Ever wondered what business process modelling was all about, and how it fitted with IT development? Read this white paper for an overview of the subject including some examples. See more. more…
Having an exit strategy if the project goes pear shaped is a concern of sponsors. How does a project manager create the exit strategy? See more. more…
As a Business Manager, are you confused when faced with a new IT Project? This article sets out six questions you should ask before a project is started. See more. more…
Afaik gmta and there is somethin in the contract that shud b changd. IMO, the 2nd para shud read, “…excluded to protect the guilty.” The exsting language provides tmi. Plz make the chnages and forward a revizd cpy to r… more…
How your team works is just as important as what your team does. Your team’s values build metrics and a common focus.Those values may include collaboration, innovation, customer focus or zero-defects. For values to become more than a poster on… more…
Thanks to Pointsec Mobile Technologies, we now know that forgetfulness qualifies as a major IT concern. The company contacted taxi companies in nine countries asking them how common it is for customers to leave cell phones, PDAs, laptops and other… more…
I wanted to note the top-ten excuses I run into when following up on tasks, but lengthened the list to twelve. So here it goes:12. I wasn’t hired to do that. 11. I thought I told you. 10. I’m so… more…
I’ve recently read a couple of books that made me chuckle along. If you have sat through boring sales presentations, listened to cliche-laden speeches, or tried to decipher an e-mail from a consultant, please read Why Business People Speak Like… more…
A recent survey by Salary.com determined that an average stay-at-home mother would earn $131,471 annually, including overtime, if she received a paycheck. It’s estimated that she works about 100 hours a week, and would be entitled to a base pay… more…
Management involves coping with uncertainty. There are potentially endless factors that may go against your business plans. For example, your information systems may go down at a critical moment, your accountant may predict that you will miss earnings expectations, or… more…
Your day can be fast paced. As a business person, you must sift through a barrage of information, from sales reports to P&L statements to balance sheets. It’s hard sometimes to make sense of it all, and to see which… more…
A study, carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry, found excessive use of technology reduced workers’ intelligence - Infomania worse than marijuana…. more…
Happy Birthday McDonald’s! The home of the Golden Arches turned 50 today. Ray Kroc opened the first restaurant in Des Plaines, IL; today, there are more than 30,000. If you purchased 100 shares of McD’s on the 1965 IPO at… more…
When I hear business people talking about sales goals, they’re always referring to Gross sales. I want to do a million dollars in sales or I want my company to grow to $10 million or $100 million. But then I… more…
If any of your business is through the mail, phone or Internet, watch out. Credit card fraud through these venues are on the way of becoming the main form of fraud. Direct Marketing News has an article today: MasterCard Expert… more…
Wal-Mart generated a profit of $10.3 billion in their last fiscal year. That breaks down to almost $20,000 a minute. Now there’s someone that put the old adage “We’ll make it up in volume” to work!… more…
If you are at all interested in mindmapping you need to check out the rash of blogs that have sprung recently:Writing about Art is like Dancing about ArchitectureHobart’s Mindjet WeblogBeyond CrayonsThe Mindjet BlogAnd if you haven’t discovered MM yet, the… more…
A recent poll surveyed executives at companies with annual sales of at least $50 million. The vast majority said that information technology spending was on the rebound and that avoiding tech purchases could create competitive disadvantages. And the consequences?49% said… more…
The Financial Services Office of the University of Arizona has a fine definition of professional two-way communication … posted first in their ValuesOf course this is about creating a culture of effective listening, conveying and receiving ideas, information and direction both verbally and nonverbally.display open, direct, honest, and positive communicationparticipates in creating a safe environment for venting, disagreeing, and giving feed back with othersshows ability to use tone and body language to express themselves positivelychecks email and voicemail on a timely basis (I think THIS is one of the issues I mostly miss in definitions… I am sure you have contacts, lecturers, customers, bosses or co-workers that ignore your sent mails ("didn’t get it…") because coping with your questions or critisim would be too much of personal efforttakes time to research and think through issues before responding to customers & co-workers verbally or via written communication (well - see above)demonstrates ability to constructively argue and facilitates this with othersA "recent survey" of the top 100 SMEs in the US found that the best companies communicated regularly with employees and valued their feedback. Listening and acting upon suggestions – so simple? … discussed more in detail here more…
More than a year ago I discussed Blog recruiting for weblogs being utilized for recruiting the real cream of the crop - as happy Jorg joined Microsoftand by change just today I I came across Cedric searching talents for Googlehref="http://www.beust.com/weblog/archives/000187.html where he asks:Wanna work at Google? Email me. and just some days later happy Bob joins Google:-) nothing has changed… the weblog community and it’s uses for marketing talents, products and companies has just developed… more…
Performance of employees and whole organziations is affected by the goals they set themselves. Altough the goal setting process is a tedious and complex one, the effort is not only worthwhile, but becoming essential in todays organizations.Organizations introducing a goal-based management - also known as - Management by Objectives report performance increases of 25% or more.But there are bad examples as well…Goal setting is the process of developing, negotiating and establishing targets that challenge the individual.Inviduals and Organizations strive to achieve their goals, thereby if goals are set up correct, their performance should increase.Ed Locke and Gary Graham developed a sophisticated model in their "theory of goal setting and task performance" also known as "Goal Setting Theory" developed / published in 1968 and 1990.The basic idea is that a goal serves as a motivator because it allows people to compare their current performance with that required to achieve the goal. To the extend they believe they will miss the goal, they feel dissatisfied and strive to improve their performance to meet it.Continued reading Goal Setting and Performance Evaluation process… more…
Jeremy’s post Fired for Blogging really shocked me a bit… bloggers are somewhat more creative and self-empowered than the ususal nine-to-five workers you meet everyday… Why would someone get fired for such a great hobby - the content? the time someone devotes to his personal enrichment versus those of the company’s ???Continued reading Joyce Trout Fired From Friendster For Blogging… more…
We need to move from seeing our Web sites as a series of projects to managing them as a well-planned process.The quality of search on many Web sites is awful. Most organizations would simply not countenance having their reception area in the mess that their search engine is in. Yet far more people pass through their search engine every day than through their reception.One of the reasons that organizations manage search so poorly is that they see search as a project. Someone decides a search engine is needed. A specification is prepared and software is bought and installed. Then, the team moves on to the next project…Managing Content Is a Process, Not a Project | MarketingProfs.com more…
