. Local companies should be interested in domains (readymade traffic - just look at Marchex), and should be interested in getting the most money out of a consumer (lead gen!). Yet I saw almost zero local-oriented companies. Domainers should love local (’unlocking’ the potential of their domains) and lead gen (leaving the Google/Yahoo duopoly) … but again, few domainers. Lead gen should love domainers (source of traffic) and local (higher margins, new areas) - but again, little interaction.

I almost feel like a trailblazer trying to connect the three - anyone else actively participating in these three areas?

In my last post on blogging and social responsibility, I outlined how blogs are going the way of tabloid rags by option for sensationalist headlines (to get more links, to get more pageviews, to get more money). My two examples were related to Muslims.

As expected, the vitriol came out - I got a few angry emails, and a few insane comments (including one claiming I must be a pedophile - *shrug*). But what was astounding is that one individual keeps on manually posting comments to my blog. What is hilarious is this person is now resorting to whining that my blog hates “freedom of speech” - missing the obvious connection that as this is my blog, I can do whatever I please to do with it. Even more astounding is that this has been going on for three days. And I know this is manual because I sometimes leave a comment, and he replies - before I go ahead and delete them both.

So to ‘prove’ to me that I hate freedom of speech and that I am a dirty Muslim pedophile, he resorts to spamming my blog, insisting I have to follow his rules.

It goes without saying that he doesn’t have the guts to use his real name and/or email.