Category Archives: Business

More questions answered

I have been following the conversation around the blogosphere over the last Questions and Answers Was the work created on your own time, on your own hardware, and uploaded to your own personal server?… I created and uploaded the image Friday night at home with my personal computer.

Amazon Prime

Amazon.com introduced a membership program called Amazon Prime that provides free two-day shipping for a yearly fee of $80. You can invite up to four family members in the same household to share the same Amazon Prime benefits at no extra cost. The household option is especially interesting. I might sign-up and share the account among members of my work family….

Managing the Technorati community

Starting Tuesday, February 1, I will start a new job as Community Manager at Technorati. I will be responsible for helping the world understand Technorati’s service offerings and providing developers with the tools they need to build and extend Technorati. I will help make your voices heard and build new features to strengthen the links we create while consuming and producing content. I am excited to be working with a team of smart and passionate people. Technorati is not the only company competing to be your live search destination and keep you informed of the latest happenings in the areas…

Personalized search meets the job market

I am meeting more and more people dissatisfied with their jobs. The top gripe is not job function, but management environment. Are you encouraged to learn new things? Attend conferences? Do you feel like you make a measurable difference? All interesting things to think about heading in to 2005 from the perspective of the employee as well as the employer. Companies are too busy to post articulate job listings and interview candidates. Most of the good job candidates are passive seekers since they cannot send an explicit signal that might get them fired or make life uncomfortable in their current…

Value of idle time

I just finished reading “Quitting the paint factory,” an article by Mark Slouka in the November 2004 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Mark looks at the history of the American worker, the pursuit of money over the value of time and mind, and questions what we value. Mark talks about the value of idle time, how we now spend money to have busy leisure time, and he shares the stories of literary figures struggling with some of the same questions about life. (via BoingBoing) What it says, crudely enough, is that in order to be successful, we must not only work…

Howard Rheingold class at Stanford

Howard Rheingold is teaching a class titled Toward a Literacy of Cooperation at Stanford on Wednesdays from 4:15 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. from January 5, 2005 until March 16. The class covers the economics of cooperation and will utilize weblogs and wikis to communicate between classes and with people from all over the world. Syllabus readings include Smart Mobs, Eric Bonabeau, Joi Ito, and Micah Sifry are all required readings. Non-students who live in the area can show up to the course without signing up.If you live outside the area we hope to be able to deliver a videostream to…

Gator EULA prohibits uninstallers

Ben Edelman read through the 63-page EULA for Gator and found some pretty interesting clauses. You agree that you will not use, or encourage others to use, any unauthorized means for the removal of the GAIN AdServer, or any GAIN-Supported Software from a computer. Ad-Aware and Spybot are of course not on the approved list. Gator displays advertisements on a computers with its software installed. These advertisements are triggered by the sites you browse, often showing a competitive offering for e-commerce sites. Like spam, the way to make companies like Claria (makers of Gator) go away is to simply not…