Do you already have an “Extreme Culture” in your XP project?Do you lead an XP project? Do you know everything about the XP process? Are you aware about the need for the “extreme culture” in your project? Culture is the way things are seen and done.Your team might not be used to the way things need to be done in an XP project. That has to change and cannot be done by an e-mail or some stand-up meeting.Changing a culture is difficult and a very long-term task, independent from XP projects – we are talking about humans having to change. And behaving like always is usually easier. Apart from the normal team building process some things implied by the project model XP need to be addressed actively - by you – the project manager.Continued reading Extreme Culture in XP projects… more…
On May 1, 2004, Oracle announced plans to retire the Oracle8i Database Administrator Certified Professional exams. As of December 31, 2004, the core certification exams for the Oracle8i DBA OCP track will no longer be available. Oracle will continue to honor and endorse those candidates who have earned their Oracle8i Database Administrator Certified Professional credential. Oracle8i DBA OCPs will continue to receive all benefits and communications as well as access to OCP resources relevant to their certification. and most important:The following upgrade exams will NOT retire and will remain available after December 31, 2004:Exam 1Z0-035 Oracle9i DBA New Features for Oracle7.3 and Oracle8 OCPs (One exam for Oracle7.3 and Oracle8 DBA OCPs to upgrade their OCP credential to Oracle9i) Exam 1Z0-020 Oracle8i: New Features for AdministratorsExam 1Z0-030 Oracle9i: Database: New Features for Administrators And that basically means, you cannot upgrade from your 8i certification with an easy single exam that doesn’t need the hands-on session.And that means, you will not "receive all benefits" of an 8i DBA as currently… you have to get back to start if you want a current Oracle certification.Well - and comparing the RDBMS of version 8 to version 10 …To be honest - Oracle never gave me relevant "benefits" for my certification - except some standard-mails and a download for their logo… a lot of headhunters just checking DBA keywords attack me - still today after years of project management…Larry - I will not upgrade this year or anytime… and waste more money on your multi-choice exams - especially not after this mail… and better: I guess I will probably take this exam out of my CVs to get rid of stupid "we need a DBA for 5 hours/week" - inquiries from incompetent recruiters… more…
On May 1, 2004, Oracle announced plans to retire the Oracle8i Database Administrator Certified Professional exams. As of December 31, 2004, the core certification exams for the Oracle8i DBA OCP track will no longer be available. Oracle will continue to honor and endorse those candidates who have earned their Oracle8i Database Administrator Certified Professional credential. Oracle8i DBA OCPs will continue to receive all benefits and communications as well as access to OCP resources relevant to their certification. and most important:The following upgrade exams will NOT retire and will remain available after December 31, 2004:Exam 1Z0-035 Oracle9i DBA New Features for Oracle7.3 and Oracle8 OCPs (One exam for Oracle7.3 and Oracle8 DBA OCPs to upgrade their OCP credential to Oracle9i) Exam 1Z0-020 Oracle8i: New Features for AdministratorsExam 1Z0-030 Oracle9i: Database: New Features for Administrators And that basically means, you cannot upgrade from your 8i certification with an easy single exam that doesn’t need the hands-on session.And that means, you will not "receive all benefits" of an 8i DBA as currently… you have to get back to start if you want a current Oracle certification.Well - and comparing the RDBMS of version 8 to version 10 …To be honest - Oracle never gave me relevant "benefits" for my certification - except some standard-mails and a download for their logo… a lot of headhunters just checking DBA keywords attack me - still today after years of project management…Larry - I will not upgrade this year or anytime… and waste more money on your multi-choice exams - especially not after this mail… and better: I guess I will probably take this exam out of my CVs to get rid of stupid "we need a DBA for 5 hours/week" - inquiries from incompetent recruiters… more…
maleProgramming Language Inventor or Serial Killer?Can you tell a coder from a cannibal? Try to work out which of the following spent their time hacking computers and which prerefferd hacking away at corpses instead…Definately a funny but interesting game for all you project managers out there! Enjoy - and remember for your next staffing interview 
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Just came across XGD: Extreme Programming for Game Developerswere Chromatic writes about Project Manager Thomas Demachy who explains Extreme Game Development, a variant of XP. Check out the full article at Gamasutra (require free user subscription).Continued reading XGD: Extreme Programming for Game Developers… more…
How true this is … the "can-do" attitude together with the "real programmers"-attitude is probably one of the issues causing troubles in some projects, don’t you agree? I think both are very high-risk positions, especially if your customer’s have similar a point of view. Thanks to Matt Payne and his friend Dan for this one more…
Kirk Pepperdine and Joseph Ottinger sent me an e-mail last weekend asking if I would write a guest editorial about management issues for the Java Developers JournalI’ve been reading your blog and must say that it’s been very entertaining. We are currently exploring the idea of adding more management based content to the magazine.JDJ’s Average Monthly Circulation of More Than 162,000* Copies Reaches More Readers Than Dr. Dobb’s, MSDN, Visual Studio, Windows & .Net Magazine, MS Certified Professional, and All Other i-Technology Magazines. press releaseand yes - I will - not that I am bored with my project or my night university… but this sounds pretty interesting. They also allow me to publish the article on my blog aswell so that’s a fine thing.This night I sent in the first draft to Joe, Kirk and Alan Williamson (the editor in-chief since Feb. 2001) … I am expecting their feedback. more…
I would like to point to the most important motivation theories, because I have not seen such a summary before in a blog and this was yet another little part of the extensive christmas present we got from our business english lecturer…MASLOW’S THEORY OF MOTIVATION AND HUMAN NEEDS Maslow’s classical theory is taught in every basic management course. Structuring the dependency of needs of human beings is a good beginning when starting to analyze humans in general. McGregor’s Factor X/Y theory theory categorizes employees in two types and explains possible behavior of their managers. Even if I know that at least these two types exists I believe it?s a too broad spectrum in human behavior to explain it with these two types.The Hawthorne study found out that employees got more motivated as soon as they recognized that they got more attention than before. It was illustrated with the example of changing lights in the factory where only the change of light intensity was important, not if it was brighter or darker. interesting, huh?Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory extends Maslow’s model very well. It?s actually obvious that people cannot be motivated without giving them a feeling of security or acceptance first. It applies very well to the situation with motivation in the workplace because it explains the needs for correct "hygiene factors" like expected salary, a good work place with proper lighting and desks for example.The equity theory assumes that the own social comparison of employees to their peers is the most important factor for motivation. The expectancy theory suggests that people are motivated to work toward rewards, bonuses and other goodies. In my opinion only a combination of these two, with the expectancy theory following the equity theory in relevance, is a valid approach. I do not believe in only the social aspects and mind-setting of employees, although the social position and treatment is probably the required precursor before additional goodies and goals can create a vital effect on motivation.Continued reading Top Motivation Theories explained and compared… more…
