If you a chance, read James Bagnell's story on the two Nortel investors who have played key roles in the submission of 11 proposals to be considered at Nortel 2003 and 2004 AGM's this week. Sucha Mann and Dr. Edward Napke have apparently touched a nerve to the point that four senior Nortel executives, including CFO Peter Currie, make the trek to Ottawa to sit down and hear what they have to say. Nortel has recommended shareholders vote against the proposals, which range from pushing back salaries to 1998 levels to rules that would restrict travel to economy class. Mann said his activism was inspired by Robert Verdun who was onto Nortel's accounting troubles long before they became a major scandal. For more on Nortel's AGMs, which take place Wednesday in suburban Toronto (far away from the analysts on Bay St. and close the airport so all the U.S. senior executives can easily fly and fly out), check out my story in Monday's Financial Post.

As much as I like the concept of Technorati, I'm growing increasingly frustrated with how it works. One of my biggest issues is the quality of the search results. Many of them produce mediocre results, rather than the most relevant or interesting. It may be the nature the beast but there's so much flotsam and jetsom that it's difficult to find the good stuff. I'm not sure about the methodology Technorati is using to spider the blogosphere but it's inconsistent. I came across a two-week old post by Ronald Gruia on Nortel on Technorati today that had apparently been posted five hours ago. It may have been that Gruia - a.k.a The Technology Futurist - isn't using a ping tool, or it may be that Technorati's spider took time to check out the post. Either way, it makes you think about the accuracy - or at least the timeliness - of Technorati's search results. From a personal perspective, Technorati does a terrible job tracking my blog even though I use the Technorati ping form every day. Many of my posts are days if not weeks old - if they appear at all. Could it be that I'm using Blogware rather than Blogger or TypePad? As far as what works for me when it comes to blog search, I find Feedster and Blogdigger to be better services. Feedster and Blogster may not have the same bells and whistles or Technorati - or the venture capital - but they do a good job. You wonder how long it's going to take Google to come out with a blog search engine. Perhaps Google will some of its cash to buy a Feedster, Blogdigger or Technorati. A more likely scenario is that Google has a small army of Phds already working on something. Another route is the development of a human-edited blog search service - sort of like what Yahoo did during the early years - where only the best blogs in each category would be listed. Some of the blogs would be added through in-house editors while many others would be through recommendations and the ratings of peers. I provided more details about this plan in a post earlier this year.

With Nortel's 2003 and 2004 AGMs this Wednesday, perhaps we'll get answers for pressing question such as why ex-CEO Frank Dunn was fired for "cause", and why ex-COO Gary Daichendt packed his bags and headed back to California after his restructuring plan was rejected by Nortel's board. In the meantime, Ronald Gruia had an interesting take on what went down with Daichendt and the board. He figures it was simpy a question of hubris, ambition and different corporate cultures as Daichendt pressed for rapid changes. If the board found this scenario unappealing, the next question they didn't they realize this was Daichendt's approach/modus operandi before they hired him?