For years, at the office, I've led the pack in finding information on the Web about our company or its competitors. Part of this comes from being focused to the point of obsession on making sure I know how our company and the marketplace is being portrayed, and part is due to utilizing the latest technology available - including a raft of saved bookmarks designed for this task. This technique, which has served me well for nearly six years, has now been nearly obsoleted by the advent of RSS.

Regardless of the company you work for, there are a limited number of trade publications that frequently cover you and your competition. Many companies pay big bucks to PR firms to track coverage, anticipated or otherwise, commonly done through searching for the company, its products and executives, on those publications that serve your market. Early on, I found I could scoop the PR firm, simply by saving these search terms as a bookmark in my browser.

Over time, I made a new folder in Safari (and Firefox) called "searches" that had the keyword searches all teed up. As part of the morning's work, I would click one by one and see if the search result counts had changed. If they did, we very likely had coverage. Later, Safari debuted a tool where I could open all items in the folder at once, in tabs in the browser. Now, with one pull down and click of the mouse, I could open twenty-some-odd windows in major media, all searching for my company and its products, and simply by hitting Command-W to close the foreground window, I could navigate one by one to see if we'd struck PR paydirt. Now, the PR team knows not to send me coverage, because more than 95 times out of 100, I've already seen it.

But now, even this advanced method is antiquated. With the debut and reach of Google News, I can be alerted on any number of keywords debuting in the media, all day long. If the keyword is particularly important, I can get an instant e-mail if Google News finds it. If it's less important, or too frequently found, I can get an e-mail at the end of the day, instead. But now, every Google News search and Google Blogs search delivers an RSS feed I can subscribe to. Now, instead of manually crawling media sites, all I've done is subscribed to these RSS feeds on my company and the competition, on media and on blogs, so that Google Reader delivers me the article, in full or headline form, immediately, saving me the step.

It's a very rare thing for Google News to miss a tracked item, and much more common that it will find it before I've even begun to look. This saves me time, and saves the company money. Maybe RSS wasn't initially intended for this use, but I've found it an invaluable tool.

No, the Earth didn't spin off its axis with us away from the blog for a few days, but nonetheless, we return with a vengeance! For the Thanksgiving day and ensuing quasi-weekend, the wife and I traveled south to San Simeon, to take in the beach, marine life in the tidepools, and visit the famed Hearst Castle.

After our trip, we drove north along the California coastline, via the scenic Highway 1, and took in some spectacular views, with rolling hills on our right, and expansive ocean and white-crested waves on our left. More snippets of that trip in the next few days, including photos, to be sure.

Cross-posted at Sactown Royalty...

Remember how Artest missed the opening tip-off against the Grizzlies last week, complaining of a sore back, and did his best Terrell Owens impression by riding a stationary bike through the first quarter?

Well, it appears he's fairly lucky that Sacramento isn't exactly the aggressive media market you see in places like New York, for he just might have been mocked up and down the Daily News and the Post for the cause of this malady. See... his back hurt because he was forced to drive his wife's Mercedes, and the car isn't exactly built for such a mythical creature as a full-framed 6'7" human.

Sam Amick of The Bee Reports:

The Kings small forward has been driving his wife's Mercedes SL 500 back and forth from their house in Loomis to Arco Arena. The Mercedes had been a gift from Artest to his wife, Kimsha, who decided the car wasn't her style. Thus, her 6-foot-7, 260-pound husband has been cramming his frame into the driver's seat, so much so that his back started giving him fits. The Mercedes is headed for the used-car market.

In fact, it sounds like Artest's back was still hurting during the Kings' contest against the Spurs, which could possibly have contributed to his off shooting night, though he lamented not having more looks in the second half. But the story is this... millionaire NBA player who reveres his ties to the ghetto hurt himself driving a Mercedes - one that his wife thought didn't fit "her style". Oh... to have such issues myself.

At the office, our desk phones show how long you have been on a call from the time you pick up the receiver, to the time you put it back in the cradle. From "Hello", the seconds begin to tick forward, and often, this clock can be used as a challenge, to see how quickly I can get the person off the other line, especially when their goal is to sell me.

Though I respect professional telemarketing and the need to promote products, I'm way too busy with real work, and way too accessible via other methods to be troubled by the typical cold-caller. Therefore, I make it a goal, as soon as I realize I've fallen into a trap of talking to someone random, to get them off the line in less than a minute. If I haven't succeeded in that task, it's because they have something I might actually be interested in, or I've flat-out failed.

For the last six years, my phone number at the office has gone unchanged. Lucky for outside salesmen, this means that my contact information in any list from the beginning of the decade still works. Over the last four years, my name and number have been on our Web site, or on our press releases, and easily indexed by Google or other Web spiders, and I've found my data in pay-for-download directories.

I know I'm easy to find, so since I've made that part easy, I don't feel any special need to reward the cold caller with my time just because they achieved the very minimum of research, and too often, there's no way we would be buying what they're selling in the first place. So, we use a variety of methods to throw people off the scent, ranging from abruptness, occasional rudeness, to flat-out lies, if I'm too much in a hurry to deal with the morality of truth.

The easiest way to ditch potential vendors is to thank them for calling but say we are happy with our current vendors and aren't interested in taking on any more at this time. In other cases, I'll say our budgets are frozen this year, and to call back in three to six months. However, this delay tactic often means I'll get piled on later, when their sophisticated CRM tools remind them I said to call back. Those calls are obvious. "Hello, Louis, we spoke in May, and you said to call you in November to talk about..." Great. Do I owe you money because you took a note, and got an Outlook reminder? Thank goodness I'm not bound by that rule.

Alternatively, I'll bounce them to somebody else in the organization, but as I'm just as cognizant of their time as I am of mine, we'll just throw people off course completely. "Oh. Our IT guy? Well, we had a contractor, and he just left. I don't know who handles that now," or... "We don't have a full-time events person on staff. Try calling the main line." After a while, they usually get frustrated, and go away. You can tell which ones are good salespeople, and which ones would rather be running their own printing companies, design houses or ad sales. The ones that start off timid and scared are easy bait. They know you own them, and you can make them feel like dirt. "Oh, you're in luck! You know why? Because we've already got a vendor who does that, and you won't have to waste your time talking to me!" Lucky them, huh?

I know. There's probably a special circle of hell for people like me. But down there, next to the lawyers, we'll have the telemarketers, and we'll finally be meeting face to face.

Listening to ''Flesh'', by Jan Johnston (Play Count: 5)