Six measures I would suggest to improve morale and motivation among office employees without increasing costs substantially areintroduce flex-time: this leads to various beneficial points for the employee - caring for sick family members, sleeping longer when the last day was a hard one or a great party with friends, finishing homework or even x-mas shopping without being stuck in the crowd are great examples for using flex-time. create good office space: Make sure that your employees get a great wooden desk, indirect lighting, a window that can be opened (preferable with a great view, but opening is a minimum - don’t care for the air conditioner). Of course all the ugly cubicles must be replaced with cosy 3-4 person offices. And the employees should have the choice on the colleagues they want to sit with. Then let the employees know that it is their office and desk and let them place in there whatever they desire - without getting stress with the - office standards police? ? might it be a sofa or a radio-set. Your employees have a chance to accept their workplace as a piece of themselves; after all they are spending a huge percentile of their life there.Create pleasant working conditions (part2): Make sure there is always enough water, coffee and tea available for free for your employees. Then they don?t spend time thinking about when and where to get it by themselves and can spend their break for what it’s meant to be - a break.respect holidays and breaks: employees are often giving their best and last bit of energy when they know that their holidays or breaks are accepted and that there will be no doubt that they can take it as long as their work result is OK. The obligatory reserve to confirm vacation requests months prior to their request is an absolute no-no from my point of view. If it is not possible to have the company up and running with one person being away for 2 weeks is unacceptable if you can plan for this situation for weeks or months. The alternative is probably sick leave.have interesting work: without having interesting, risky or challenging work your best employees will leave pretty soon. Make sure that most of the work that needs to be done is the interesting one. Beware of too much administrative overhead in your organization that could kill all the pleasure in working. Huge corporations usually have the biggest problem with this point. I believe this is one of the most important points for me.pay well: although this has a commercial factor as well - whatever you do for your employees - at last they work for earning money for living. And if their demands are not met by your payment, you have a problem. This is the most important hygiene factor in Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory from my point of view.Continued reading Improve morale and motivation among employees without increasing costs… more…
Dave has a nice article about saving time for bloggers… some rather practical, but then straighforward ideas that are targetted to minimize information overload blur as I would call itRead less.Read what you do read less often.Filter your reading.Read faster.Browse faster. Be more focused in your writing. Write faster. Write more concisely, and if necessary, less often.Tell true stories and provide live, first-hand reports. Split the workload with other bloggers. Narrow your audience.Learn to type properly. (oh well - a basic requirement I guess)Budget your time. Give yourself time to think, to experience offline, and to think creatively. This is the most important.Overall I like his summary and remember myself scanning zillions of news per day in the summer … well actually at a job-less time… With a 100% job and a 100% university study there’s basically not much time left but to write about the things that really impress you… in a straigt and fast manner…Continued reading Time-Savers for Bloggers… more…
Jorgen Thelin points me to this article questioning "What Makes a Good Integration Developer?" ?Over time, a number of statistics have shown that the top developers outperform the average developers (not even talking about the bad ones) by an order of magnitude or so. As it turns out that the top developers do not earn 10 times the average salary, these guys (and girls) are a steal. Every company should then aim to get a hold of these "top quartile" developers, assuming the individuals demonstrate a minimum amount of social behavior. Of course - as DB noted - you could say "Average developers are expensive" - but that’s way to negative, isn’t it? more…
235,000 Fewer Programmers by 2015 out of a CNN money report is hot stuff…This article explains part of the motivation for my additional marketing & sales study… I’ve been coding for 10+ yrs and have been working as a project manager already for 4+ yrs now… And believe me - requirements change, technology changes, motivation changes and job-requirements change…I do not expect me to do the same stuff I’ve done until now in 10 yrs from now… it well be sure some sort of combination thing with an excellent mixture of all good ingredients, 25 yrs work experience in software development, management skills and (web.)marketing/sales/pre-sales and other activies… hell - what do you call that type of job???If you believe only a bit of such reports, then get some good books, inscribe a university or just spend your money on courses, trainings and certifications and make sure you are always miles ahead of the IT-gardeners… more…
Just found this list of top 10 listening skills put together by Halma Comber..Stop talkingPut all your energy into listeningNotice your own filters when listeningDon’t argue mentallyInhibit your impulse to immediately answer questionsAdjust to the situationWhen in doubt about whether to listen or speak, keep listeningDon’t assume you have to do anything but listenWork at listeningListen generously with a willingness to be influenced more…
vsbabu thinks about creating and MSP 2000 tutorial… mhhh… I guess I might enjoy a pragmatic one with do’s and don’ts and templates and import/export tips/tricks and real-life samples… more…
Thanks to J2EEGEEK I could find this great Dilbert cartoon…Very funny, because my project is an XP aswell - fortunately my customer understood the advantages and disadvantages and helps enforcing small featuresets per release… oh - btw: release in 1 week more…
Google and Dilbert Doodle rocks… more…
Single-User Subversion and Multiuser Subversion by Rafael Garcia-Suarez explain the setup of the Subversion version control system which tends to be the better CVS. He demonstrates how to use it for multiuser, distributed projects aswell as single user enviroments. What can this modern, powerful source-control system do for you?Subversion is an open source revision control system, similar in purpose to the well-known, widely deployed, and aging CVS. It is designed to provide state-of-the-art versioning, built from modern technologies.Subversion is still in development and has not reached version 1.0 yet. However, it’s pretty stable and you can use it right now. In this article, we’ll cover the basics of Subversion, how to install it, and how to use Subversion for personal projects. A future article will cover installing and usingAlso checkout a previous post…Current Version ist Subversion 0.35 (code complete on Friday 12 December 2003, release one week later)…Continued reading Subversion Setup Tutorials… more…
