“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”
—Warren Buffett

If any significant portion of your business life is consumed by meetings, then I’m sure you’ll find this article to be spot on.

MarketingSherpa has announced the winners of a vote to determine Sherpa readers’ favorite marketing-related blogs and podcasts of 2006. Steve Hall’s fine Adrants was named “Best Blog on Advertising” despite yours truly blogging for it from Ad:Tech.

Takeaway for Marketers: If you’re not paying attention to a few of these blogs — at least Adrants and Seth’s blog — where’ve you been?

DMNews alerts us to the fact that Hitwise is launching Hitwise Conversions, a product Hitwise says “can be customized to meet the needs of marketers, reporting on a range of data points such as promotional pages, shopping cart activity, registration page completion, loan application submissions, auction bids and user interaction within a specific channel of a site.” Here’s the full Hitwise release.

By the way, Hitwise recently launched a Hitwise Intelligence blog that’s pretty interesting. Yesterday’s post about Google searches for “amazon.com” makes for good reading, but I think in addition to asking these questions — Why would Google do this? Is there a glitch in the system? — there’s one more that needs to be asked: Why are so many people typing “amazon.com” into Google instead of into the browser URL bar?

This is interesting: A MySpace page for Camel cigarettes. Turn it up: You get “Tex” Williams, too!

“Please note: This site is fan-created and is in no way associated with R.J. Reynolds manufacturing company or any other company associated with it. Any information on here is not connected to the aforementioned companies, it is user-created.”

Alrighty, if you say so. Seems right, too, that Camel’s friends are coffee and Jack Daniel’s. Thanks to Barbara Pflughaupt for pointing this one out.