From Mean Green Eagles To Flying Elvi

American college football season has kicked into high gear and there are a lot of happy people across the country and around the world.

I follow a number of teams, but my faves have to be my alma mater, the University of North Texas “Mean Green” Eagles, and living here in Austin, the Texas Longhorns.

The Eagles are off to play Alabama tomorrow, God Bless ‘Em.  As I Tweeted earlier, at least North Texas is getting paid the princely sum of $750,000 in TV money to make the trip.

Tomorrow night, it will be Texas Tech Red Raiders paying a visit to Austin to take on the Longhorns.  We’ll just see how that hurry up spread offense works in the Texas Capitol.

We’ll also see how the new Google DoubleClick Ad Exchange works out, which Google is undergoing to take on Yahoo (among others) in display advertising.

This is one of the first long-anticipated outcomes of the Google DoubleClick deal, and though many would suggest Google’s playing catchup on this one, The New York Times writes this is Google “pushing for a second act.”

Yahoo won’t give up that ground easily, and since this space is all about filling excess inventory, I would suggest that targeting and context will become the rightful king of display.

Whoever can provide the best contextual display advertising, wins…good luck to the rare instance where Google plays David to somebody else’s Goliath.

Speaking of context, I’d like to provide you more on the coming Information on Demand conference previously mentioned in this blog, and which will be held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from October 25-29.

And so I’m going to refer you to our own Nancy Kreps, who recently previewed the conference with developerWorks’ Scott Laningham in this podcast.

Nancy is the conference education manager and does a brilliant job (in less than 6 minutes) of explaining what you can expect to find should you make the journey to Vegas.

As also previously mentioned, I will be making a visit to Vegas to blog the event, and am really looking forward to my return engagement at the Mandalay Bay.

I wasn’t able to make it last year, but blogged the event in 2006 and 2007, and can only say it’s a massive, and massively educational and informative, event.

It can even be quite entertaining (one year I remember SWG general manager, Steve Mills, taking the stage wearing some Elvis glasses, and that alone was the worth the price of admission!).

I will be joined this year by Scott Laningham with his roving camera and microphone, so we hope to cover the event from any number of angles (including in advance of the event…keep an eye on this blog for coming podcasts from a garden variety of Information Management experts!)

Information management and business analytics are ridiculously hot topics at the moment, so we’ll be sure to keep that in mind in order to keep our coverage market driven.

That said, we will also reserve the right to cover ridiculously frivolous and Vega-rati-like topics as well.

Hey, what’s a trip to Vegas without a sighting of the skydiving Flying Elvi??