Google is one of the best things to happen to the Net. So will its IPO, expected this spring, be a must-buy? A look inside reveals a talented company facing trouble. Fortune’s Dec 8th issue has the great article Can Google Grow Up? about it…Continued reading Can Google Grow Up?… more…
The Process of Database Refactoring is a very comprehensive article on the issues, cases and do’s and don’ts of database refactoring - i.e. schema changing… Scott Ambler is the author of from which chapter 12 this essay is summarized… The book was released just in October 2003Both will be worth a read… make sure you order the book… I got the tip for this on Andrej’s discussion about PL/SQL refactoring …Continued reading Process of Database Refactoring… more…
Andrej discovered utPLsql as I found utPLsql some time ago… he thinks - and I guess I can agree absolutely - that refactoring pl/sql is harder than refactoring java:1) refactoring java usually doesn’t impact production data, but when refactoring sql you have to think about migrating data, which usually means creating a lot of migration scripts. {except you have some wonderful tools I am still looking for}2) there’s no tool support for pl/sql refactoring as in Java…well… his thread has a nice discussion where even creator Steven Feuerstein put his 2 cents into it, so that’s definately worth a read…Continued reading Refactoring PL/SQL… more…
Google Sitemaps allows you to update an XML file to Google for telling the crawlers where to crawl for update… wow.Google Sitemaps is an experiment in web crawling. Using Sitemaps to inform and direct our crawlers, we hope to expand our coverage of the web and improve the time to inclusion in our index.It’s a collaborative crawling system that enables you to communicate directly with Google to keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages.By placing a Sitemap-formatted file on your webserver, you enable our crawlers to find out what pages are present and which have recently changed, and to crawl your site accordingly.you get:Better crawl coverage to help people find more of your web pages Fresher search results A smarter crawl because you can provide specific information about all your web pages, such as when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changesamazing feature… there is even a Google Sitemap Generator available .. and you are allowed to update the Google Crawler once per hour.. the site map generator is a little pythin script to run actually, no heavy Windows application.Webmasters with a Unix webserver may consider setting this up as a cron job. Google created an own Sitemap XML Schema where you can specify those details aschangefreq — how frequently the content at the URL is likely to change lastmod — the time the content at the URL was last modified loc — the URL location priority — the priority of the page relative to other pages on the same site url — this tag encapsulates the first four tags in this list urlset — this tag encapsulates the first five tags in this listI am sure there will be great discussions and applications for this use… more…
Not only that the cache servers and pagerank datacenters of Google went down days ago, today a firefox plugin was released that happens to become the Nightmare of Google : CustomizeGoogleIt allows you toenable a Google Suggest query in all Google windows - very very handyadd some extra search links to Yahoo, Teoma, MSN, etc.filter ads from all Google services like search, group, news, etcdisallow Google to create a user profile by tampering with their Cookies…Now this is a tough one… enjoy.This hack is actually just ONE of a million cool scripts using GreaseMonkey a framework for Firefox to modify web sites behaviour as you wish… more…
With the recent surge of tools using web service APIs like the Yahoo APIs in PHP such as * Link Harvester* Yahoo MT Plugin* Released Yahoo Web Api it suddenly became necessary for several web hosts (including me with my own dedicated servers) to provide the PHP domxml extension in their setup.I noticed that the standard CPANEL setup didn’t provide an option for adding DOMXML to the standard PHP recompilation and decided to dig into the configure/make config of CPANEL9/10.x and PHP4.3.9/10 …Here are my steps for getting DOMXML and XML-RPC (another usefull thing) into your standard PHP distro… all steps without ANY warranties… get a paid administrator if you don’t have the guts.Continued reading How-to install DOMXML and XML-RPC for PHP by recompiling PHP4 and Apache on your CPANEL server… more…
Aaron from Seobook released a new open source deep link analyser. The tool is open source, uses the new Yahoo web services infrastructure and can be hosted freely…Read more on it in my web marketing blog more…
The SLA enforcement business is VERY crowded… actually searching for a little script to install on a cheap separate host to do some http checks brought me to some http / web content checker services or scripts … as soon as some extras are needed you get charged almost the price of a standard web hosting package where you could setup that service yourself…Of course some offers vary a lot in terms of service and features…Free Monitoring of 5 UrlsServerMojo - freeKnightguard @ $179 / yrMontoring for 29$ or 12 surveys to fill outcheck 1 URL for $8.95/moSite Uptime has another 1 URL checker freeAnd of course there are client based programs,best of which is ServersAlive that even has a free download version. Java based ServerWatcher - an open source SF projectContinued reading Http Monitors and Web Content Checker… more…
Another cool RSS feed service today…Ambatch offers a Clickbank RSS feed for you to provide product data for integration into weblogs or with other RSS based scripts or publishing tools.Ambatch is the creator of an automatic translation tool because they claim that the automatic translation of your web site can bring you tons of traffic… their explanation is simple that the the existing internet is very big and competitive when it comes to english sites, but far easier for other languages…Therefore they even offer a multilingual keyword analysis tool that shows you all sorts of translations of your main keyword plus the pagerank and competition for the top ranked sites… interesting to see that those numbers are REALLY much smaller…Very funny to play with - check it out! more…
With several other RSS advertisement services, Google finally is running a new ad format beta with Adsense ads in RSS feeds only on longhornblogs. I expected this already a year before or so - … basically that means that RSS is finally such a strength that Google cares about it Read about their beta-test at AdSense in RSSThanks to Rok again for this great post - checkout his very RSS bound weblog!Also Google also announced today to their publishers, that they will be offeringAdvertisers can CHOOSE your website for publishing… that means their ads are bound to your ad space… amazing new feature for the advertisersImpression only ads - you get paid only by impressions (a CPM value as with good old banner time)They are testing text ads that fill the whole ad box (looks like those on the Longhornblogs)They introduced bigger text ad blocks - e.g. 336 x 280 (only for text ads) instead of 300 x 250 (for text + image ads) more…
