For the second year in a row, Continental Airlines has the most satisfied customers among domestic carriers, according to the latest J.D. Power and Associates 2007 North America Airline Satisfaction Study.

It finished 24 points ahead of Delta, its nearest rival, for customer satisfaction among traditional network carriers in North America. It is the second consecutive year that Continental has won the award. link

Among low-cost carriers, JetBlue won top honors, as it did in 2006 and 2005. link

Business and leisure flyers evaluated the airlines in seven areas: Reservations, check-in, boarding/ deplaning/ baggage, aircraft, flight crew, in-flight services, and costs/ fees.

Agree? Disagree? Who is your top choice among domestic airlines? Why?

Safari for Windows is supposed to be faster than either Microsoft’s IE or open-source Firefox. Steve Jobs says it’s faster, so it must be true, right?

But that certainly wasn’t my experience. I found it much slower to boot and to load pages. (See the original post here.) And now Wired has run some comparative speed tests that confirm Firefox really is faster (although not by much).

Whew. Thought I was losing it.

Imus in the Morning used to promote itself as “This ain’t your mother’s morning show.” Actually, it turns out, it is. And your grandmother’s too.

The comments I’ve received suggest that Imus fans are not predominantly male, as one might have expected. There are lots of females, too, as young as college age and extending well into their 80s. A lot more older women than I would have expected.

Other comments reveal:

• They don’ t mind being called I-Hos. (Even the guys.) One told me, “Being an I-ho sure beats being a media ho!”
• Petitions are now being circulated to pressure MSNBC and CBS to bring him back.
• A rally will be held in NYC on June 29, when the petitions will be presented to the three media outlets. Imus supporters are coming from as far away as Washington State — now that’s a dedicated fan!
• Somebody has started a “fake” Imus blog. A commenter tipped me off to it, and I must say, it’s pretty funny. The guy writes like Imus talks, so if your ears are offended by vulgarity, don’t go there.Wait a minute, what am I saying? These are Imus fans!

With apologies to Steven Stills:

“If you can’t watch the Imus you love,
now you can read the Imus you’ve got.”

Want a sure-fire strategy for building a successful Web business? Line up customers first, then create a business to serve them.

It’s an approach that’s working for the UK’s David Carter, says Business 2.0. Carter identifies a business niche or a hot growth area like commercial real estate. Then he buys domain names around the topic. He saves money by shunning pricey domains for URLs with hyphens, such as commercial-property.co.uk/.

He builds the sites, adds content, and waits for customers. When inquiries come in, Carter steers them to an acquaintance or a local business he’s partnering with. In many cases, Carter simply becomes the middleman, using the Web to attract willing buyers that he hands off to others for a fee.

To satisfy a flood of eager customers, Carter turned his original AsbestosSurveys.com site into an actual business, called AsbestosServices.com. He took a half-week course, got certified, and teamed up with a friend. Today, once or twice a week — essentially whenever he feels like getting out of the house — Carter surveys a property, armed with a digital camera and notepad. He claims the effort will net the pair about $350,000 this year.

Not too shabby for a guy who knew absolutely nothing about asbestos when he started.

Carter’s way, in brief:

1. Identify an overlooked need for services kicked up by, for instance, relatively obscure regulatory changes.
2. Construct a first-rate website with a generic domain name that will draw in prospective customers.
3. With clients in hand, create the business, providing the service yourself or subcontracting to established players.

I hate sales and discounts — at least for professionals and small businesses. When you lower prices, you’re basically training customers to wait for a lower price before buying– a bad habit.

There are many better ways to drum up business, especially during your slow season. Rather than simply offering discounts, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing suggests thinking of some combination of the following offers:

• Exclusive and private members-only discount sale days
• Community-building events that include the entire family
• Early hours just for current customers, where they get first crack at the newest stuff
• Credits and/or discounts for referrals and passing out gift certificates
• Promotion with a non-profit partner that donates a portion of sales during an exclusive event (you can probably find a way to work this into one of the non-profit’s events).

This approach is much classier than simply lowering prices. First, as Jantsch points out, it rewards your good clients. Plus it motivates prospects to become clients, because they see they get lots of unique benefits when they do.

By the way, this approach isn’t only for retailers. It can work just as well for B2B and even service businesses. So — what are your plans for a summer promotion?

