Welcome to this week's installment of Quick Hits… catching you new readers up, this is where I talk about all the things that happen over the course of a week or two that don't quite make it into a full blog post.  Here goes…

- The Olympics are almost finally over, yet all I keep asking myself is "what are all these athletes going to for a career?"  Many of them give up college and a majority of their 20s chasing Gold.  I guess there are opportunities for them to become trainers, coaches, etc., but surely some of them will have problems adapting to the real world?
- On to the Conventions.  Oh brother.
- This year, we get to choose between the most liberal and inexperienced member of the Senate or a guy who doesn't know how to use e-mail.  Make it stop.
- I couldn't help myself from commenting about HelloMetro's apparent trademarking of the term "hyperlocal."  Hyperlocal is a term that could apply to a variety of long-tail local business opportunities, it makes a lot of sense, and it is starting to get traction.  Until now perhaps.  I think it's a pretty weak IP strategy for a company to subvert an emerging industry term for their own purposes, and I think it's at least mildly exploitive.  I'm annoyed.
- Why is customer service in many doctor's offices so TERRIBLE?  Yesterday, I spent an hour at my hand doctor's office to wait for what turned out to be a 5 minute checkup on my broken finger from June.  Maybe the worst part about it was that the office was relatively empty.  Now I am sure the doctor is a very important person, but when an appointment starts 1 hour after its scheduled time, something is wrong.  When I finally saw him, he was pretty eager to get in and out of my room.  Instead of hearing a full rundown of what I can & can't do with my healing finger and when, I had to ask all the questions.  This was barely better than my first visit there, when I had a 90 minute wait for my initial checkup.  All of this from a hand doctor who was in Seattle Magazine's "Top Doctors" list for 2008?  It all makes you realize that sadly doctor's offices today are (generally speaking) more about small business than the Hippocratic Oath.
- I've been playing around with Facebook advertising lately, running experiments on a few different types of ads.  My main takeaway — ads generally work in a local context as long as you keep your expectations low.  Hit/conversion rates are poor, probably because the customer is "qualified" in no way whatsoever.  If Facebook has one advantage over other ad alternatives, it is the ability to target people locally.  I think some combination of their local ad targeting and the wealth of applications available to users will help advertisers target people more effectively, but it will take time.

Have a great weekend everyone!