The importance of competitive bidding

When businesses seek to conduct impartial research about a subject near and dear to them, I think it's an important practice of good governance to obtain competitive proposals and quotations from at least three reputable vendors.

I don't think it's good practice to allow "the new guy" to wire the contract to his former employer, then when publicly called out about it, to ignore the problem entirely. It would seem that the world's fifth-most popular website doesn't see things my way.

Congratulations, Q2 Consulting LLC. You're surely the pride of Oklahoma now.

Who's a recognized authority?

Another debate on Wikipedia. What fun.

Wikipedia's article about "Churn rate" at this moment (though it won't last long) contains an external link to my blog post about churn rates. A couple of editors have indicated that the link is inappropriate, because I am not a "recognized expert" or "recognized authority" on churn rates. The blog post comes up as the #2 Google search result (after Wikipedia) when you search for 'churn rates', and it is this blog's most heavily visited page.

We have one party (me) wishing to help expand Wikipedia's usefulness by including one external link to a sourced, academically-cited blog post. The author's credentials include career work in the area of churn rate research, currently for a Fortune 100 firm where churn is an essential matter.

We have another party saying it is not sourced (even though it is), that the scholarly reference to it is merely a ".edu web page" (even though it is a published subscription journal with ISSN: 1527-6619), and that the author is not a recognized expert.

I've pointed out that Wikipedia has thousands of similar external links to commercial sites with far less expertise and scholarly credibility than my own. Who do you think has the more solid footing in this debate?

I hope that any uninvolved Wikipedia editors in good standing might help weigh in on this debate. Should the link stay, or go?

Bradley Joseph atop Wikipedia

The featured, front-page article on Wikipedia today is about musician Bradley Joseph.

His musical talents include "hired by Yanni", "lead keyboardist for Sheena Easton", and "included in multiple various-artist compilation albums, most recently the 2008 release of The Weather Channel Presents: Smooth Jazz II".

I can't imagine how many iterations of smooth jazz from the Weather Channel will ultimately be necessary to exhaust the genre, but apparently we're already up to Volume II.


There is some debate on the Wikipedia talk page about whether this article is truly encyclopedic, as it seems awfully self-promotional, and it lacks even one mote of negative criticism.

"Taking a look at the references it appears Joseph doesn't seem to register outside of the musical circles in which he is appreciated, a very unique situation which causes the article bias."

I do have to wonder how it is possible an article of this length and detail did not involve a financially-interested party at some point.

We all know that Wikipedia can be, in many cases, a marketing dynamo for the subjects portrayed within. Prior to today, Bradley Joseph's article was getting approximately 70 views a day. Now that it's on the Main Page, it will be opened today by between 30,000 and 100,000 people, and the intro blurb on the Main Page itself will capture the passing attention of at least 10 to 15 million additional people.

Joseph's music is backed by 15 talented musicians, some playing three or more different instruments, that make up a symphony of sounds ranging from quietly pensive mood music to a rich orchestration of classical depth and breadth. "
—Ken Moore, Naples Daily News

Loyal Wikipedians will tell you that they have a strict policy against exploiting Wikipedia for marketing or self-promotion purposes. Uh huh.

That's all I have for today, other than to mention that FCC chairman Kevin Martin was recently outvoted 4-1 by his fellow commissioners. Boo hoo.