April 18th, 2008

We felt aftershocks in the office at around 10:15 this morning. The search term “chicago earthquake” is “spicy hot” right now according to Google Trends. Search activity peaked about 6 hours ago … what’s interesting (and note that the timescale is P.S.T. and we are in C.S.T.) is that search activity picks up immediately after the earthquake occurred. I experienced an earthquake in 1988 while living in upstate NY and we had to wait an hour, glued to the radio, to learn whether or not I was hallucinating. I’m not sure how quickly official news of the quake was posted, but many turned to Google for information as soon as the event occurred.

Surfing around I found this great USGS user contributed data earthquake experience map. If you felt the quake post your experience.

Robert Cringely has a great post this week, “The Truth About IT Consultants”.  He talks about the general state of IT consulting, but I think it applies nicely to the web content management system world.  As I read the article I grew concerned that this was just another trash the IT consultants rant until I came to this paragraph:

“The best consultants are the ones who come with a portfolio of products and tools. Their trick is to have a really good portfolio of stuff that really works, is really good, and can be sold and implemented quickly in a very cost-effective way. So it isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all when a consultant offers to sell you tools, as long as they are the right tools and the consultant really knows how to use them.”

Exactly what we are all about!