RH Donnelley announced their filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection today, becoming the latest in a string of print publishers to do so.  

For me, however, this one is a little different as I worked for RHD for several years.  The tone of CEO Dave Swanson’s message was perhaps the most surprising part of this all:

I understand that filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy may cause concern on your part, but I want to

assure you that this action is being taken primarily to restructure our balance sheet, and we

do not anticipate any impact on our business operations. While this difficult economy has

caused us to rethink our capital structure, R.H. Donnelley’s operations remain vibrant and

strong, and through the motions filed with the Bankruptcy Court, we have taken steps to

ensure that there will be no change in support, service or business operations. Simply put, it

will be business as usual at R.H. Donnelley throughout this process.

I have never myself been through bankruptcy, and thankfully have never worked for a company who has while I was employed there.  But, it does strike me as off that the tone of this email seems to spit in the face of the investors/lenders who are going to lose out because of this.  It does seem to say “our company is fine, we just owe a lot of money we can’t afford to pay back” and “we aren’t going to change anything around here, business as usual”.  

RHD, forgive me for my disallegiance, but “business as usual” is one of the things that got you into this mess in the first place.  I think a massive shakeup is in order, at least some corporate restructuring to go along with the debt restructuring.

Just one man’s opinion.

On April 24th, I posted that www.tweetvalue.com had appraised my Twitter profile as being worth a whopping $3. OK, that was sarcastic, I will admit it. Since then, however, I have actually found myself getting more interested in Twitter (maybe because it suddenly seems absolutely everyone in the world is getting more interested in it not just web geeks).

So, I spent about 20 minutes picking some people to follow. If you read this blog (and you actually exist) you probably already follow them to: Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan, The Onion, and the like. Turns out these guys tweet quite a bit. And, as they are interesting figures in my industry, I actually enjoy reading some of what they write.

But, an interesting thing happened. When I started following them, it meant more people found me and decided to follow me, too. Some of them are clearly total BS and probably purely setup for some kind of spyware or phishing scam. But, some are obviously real people. What pressure? I suddenly have a bigger audience on Twitter than I have here (not that either are big).

And, as if to justify the massive effort, tweetvalue has now upped their estimate of my worth to $17. I figure if I keep my ramp rate at this level, my profile will be worth $100 in 30 days. That’s remarkable (some sarcasm, still, sorry). Nevertheless, it is something fun to shoot for— I haven’t had a fun project like this since I obsessed with ranking for ‘Bacon Polenta’ (which I did).

So, here we go– I am even putting the counter on my sidebar so you can see where I stand. If you don’t follow me on Twitter already, now is the time to start. You will get next to nothing in return (aside from the occasional witty comment), but will be helping me on my path to great wealth (last bit of sarcasm, I promise).

Google recently added a new feature in their SERPs where they featured a public Google profile in the search results for a name search.  I immediately created my own Google profile and within 2 days it was added to the bottom of the search page for ‘Ari Sternberg’ (and, no Google, I didn’t mean “Ari Steinberg”):

So, that got the evil part of my brain to thinking.  If I can create a profile for “Ari Sternberg” and show up right away on page 1 results, couldn’t I do the same if my name was “Mesothelioma Lawyer”?

In the interest of science, I felt it was my duty to test this.  I created a new Gmail user account called “Messielawyer” and set up the profile with the first name being “Mesothelioma” and the last name being “Lawyer”.  I built a nice profile for it packed with great information.  I did enough that the message appeared at the top of my profile that it was now eligible to be featured in Google search results!

Now, there are plenty of awful things you could do with a first page ranking for one of the most expensive terms on the entire web.  There is plenty of money that could be made.  To reiterate, I was only doing this for testing purposes only.

Alas, Google is a smart beast.  Despite my name being Mesothelioma Lawyer, they somehow knew not to trigger the profile in the results page.  I wonder if they don’t show them in any page that has paid results.  Nope, they still show it for “Bob Smith”. 

Maybe for my next test I’ll use something a little less high-dollar.  

Drat, Google is smart.