Amaztype is a nice new application from Japan, drawing your words using Amazon book cover artworks… your have to check this out - Flash is required and it’s definately fun to play around there and zoom in/out of the covers…Just as Google they implemented their own Amaztype Zeitgeist where they display the top 10 words queried …Funny that Harry Potter and Warren Ellis lead the #1 spots with three times more that Cat or double times more than "sex" - my first query… (they have two spots for that - I guess they dont distinguish between lower/uppercase entered words… more…
This is going to ship end of April and it looks very promising, as it should show developers how to harness the power of services such as Google, eBay, PayPal, and Amazon.com from within an application, whether it is Web-based, Windows-based, or even a Microsoft Office application.After a quick review of the basics, readers will dive into more advanced techniques such as calling the APIs from mobile devices, Office VBA programs, Windows Forms and Web applications, and even how to integrate the various APIs together for a complete solution.Denise Gosnell skillfully guides readers through the ins and outs of the various services, the anatomy of an API query, which features are available via the APIs, and how to get results from their own applications.But beware - if you are into eBay coding, take note that they are just migrating to a generic xml scheme and this book cannot pick up those latest developments so fast … check those out here more…
That was fast… the Yahoo Web API - finally released just a few days ago now has a few cool applications been made for… * SearchGuild has a site PHP/webservice search to integrate * a Yahoo Search movable type plugin is available as well * this Wiki lists a good two dozens of other applications already available : I unlinked this, as it’s full of spam… http://developer.yahoo.net/wiki/index.cgi?ApplicationList happy browsing Continued reading Yahoo Search site integration, applications and Movable Type plugin… more…
This one is neat - a new EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through in Google.The first phase of the study was conducted with 50 people in Eyetools’ eye tracking lab in San Francisco, California and presented panel participants with 5 distinct scenarios that would require the use of a search engine. Google was used as the search engine in all of the instances.This is the measured organic Ranking Visibility (shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)Rank 1 - 100%Rank 2 - 100%Rank 3 - 100%Rank 4 - 85%Rank 5 - 60%Rank 6 - 50%Rank 7 - 50%Rank 8 - 30%Rank 9 - 30%Rank 10 - 20%You can also check the full size pictureThere seems to be a “F” shaped scan pattern, where the eye tends to travel vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right if something caught the participant’s attention.What I find especially intersting is, that the top Google Adsense ad still receives 50% of the eyes, while the bottom ad get’s 10 onyl…in Other words: a TOP Adwords ranking buys you a guaranted SERP at position 6 or 7…. not too bad…but then nothing REALLY unexpected… the whole study had 50 people analysed, but the study is still going on… watch out for future results.Eyetools Uncover Google’s Golden Triangle more…
After Google had it’s Google API exposed for various tool builders for years already, Yahoo followed them with a web service API - utilizing REST ( the Representational State Transfer technology to handle resources in a common way - sort of enhanced session handling… )But what’s even more important and MUCH better than with Google… they expose EVERYTHING!All the various search types are exposed and documented in these Service APIs documents: Image Search Local Search News Search Video Search Web SearchCheckout the Yahoo! Search Web Services today! I want to see all those great tools ASAP. more…
Overstock.com Auctions announced the release of an XML feed for the Affiliate Program…they provide product and auction data via web-services - XML-RPC - for their affiliates… I am signed up in the beta-program and received a nice PDF document with the protocol specifications…with a simple HTTP query for superman comics you receive all current auction data with several category data…This is the answer to Ebay’s XML API , altough ebay’s API is much more advanced and supports transactions (bidding) via XML what overstock does not… but hey - it’s a start…. more…
Jeff Barr from Amazon - AWS team has a nice blog up at typepad that covers all Amazon Web services news…AWS is the web service technology that 1000s of affiliates use to build their amazon shops… also the product infos you see listed on this site are downloaded via AWS from Amazon…And after 2+ years of operation finally MIT Technology Review Covers AWS …I have a trendous amount of admiration for Amazon because they really revised their philosophy. Their philosophy three years ago was that they’d spent hundreds of millions building a product database, and that their database was their most sacred asset.Now Amazon has 65,000 registered developers and 500,000 resellers.They’re saying to them, we’ll offer the product channel, you just come and sell here. They realize now that their biggest asset is actually their retailing partners. They sell less and less of the products they stock themselves, and are increasing the share of third-party resellers who sell through them. I think that was a big, big task. I don’t know if other [e-commerce] companies can catch up. more…
Take a look at some of the newest RSS newsreaders offered for Mac OS X, and size up their different feature lists.MacDevCenter.com: RSS: The Next GenerationAt the end, based on what we’ve seen, we’ll try to answer the question: Where is RSS software heading? more…
Oh well - VentureCap times are in again I guess… is the whole market crazy about blogs, content aggregation and text ads ? I think so… People start pouring money into a newsreader company creating NewsGator and explain it… Why Did We Invest in NewsGator? so why? I think because the personal publishing movement is actually so spread that Google and many others jumped the waggon… really rocks… and I am in it c’mon - pour money over me… 
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com.myjavatools.xml.Rss is featured in the articel Java Package Processes All RSS Formats because it reads all known RSS formats (from version 0.90 to 2.0) and outputs all the converted data in the 2.0 format. You can instantiate com.myjavatools.xml.Rss from any RSS feed, regardless of version. The class gives access to all the RSS elements, and you also can create new RSS containers, add or change the contents, and write RSS data to an output stream. However, it doesn’t offer any syndication features, so no filtration or selection… Looks interested to base RSS aggregating services on… more…
Television Listings and XMLTV talks about XMLTV, a format for providing do-it-yourself TiVo PCs with a TV listings. It’s a Perl XML-based solution by Edward Avis that many of the TV-on-your-PC packages like Freevo and MythTV support. With support for screen-scraping data for many country’s cable systems, XMLTV can take various sources and create a consistent stream of XML.If you have an iCal-compliant viewer (like Mozilla) you can even convert this to a calendar. more…
Yahoo introduces a beta release of an RSS headlines reader for the "My Yahoo!" portal service… finally RSS for the masses? already 10000+ of my 50000+ readers access the page via RSS feeds - I just wonder how this will change when the big sites like Yahoo provide easy to use such easy to use RSS services Add it to My Yahoo! here: Introducing RSS Headlines Jeremy has a nice doc on how to ping Yahoo more…
Windows Longhorn is a demonstrably powerful and ambitious concept, but the architectural principles are hardly new. From 10,000 feet, Mozilla’s architecture looks remarkably similar.Nigel McFarlane compares the Longhorn XAML technology to Mozilla’s XUL in Longhorn and Mozilla: Birds of a Feather more…
