The Deets

What does the rotating banner advertisement below have to do with 3rd Congressional District DFL candidate Ashwin Madia and Republican candidate Erik Paulsen?

Give up? That’s an advertisement for one of Madia and Paulsen’s competitor’s businesses. It’s currently rotating on the front page of CityPages.com.

Steev RamsDell, an independent candidate for Congress in the 3rd District, is the owner of three local rejuvenation centers: PowerNap Sleep Centers, San Mei Rejuvenation Centers (Yelp reviews here), and Planet Shikoku Super Rejuvenation Centers.

Steev RamsDell via ramsdell4congress.com

RamsDell’s positions include making English the only acceptable language for the Pledge of Allegiance and he wants to cut funding for the American Cancer Society in order to force ACS to come up with a cure rather than profit from the ongoing problems with cancer. More about this can be found at RamsDell’s anti-sickcare advocacy site, ShowMeTheCure.com.

Interestingly, the office number for RamDell’s campaign is the same number one can use to book showgirls for exotic massage and dances.

How convenient is that? You can call to find out more about this candidate and make plans for some rejuvenation in just one call.

That’s bringing new efficiencies to government.

Few things make me blow beer out of my nose faster than a canned trend piece from the NY Times. I’m going to have to use a mop on my keyboard after publishing this.

It looks like the low-alcohol beer industry has a decent PR firm. They managed to get the NY Times to pen 1500 words on this non-starter.

Here’s how you can tell that something in the NY Times is a PR generated BS article that insults the fish wrap it’s printed on: it include the phrase “small but growing number”:

While many craft brewers are trying to quench the nation’s growing thirst for extreme beers pumped with alcohol, Mr. Taylor is one of a small but growing number of brewers, beer experts and importers who are applying the brakes and turning toward well-made low-alcohol beers

Good for you, Mr. Taylor. I hope you find a market for you non-light light beer. But your product is not part of a “small but growing number” just because a PR firm convinces someone in the business section at the NY Times to write about it.

If you think I’m kidding about the use of the term “small but growing number” I’m not. The NY Times has 36,000 uses of the term indexed in Google.

In case you didn’t know, a “small but growing number” of business travelers are choosing to stay in B&B’s according to the PR person who sold that story to the Times.

Betsy Andrews got paid to regurgitate the low-alcohol beer story and Joe Sharky covered the B&B for Businesses “trend” back in 1999 that’s really swept the nation over the past 9 years. Not. (An expression that also hasn’t swept the nation over the past 9 years.)

Where do Minnesota’s biggest weather junkies live?

One way to find out is to look at which zip codes are getting the most weather searches on Google. Google’s Suggest feature helps guide us toward which zips are popular among weather checking addicts:

Drilling down, here is what the 554– zips around Minneapolis look like:

And the 551– zips near St Paul:

Personally, I open the door to find out what the weather is like. Old school.

Congrats to Katie at Camacho Watcho on her first year of blogging and, coincidentally, her 7th wedding anniversary.

Tying into the 7 scene, here are my 7 favorite posts regarding local eateries reviewed by Camacho Watcho in recent months:

- Pizza Farm in Stockholm, WI
- Dominguez Family Restaurant
- Tin Fish vs Sea Salt
- Brasa
- Salut Bar Americain
- Pizza Nea
- Sea Salt

and a bonus: Big Papa Pickle

This just in from Olive in the comments of the previous Bulldog St Paul post:

Bulldog Lowertown is a sure thing! You can expect an opening sometime in the last week of Sept -first week of Oct. 40 tap beers, shuffel board, and of course vienna beef dogs and hamburgers, plus a few new menu items. Oh and lets not forget the tots!!!!

Excellent!

Can anyone explain what value automatically refreshing a page every 10 minutes provides the reader of a news site like StarTribune.com?

For me, this does not help me and in fact hurts my experience with their site.

1. Sometimes I get distracted by something that needs to be flipped on the grill. When I get back to reading, the page suddenly decides that it needs to refresh. That was not helpful.

2. Sometimes I have more than one tab open at the same time in my browser. Actually, most of the time. At times like that, it’s quite possible that I’ll be reading something in a different tab only to notice the icon for the StarTribune tab spinning in a different tab. You just broke my concentration without providing any value, StarTribune, which makes me hate you.

3. StarTribune uses some of my bandwidth every time they refresh the page so they can push new ads.

4. I often open tabs as I see things than interest me, then work my way through those tabs over time. I’m sure some of the advertisers who’s ads are shown on the StarTribune are paying for those ads on an impression basis. If that’s the case, they’re getting ripped off by paying for ads that are reloading in tabs no human sees.