By the way, if you need some professional help writing the copy…

Apple has just released a Windows version of their Safari browser. It’s supposed to be twice as fast as Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Tain’t so, based on my (admittedly limited) testing. I downloaded it. Installed it. Launched it. The default Apple home page took almost 20 seconds to load. Yikes!

Yahoo News loaded much more slowly than with FireFox. The New York Times opened a bit faster, but that was included as a default bookmark, so it may have started loading even before my click, like FireFox’s pre-fetching capability.

On many pages the type (Verdana) looked muddy and smeared, like I’d forgotten to put on my glasses. But the strangest thing of all? I’d forgotten how crowded, flashy and distracting the Web can be when you don’t have AdBlock Plus filtering out the crap. Until Safari has ABP, I’m sticking with the ‘Fox. (And probably even then.)

But hey, Apple — I still love my iPod…

Lots of reaction to Saturday’s post about Don Imus. It attracted more comments than any other post. Thank you all for participating.

Like all of you who left comments, I am (was?) also a huge Imus fan, and have been for over 20 years. So let me start by pointing out that the quote about Imus going “off the deep end” was said by an Emory University business professor, not me. Unfortunately, I neglected to include the link, so I’ll add it here.

I saw the “nappy headed ho” comment live as it happened, and it didn’t even register a blip in my Outrage Meter. It was obviously just an offhand comment, a spontaneous ad lib, not meant maliciously. It was just part of the Imus in the Morning routine. Regular (and even irregular) viewers knew he didn’t mean it.

However, it was probably a mistake to direct a comment like that toward young college athletes like that. So-called “public figures” (like Rev. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Al Roker) are fair game, but not young kids.

Another point: When you look at Imus’s words in print, they look hateful, racist and indefensible. But seen/heard in the context of his show, they were actually pretty tame. But Sharpton, Roker et al pounced on it and made them seem far more hateful and incendiary.

Imus’s ranting — about autism, Thimerosal, Greening the Cleaning, Auto Body Express, even Whittaker Chambers — has long been an integral part of his act. But I don’t think it’s an “act” at all — just part of his personality. He routinely rails against the foibles of many ethnic and demographic groups, religions, stereotypes of all sorts.

I certainly do not believe Imus is a racist. If anything, he’s a curmudgeon, a cranky old grouch. I’ve never met him, but people who know him personally have told me that that’s who he is, that’s his authentic self. He isn’t afraid to be unlikable. He’s real — no wonder he was such an effective communicator. Name one other person in the blow-dried media who reveals their authentic self…

Of course, Imus is also a performer who put on a great show. He brought in terrific guests, asked good questions, then actually gave them the time to answer, instead of constantly interrupting and badgering them like most Talking TV Heads. (Yeah, I’m talking about you, Bill O’Reilly.) His in-depth interviews and live musical performances by often-ignored talents were a delight and a rarity in today’s ratings-obsessed media.

He was also rich enough that he didn’t care if anyone listened/watched or not. Imus did what HE wanted to do, and screw anyone who didn’t like it. That authenticity attracted millions of listeners and viewers, which in turn attracted sponsors and big bucks. Both have now left MSNBC and CBS radio once they booted Imus.

With his telethons and other campaigns, he did a lot of good. Like NPR pledge breaks, I personally couldn’t listen to them, but I applaud his efforts to use his fame to do good. I admire him for that.

And like many of you commenters, I haven’t watched MSNBC since. It’s part protest, but mostly because there is virtually nothing worth watching on that channel or any other. I’m on a media fast of sorts. Clears the mind. It’s good for you.

BTW, many commenters mentioned they’re boycotting Procter & Gamble. Good for you. Personally, my family hasn’t bought their products in years. Not because of Imus, but because they test their products on live animals, often blinding and maiming them in the process. An inexcusable and barbaric practice.

Finally, it’s interesting that all this reaction came just as The Sopranos was ending its long run on HBO. Like Imus, Tony Soprano is one misunderstood guy. Like Imus, the Sopranos is seen as profane, casting negative stereotypes, etc.

Most of all, what Sopranos executive producer Terence Winter said about networks applies equally to Imus:

“They live in fear of offending anybody. If one guy writes in and says, ‘I’m never going to buy Ivory soap again because you had a joke in your show about albinos and I’m an albino,’ you will get a memo the next day: ‘No more albino jokes.’ They don’t have the courage of their convictions.”

And so it goes…