Oracle OTN has a tutorial up on Recursive XSLT that describes sample code that uses recursive XSLT calls and JavaScript to display an expanding and collapsing tree view of an XML document. more…
Greg Reinacker’s Marketing by RSS inspires me and others like Dwight and Derek to think about user-tracking for RSS feeds via HTTP Redirects when fetching the feed. One mind-twist seems to be the transfering of User-Ids (as object-ids, numeric values, integers or something like that)… why not use a simple name or e-Mail for user-tracking… and then let the user decide when he wants to use a new e-Mail. I guess assigning object-ids on the web is fine, but when it comes to identification I would hate something like a 3453465363 that’s Christoph Cemper… the only type of autogenerated ID is my old 7-digit ICQ-Id … the only one ! more…
Fast Web Services is an initiative at Sun Microsystems aimed at the identification of performance problems in existing implementations of Web Services standards.They - all of a sudden - find out that sending XMLs around takes up memory, network, parsing XMLs from free text takes up memory, CPU, etc…Fast Web Services attempts to solve these problems by defining binary-based messages that consume less bandwidth and are faster and require less memory to be processed. The price for this is loss of self-description. Fast Web Services is not an attempt to replace XML-based messaging. It is designed to be an alternative that can be used when performance is an issue.I think of this like a switchable AXIS provider or something like that - that means as soon as you go into production you pull a trigger and get fast and binary chunks on the wire instead of you XML stories… Good idea at all. And a not so boring intiative in the endless world of Web Services standards definition groups. more…
ODBC Socket Server is an open source database access toolkit that exposes Windows ODBC data sources with an XML-based TCP/IP interface. This allows Linux, UNIX, Macintosh, or any other TCP/IP capable OS to access ODBC (or OLE DB) databases running on Windows systems. This even allows MS Access to be accessed across TCP/IP networks. more…
as I wrote in previous posts the landscape for RSS on P800 does look like there’s something available…well - test results are frustratingFriday does only support Syndic8 and does not even seem to connect… found no source…mReaderdoes import OPML and connects *sometimes* for download (without progress logs) and then nothing - no reading workedPeekAndPick at least brought me to the posts to mark for emailing, but then the email-function was broke… oh well…special test for blog-posting not RSS reading Azure returns unspecific errors (general exceptions because of general exception catchers 
what I saw from the code I started to play around) but I at least could make a connect *sometimes*all of these apps are Java / J2ME 1.04 and free/open source (although not all open)… I did not try the commercial tip because of it’s obvious limitations… I also stepped back from the original requirement of offline-browsing and tried to have RSS reading “at least” onlinewell - overall the usability is without doubt critical and not-usable for my day-to-day use… Eclipse is warmed up and fit with WTK104 and I wonder if there will be chance to make 1 good from 3 bad versions…Continued reading NO Stable RSS J2ME Newsfeed Reader for P800 (yet)!… more…
Google signed a deal to Bundle it’s Toolbar with WinZip - and the latest distribution seems to have it inside already…Just like spyware/adware companies bundled their Gator and other crap, Google goes the mass distribution way now to get it’s Toolbar to the masses.Why? Because they rely on user intervention, user traffic statistics as an additional metric in their rankings - what else?And of course having a Google logo on every Internet Explorer has some advertisting value you must admit altough the brand is already worth zillions and Google topped Coke, Apple, Mini in Brand Value, they have to reach out for more… more…
Another cool RSS feed service today…Ambatch offers a Clickbank RSS feed for you to provide product data for integration into weblogs or with other RSS based scripts or publishing tools.Ambatch is the creator of an automatic translation tool because they claim that the automatic translation of your web site can bring you tons of traffic… their explanation is simple that the the existing internet is very big and competitive when it comes to english sites, but far easier for other languages…Therefore they even offer a multilingual keyword analysis tool that shows you all sorts of translations of your main keyword plus the pagerank and competition for the top ranked sites… interesting to see that those numbers are REALLY much smaller…Very funny to play with - check it out! more…
With several other RSS advertisement services, Google finally is running a new ad format beta with Adsense ads in RSS feeds only on longhornblogs. I expected this already a year before or so - … basically that means that RSS is finally such a strength that Google cares about it Read about their beta-test at AdSense in RSSThanks to Rok again for this great post - checkout his very RSS bound weblog!Also Google also announced today to their publishers, that they will be offeringAdvertisers can CHOOSE your website for publishing… that means their ads are bound to your ad space… amazing new feature for the advertisersImpression only ads - you get paid only by impressions (a CPM value as with good old banner time)They are testing text ads that fill the whole ad box (looks like those on the Longhornblogs)They introduced bigger text ad blocks - e.g. 336 x 280 (only for text ads) instead of 300 x 250 (for text + image ads) more…
In a recent study by MarketingSherpa I read that marketers will spend $3.3 billion USD on paid search listings, while only $238.5 million on site optimization to get more and better rankings in organic search… Inhouse SEOs are excluded from this, but it is assumed that this is a minor number of SEOs working… At the same time we learnt in The Golden Google Triangle that these ad spots are more and more ignored and people tend to click 100% more on the organic listings… more…
This one is neat - a new EyeTracking Study verifies the importance of page position and rank in both Organic and PPC search results for visibility and click through in Google.The first phase of the study was conducted with 50 people in Eyetools’ eye tracking lab in San Francisco, California and presented panel participants with 5 distinct scenarios that would require the use of a search engine. Google was used as the search engine in all of the instances.This is the measured organic Ranking Visibility (shown in a percentage of participants looking at a listing in this location)Rank 1 - 100%Rank 2 - 100%Rank 3 - 100%Rank 4 - 85%Rank 5 - 60%Rank 6 - 50%Rank 7 - 50%Rank 8 - 30%Rank 9 - 30%Rank 10 - 20%You can also check the full size pictureThere seems to be a “F” shaped scan pattern, where the eye tends to travel vertically along the far left side of the results looking for visual cues (relevant words, brands, etc) and then scanning to the right if something caught the participant’s attention.What I find especially intersting is, that the top Google Adsense ad still receives 50% of the eyes, while the bottom ad get’s 10 onyl…in Other words: a TOP Adwords ranking buys you a guaranted SERP at position 6 or 7…. not too bad…but then nothing REALLY unexpected… the whole study had 50 people analysed, but the study is still going on… watch out for future results.Eyetools Uncover Google’s Golden Triangle more…
