70,000 Jobs Lost In One Day

In a single day, on Jan. 26, at least 70,000 new layoffs were announced at companies as varied as telecom giant Sprint Nextel , construction equipment maker Caterpillar , semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments , and pharmaceutical house Pfizer .

Presidential Inauguration May Yield Stock Market Free Fall

There has been a lot of excitement recently as Bush prepares to exit the White House. People are feeling better about things. Change is on the way. I really wanted to chime in with my 2 cents about the passing of the presidential torch, and all I could come up with was one thought:

Investors – Learn what ‘sell the news‘ means and run like hell.

Those Wall Street giants might get a week of unloading to their retail customers at higher levels before everyone realizes the economy is more screwed in Feburary than we were in January. Beware once their inventory of long shares is gone; the short they are already prepared to put in will hit the market like a Rail Car. It will be interesting to see if a real bottom can be put in whenever they decide to cover the mammoth short that will develop over the next few months.

YouTube Mutes Videos & Begins Death Spiral

In case you haven’t noticed, this past week YouTube began muting audio in videos suspected of violating copyright laws. This doesn’t just include only people posting rips of DVDs or tracks from their Mp3 Collection, it also includes Spoofs, Documentaries, and anything else that includes content or music that is in violation of copyright laws. YouTube is beginning a huge transformation from a popular site, into a site that a lot of people used to like .

Should YouTube take these results out of the search listings? Should users be required to filter through tons of results that have no audio? Now the whole site feels like a trick. You are excited to find the video you want to see, you click it, then they smack you in face. It’s only a matter of time before people begin finding their old favorite (now muted) videos on other services (about to get sued out of existence) and reduce the amount of time they spend on YouTube by 20-40%. People can embed videos from other services into their FaceBook just as easily as they do from YouTube.

YouTube hasn’t focused on tools or functionality to increase loyalty for the common user. Mix in the current advertising slump for large network sites and you get a clear picture of the Horror YouTube’s managers must be experiencing.

Is Google missing the mark on Social Networking when it comes to YouTube? Are they even throwing darts? YouTube better pray there isn’t any type of social revolt against Google.

WordPress – Control Where Categories Are Displayed

If you ever want to exclude all  posts in specific category from being displayed on the index page of your wordpress blog, the archives, your feed, article lists, or anywhere else, you need a Category Visibility Plugin (unless you want to do the code yourself in The Loop).

After installing and reviewing a few, I am recommending the ACE Wordpress (Advanced Category Excluder) Plugin for Wordpress V2.7 +.

Twitter Allows Customers To Keep Track of Each Other

Twitter. It’s a verb, it’s a noun, it’s stupid simple and it’s the hottest new fad in Social Networking. If you join Twitter, you are given a web page with a form at the top and a few statistics pales. The form box is for one purpose, to type what you are doing at that moment. You can follow other Twitter users by subscribing to their “tweets”. If you start following 20 friends, you will have a snapshot view of what everyone is doing, most all of the time.

Now imagine how this can be applied to businesses and social groups. If customers from Louie’s Deli are using twitter and start following the Deli’s Twitter account, they can find each other by viewing lists of all the people who follow Louie’s updates. Customers can see what one another are up to, and even begin following each other’s updates regularly.

The blogging community, already obsessed with writing about themselves, is eating up Twitter like ice cream on the Forth of July. What could be better than embedding your “latest tweet” somewhere into your website? (lol) You can see mine on the right sidebar. Twitter is more of a social network version of crack than a game changer. I’m interested to see how far this star shoots before it falls.