I’m good at dumb…uh, I mean, I’m good at spotting dumb. I have dumb-spotted traffic.com.

It may or may not be a good website for checking traffic conditions (it wouldn’t let me register). But what they are advertising on the radio is dumb — traffic updates sent to your cell phone with alternate route maps. So let me get this straight. I’m supposed to check my cell phone while I’m in stop-and-go-traffic for traffic reports and a map of where to go. Could I suggest that if I’m checking my cell phone for maps while I’m trying to get through Washington, DC traffic then I’m going to turn stop-and-go-traffic into stop-and-bump-traffic?

Traffic.com.dumb, that’s what that is.

Here is your recommended reading on this palindromic day, from the folks at Blogenberg:

Interesting reporting and commentary on the status of Yahoo’s leadership team are found,respectively, at Reuters.com and at the Silicon Alley Insider.

The Church of the Customer ponders the age old question: To apologize or not to apologize?

Is an Internet version of the Patriot Act waiting in the wings?

Here’s an interesting interview with the CEO of Ifbyphone at the Behavioral Insider blog about the marriage of online and telephone, often referred to as Click-to-Call. Is this progress or is it sinking us deeper into communicating only with machines?

Out to Launch summarizes the recent Ruby Tuesday campaign. Read it and check out the links—it’s hilarious. (The rest of the post may or may not be worth reading. Blogenberg was too busy laughing at the final Ruby Tuesday spot.)

For some entrepreneurs, money is not the point. I’m not talking about me, to be honest. I’m talking about, well, I’ll call him John.

John has given up a high-powered Washington, DC career. He’d been a high-level Congressional aide. And he just wrapped up a stint as an important government official. He, his wife, and three kids have traded in a house they own in a sought after part of town for, according to his description, a rental home near Los Angeles that nobody would call beautiful.

Some of their friends think John and his wife are insane. They’ve gone insane so they can pursue two dreams. She has been a freelance entertainment writer and wants to try to make it a full-time career. That means being in Hollywood. He’s always wanted to teach, which can happen anywhere. So they’ve moved to Hollywood.

She recently got credentialed for the summer Hollywood press tour — a hard thing to do which means you’ve at least got inside the club. He got a job teaching high school government at a private school.

As they embark on this new stage of life, John and his wife like to joke, “Money is for the weak.” I don’t quite get the joke. But I do get the entrepreneurial spirit that is driving them. Very cool.

Me: “If you work hard…:”
14-year-old son: “I know,” he dramatically sighs, “good things happen.”

What a great father moment — all my hard work to get it through his thick head that hard work guarantees reward is at least turning him into a parrot!

This week’s recommended reading from your friends at Blogenberg…

• Dosh Dosh has two good posts relevant to marketing and online PR: One is about the connection between emotions and viral marketing and the other about ambush marketing and its relevance online.
• Blogging in the B-to-B context can really yield some great results.
• Duct Tape Marketing simply and succinctly articulates what makes a small business green.
• This post is a rather harsh but, in some ways, spot-on analysis of the PR industry’s bumbling forays into social media.
• Blogs and an enormous amount of Internet rantings have finally caused Comcast to turn a corner in listening and acting on customers’ complaints.
• The SEC will soon recognize the use of blogs by corporations as sufficient for certain types of disclosure - puts another nail in the coffin of the press release but what does it mean, if anything, for corporate accountability?
• Willie Brown, California power broker, shares the secret of his success: style.
• We keep running into good posts on the importance of “personal branding.” So we’ll keep sharing them.