Tomorrow the first "Affiliate Marketing" Trade Show starts tomorrow February 17 until 19, 2005 (Thursday-Saturday) … sort of an online event that you can attend without ever leaving your home or office (and that’s good with this unbelievable bad weather here in Austria Revenue is a Premium Sponsor at eComXpo, the first online trade show for the Affiliate Marketing Channel and they provided me a free pass - so I’ll definately check it out tomorrow…I think they provide some kind of special software to browse the show, attend some classes (like video conferencing?) and checkout some other channels..the hype - Why Attend?Choose from 100 educational sessions ranging from search, to email to making blogs payNetwork with 100’s of merchants, affiliates and executives from the top networksLearn how to finally quit that ‘day’ job from experts including Shawn Collins, Declan Dunn, Linda Woods and Haiko de Poel, Jr.Get a chance to win great prizes such as iPods, flat-screen TVs, Caribbean vacations and a free classified ad in Revenue ($1,000 value)Receive all the benefits of a top trade show for only $89.95 that can be written off as a business expenseGet a free 1 year subscription to Revenue magazine, plus $500 in valuable coupons to keep for yourself or use as a prize for your own customersI would say that this is recommend alone for the Revenue subscription that everyone in the affiliate marketing business should have… more…
It’s confirmed now by a more scientific study… DoubleClick examined 12 weeks of prepurchase search engine usage…The study, which analyzes pre-purchase search activity across four categories (Apparel, Computer Hardware, Sports and Fitness, and Travel), showed that almost 50 percent of all online shoppers conducted related research at a search engine before making an online purchase.What is also outlined in the study is the frequency of searches and how close there are in relation to the actual purchase. All of this varies by category.Summary of Findings:Search plays a role in roughly half of all online purchases.The majority of pre-purchase search activity (searches and clicks) involvesgeneric terms, not the merchants brands.Branded terms peak in search activity closer to the purchase.Most buyers complete their relevant search activity well in advance of the purchase.Generic terms represent an opportunity to attract and engage in-marketsearchers throughout the buying cycle.Search result analyses (sales and ROI) that consider only a short period priorto purchase do not account for the value of generic searchBrand-specific searches accounted for only 18.1 to 28.5 percent of all searches those buyers conducted, depending on the respective purchase categories.Nothing that we didnt guess alone - but it’s good to have another resource in this Search before Purchase PDFSource: DoubleClick: Online Advertising, Email Marketing, Database Marketing and Marketing Analytics SolutionsVia RevenueMagazine - the first and coolest online marketing magazine… more…
The "The Web Credibility Project" is part of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, an ongoing project concentrating onPerforming quantitative research on Web credibility.Collecting all public information on Web credibility.Acting as a clearinghouse for this information.Facilitating research and discussion about Web credibility.Helping designers create credible Web sites.Great numbers, great bullets of do’s and don’ts that were statistically researched … I guess I’ll have to read this whole article on Web Credibility ASAP…Thanks to BeginBiz Affiliate Marketing Blog: Web Site Credibility for this link. more…
While searching for marketing related blogs I came across Heather’s Marketing at Microsoft Blog, which seems to be actually a more "Marketing Recruiting at Microsoft" Blog as Heather’s speciality is recruiting Marketing/Tech talents for such shiny positions as Technical Diplomacy (that are responsible for managing the relationship with Microsoft’s largest competitors) and the conference-famous Technical Envagelists you all probably know…Personally I enjoyed reading some of Heather’s posts because she outlines for examples, why snail-mail adresses are important on your resumes (except your name is of the seldom sort…)Heather’s "Marketing at Microsoft" Blog more…
Chu Yeow is collecting money for a full page ad in the New York times to announce the release of FireFox 1.0 … fancy idea… I wonder it he will make it…6 more days to show your support for Firefox! more…
More than a year ago I discussed Blog recruiting for weblogs being utilized for recruiting the real cream of the crop - as happy Jorg joined Microsoftand by change just today I I came across Cedric searching talents for Googlehref="http://www.beust.com/weblog/archives/000187.html where he asks:Wanna work at Google? Email me. and just some days later happy Bob joins Google:-) nothing has changed… the weblog community and it’s uses for marketing talents, products and companies has just developed… more…
I came across Revenue some days ago and ordered their subscription immediately… finally a print mag that allows to track the affiliate marketing business … Revenue , is the first magazine dedicated to affiliate marketing. Montgomery Research focusses on the convergence of business and technology. Offering industry news, product reviews, cases studies, education, guidance, tutorials and real-life sucess stories.They claim to be working with the thought leaders in this field - industry gurus, successful affiliates, top journalists and others - to produce a magazine that stresses good business practices and strong ethical guidelines that will help affiliate marketing grow.They have some great sample articles up - check them out at their Gallery of Previous IssuesRevenue MagazineThe major topics to subscribe for areSearch Engine StrategiesDesign IdeasMarketing Industry NewsInterviews With Industry Leadersall just to raise Your Level of Revenue more…
It has been June 22nd when GOOGLE had an overall PR update. The previous record was about 50-60 days between two updates – now it’s aproaching 90!Some sites are reporting sporadic PR changes – for some pages – but mostly drops because of index removal I guessAre the days of the overall update dead? Are they further trying to confound Webmaster tools by eliminating update comparisons?My recommendation – don’t get confused to much about that. ( did you dream about PR updates and what Google is trying to do about PR? Well – I did – and several fellow webmasters as well… )Another idea is to expect that PR representation will change so that it will better represent Google’s "opinion" of a web page. At the moment toolbar PR is some kind of logarithmical representation of the Real PageRank that Google’s algorithms work with. It’s a very basic and limited way of Representation of their "opinion" of the value of a page. A better way to display their internal data about theming, relations, relevance, authority will sure better reinforce their authority on search and put the competition far behind them again…Continued reading Where is Google’s PageRank update now?… more…
As I wrote, I am trying Clicksor - a new context sensitive PPC ads service …After some days the numbers look really bad - 10575 impressions contra 7 clicks… thats a CTR of only 0,06 % … looks like the ads are not really targetted…I will leave it up for another week or two… while looking for another nice alternative … more…
