Wednesday, March 29, 2006

eBay adds RSS for search

It is essential for businesses offering dynamic content to have RSS feeds. Whether it is a blog or other information, to be found, one must be updated and served up via RSS. eBay has now joined in!
eBay adds RSS for search: "eBay started offering feeds for your searches last week. That's good. It'll help extend RSS even more. Plus it'll be nice for eBayers. It's just a shame they aren't using the proposed standard orange box, but instead the letters RSS in an orange rectangle.

But is RSS totally legit now or what? Rhetorical question, but I think this really is good news.

Tags:

History for Sale


A German enigma machine is on sale at eBay. Current price: $13,000+ US dollars.

Just think, what people gave their lives to break and steal is now being sold to the highest bidder over the Internet!


Tuesday, March 28, 2006

The Power of Goals

Goal setting has always been very important to me. There was a study done a while back of achievement and it was "discovered" that those who graduated from a leading business school with written goals went on to accumulate a signficantly higher amount of net worth than those who didn't.

I've continued to teach my students about goal setting. This article is one of the best goal setting articles I've come across in a long time!

The Power of Goals: "I was not the most intelligent kid in school. I was not the smartest kid in class. I was not the best student ever. One thing I am sure of is I am the most ambitious person you can ever meet. As it turned out a few years after graduation I began to see the difference [...]"


Monday, March 27, 2006

Some great resources to read about Web 2.0

These three articles profile many of the services that I use including: bloglines and writely. Unfortunately, the top 25 on Business 2.0 doesn't include two of my new favorites: Airset (for calendaring and family management) and Odeo (for easy podcasting.) I also really like Talkr which takes my teaching blog and converts it to a podcast radio station for iPods.

Read these articles, they are important!

There are many new services that are free that are available including some great sales and marketing tools. (Read the Business 2.0 list, it does a great job of explaining the service in "newbie" terms.)

Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Google Testifies about their Chinese censorship

This is an interesting read for those watching what Google is doing in China.

The hearing is being conducted because Google recently agreed to filter "objectionable" material on behalf of the Chinese government. This "objectionable" material includes of course, the most threatening religion to the realm, evangelical Christianity as well as all references to democracy. I believe that Google has abandoned American beliefs and has adopted a "Southpark" view of things:
Sometimes what's right isn't as important as what's profitable.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park, Prehistoric Ice Man, 1999
As we forget values, we lose our identity. As we lose our identity, we try to be everyone to everybody. As we try to be everyone to everybody we lose focus. As we lose focus, we lose profitability and someone else takes our place. Google didn't exist 8 years a go.

Food for thought!