5. At its worst, I’ve noticed that I’ve left pages of the StarTribune open in my browser for almost a full day. If the StarTribune consistently reloads their pages every 600000 milliseconds (10 minutes) they’re serving a LOT of ads prospective customers don’t see yet advertisers pay for.

But wait! Maybe there is a good reason for refreshing the page. Here is what I’d expect to hear in response: “Sometimes stories change so we want to make sure you’re looking at the most current version of the story.”

My response: Go to search.twitter.com and search for a popular term such as “Obama.” Then wait a few minutes. You’ll see a message near the top of the page like this:

Pages DO change over time. This is a better way to deal with the issue. Leave it up to the readers to decide whether they’d like to continue reading what’s already in front of them, or click a link to see the latest version.

This is better for readers AND advertisers since readers gain more control over the content they’re trying to read and advertisers get more valuable ad impressions.

Hooeyspewer reports that she’s had great success getting off of catalogs using a service called CatalogChoice.

My mailbox is seriously thankful to me for lightening its load. When I initially wrote about signing up with them, they had over a half-million members and its membership had collectively opted out of over 6 million catalogs. Today, the site boasts more than 963,000 members and reports that their membership has canceled over 12,600,000 catalogs. That’s a lot of resources no longer being wasted for marketing that wasn’t working in the first place.

Personally, I’ve had good luck unsubscribing from catalogs from retailer’s websites through their website’s contact form. Some have forms specifically for this purpose, but many just have a contact form where I tell them I’d like to unsubscribe from their mailings. That’s worked for me. In fact, there are days when I receive no mail at all, which never used to happen. Striving for zero-mailbox.

Sadly, one of the catalog retailers who isn’t participating in CatalogChoice (and of the the 4 out of 44 that Hooeyspewer had issues with) is Macy’s. It turns out that Hooeyspewer is no fan of Macy’s and continues to hold a grudge against them for taking away her beloved Chicago Marshall Field’s stores. I’m sure more than a few Dayton’s fans in Minneapolis can relate to that.

Quick reminder to Minneapolis residents: Switch your utility bill to e-bill. You’ll receive your monthly statement via email rather than paper mail.

You can check a box on the back of your paper statement this month to do this, or go here right now to fill out the form now. E-delivery of statements is planned to start in October.

That saves the purchase, printing, mailing, and recycling costs associated with 12 mailings per year.

Going green is the smart economic choice, as Cam Gordon explains below:

Second Ward, Minneapolis: Email Utility Bills!

If all Minneapolis utility customers signed up for electronic billing, each year the City would safe 44 tons of wood (equal to 302 trees) and enough energy to power seven homes. It’s also a great way for us to make your tax dollars go further.

Dang, this takes “staged media event” to a whole new level:

Obama filled that place on short notice and had that place rockin’ on June 3rd. It will be interesting to see how excited the delegates can get for 2008’s Bob Dole, John McCain.

Has anyone figured out how many houses McCain owns in Minnesota? Maybe he can host some of the delegates himself if he can figure out where his houses are.

Last year, I had a chance to meet Larry Irving (click for an interview by Ben from BenCredible), the Co-Chairman of the Internet Innovation Alliance and former member of the Clinton administration, at a conference about broadband internet access to the home. The hot topic at the time was providing fiber connections to every home as a way to dramatically increase broadband Internet speeds.

One thing Mr. Irving did a great job explaining was that government should not be in the game of picking which technology is the best technology to solve a problem. For example, at the start of the Clinton administration, he said people lobbied at the time for providing an ISDN line to every home in America. Clearly, that would have been a wasteful program for the government to subsidize, which is why it’s wasteful today for McCain to pick winners by subsidizing today’s technology as offered by campaign donors AT&T or Comcast.

It’s not just in Internet technology where picking winners can have bad results. Look at our current energy policies where we subsidize ethanol rather than providing incentives that let the best innovation and technology win. For example, a carbon tax that accounts for the environmental and health consequences of belching carbon into our atmosphere and air we breathe would foster innovation in technologies that are able to avoid the tax by being cleaner forms of energy.

Figure out what problem you’re trying to solve (reduced carbon emissions, increase broadband penetration, etc). Then provide incentives for the market to solve that problem.

John McCain is no technology Nostradamus. Stop trying to pick winners based on campaign donations and start letting the market work.