And another jumping the context sensitive text ad PPC (pay per click) bandwagon - Clicksor promises 60% revenue share for their publishers.Clicksor passes its profits along to you by paying up to 60% of the advertising clicks revenues generated from your website. Clicksor provides online real time stats and a fortnightly payment schedule. They pay via check or even better for international customers through PayPal… do you know my bank charges me 14 EUR = 20 $ for clearing a US dollar check ? This must be illegal in some countries of the world - not Austria.. hate it Anyway - what is really interesting is that they offer referral bonuses like other affiliate programs… So when you join their affiliate program via my link (above), you will also be enrolled for the webmasters referral program. But better for me - for every webmaster I refer they promise to pay me $5.00 cash. Well - I wonder if any of you is interested in trying that out, yet giving me a little appreciation with the referral link.These ads are already rolled out all over the site, so I should be able to report some experiences about their programm pretty soon - taken that in August (moved servers at the beginning, so a bit incomplete stats yet) I got 66273 unqiue visitors, that visited 1.51 each (100362 total visits) and loading 3.76 pages/visit (equals 378062 pages) for a max of 1342558 hits (13.37 hits/visit) … nice, eh? more…
Well - I must admit - that was a not too bad idea… the resources needed to re-elect a Republican president and Congress shall be collected with an internet marketing affiliate program… zillions of web pages shall wear stars+stripes and Mr. Dumbface to collect donations… affiliates will earn earn 30% of each donation that is brought in… Interesting:Please note search engine marketing is NOT allowed as part of this program. Affiliates will NOT be paid for donations generated through search engines.Could it be, because he is just unelectable ?Anyway… a Publisher Sign Up at CJ is open for all spammers and spy-ware creators… everyone may participate… looking forward to many "help Bush get re-elected with you money" spam crap…Brian writes more about it…What I like most is this comment: But there’s still time for an enterprising porn webmaster to signup for the program, slap some links up on their site and issue a press release that they are being funded by the Republicans. more…
A lot of people try to get around the problem that you have to use the Google Toolbar plugin for Internet Explorer - using IE just to see the PR of a page really sucks…what’s this Dr.Google guy talking about? Read the PageRank PrimerSo here i my nice best of resource list for your PageRank investigations: "Prog (formerly Proogle) | PageRank Search Engine":http://www.webmasterbrain.com/proogle/PageRank ImagesGoogle PageRank Calculator Value Report without Toolbar SEO Rank : Search Engine Position Analysis ReportSeo Guy’s PR Finder(it seems as some of these scripts are violating the Google TOS who don’t allow automatic queries… don’t say we didn’t warn you…)Enjoy… more…
Pfizer Inc. agreed to pay $430 million and plead guilty to criminal charges for illegally marketing an epilepsy drug for unapproved uses such as migraines and pain, U.S. prosecutors said on Thursday.Continued reading Pfizer pays $430 million for false marketing… more…
EasyAdvertise.com is another Text Ad Network I just came across… I just wonder how all those wannabe adsense/textads.biz will develop in the future… more…
GoogleGuy was missunderstood when Mark interpreted that it should be April. My own Tech-Weblog advanced to a PR of 7 now, having almost double backlinks now… great stuff! more…
William suggests, that Page Rank was abandoned by Google and that the AdSense program not only gives Google revenue but an even better way to measure web site performance…Problem is that the "democratic" and "non-evil" way that Google wants to go does not work for the part of the web that is not in the Ad Sense program. That would definately bias the search engine results towards Google Affilated sites, which would mean a big piece of the cake would get bad results. Always assuming that PR would be completely dead.As an additional metric, this suggestion looks fine to me.Adsense, PageRank, and the Way Things Combine more…
RSSTop55 - Best Blog Directory And RSS Submission Sites by Robin Good. check it out. more…
The latest on update Austin points me to another description of the "newer" Google Hilltop Algorithm and it’s strategy to find "expert" documents in the web based on content and of-course incoming links…. Interesting that one issue they use for relevancy tracking is Usage Information so actually the knowledge about which search results users actually click on…That fits perfectly with the observation of Dirson that Google started to have redirect urls in the search-results - basically for tracking on which results the users really clicked… check interesting, huh? more…
Adam points out that Sony pictures finally understood that copyrighting things and hunting the fans of characters like SpiderMan does not really help the marketing department at all.. so they provided ready made blog templates in a SpiderMan-Style for LiveJournal and Blogger… great to see this move… more…
John Battelle’s Searchblog leads me to RSS Ads - folks that came up with the same idea that probably several of us already had - I even experimented the last days with some random text ads in the RSS feed.They want to act as a hub between ad seller and buyer and provide means to integrate the dynamic ads into the RSS feeds. I hope they know that 99% of all RSS readers do not run JavaScript (for good reasons), otherwise we could have used Adsense or AdSonar or TextAds or some other ad system already… more…
40% of application development projects are canceled before completion, and a third of the remaining projects are challenged by cost/time overruns. This webcast looks at the new features in Microsoft Project Standard 2003 that can help you avoid pitfalls and minimize IT project manager pains. more…
CTOs, CIOs, and all officers who oversee major development projects have had to deliver the dreaded message. But a deadline for the sake of a deadline is a dangerous pitfall that can consume an entire project and stymie it to the point that it never launches. Over the years the author has come up with six simple rules that help deadlines become more meaningful, while keeping the developers, the user community, the CFO and the CEO all satisfied. more…
Schlumberger Oilfield Services provides virtually every type of exploration and production service required during the life of an oil and gas reservoir. Schlumberger has operations in over 100 countries and has over 64,000 employees. Schlumberger Oilfield Services is implementing SAP R/3 worldwide. EMC Documentum Consulting has helped Schlumberger Oilfield Services implement new technologies, and efficient project management has translated into expanded product capabilities as well as and improved services for customers. more…
Schlumberger Oilfield Services provides virtually every type of exploration and production service required during the life of an oil and gas reservoir. Schlumberger Oilfield Services is implementing SAP R/3 worldwide. EMC Documentum Consulting was responsible for supporting and consulting Schlumberger’s implementation of the SAP R/3 module Sales & Distribution (SD). The special challenge within this project was to create an integrated sales module of the different services of six product lines. more…
Salmat (ASX Code: SLM) is one of Australasia’s leading customer communications companies providing all forms of direct communications from teleservices and letterbox delivery to document management and fulfilment. As a commitment to customer service, Salmat began looking for a collaboration tool in early 2002. The company needed a web-based software model where all project team members could work on a project in a central place. In June 2002, Salmat implemented Documentum eRoom technology in its operations to create web-based digital workplaces for its extended enterprise collaboration, project collaboration and client engagements. more…
I’ve heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then …
OK, so you’re the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.
What would you spend the money on?
How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?