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Unable To Connect
Trend Watchers Resource List
Euan Semple Discusses Real-world Use of Blogs, Wikis, and Social Software in Business
On Value Transactions for "Free" Content
Tab Sidebar for Firefox 1.5
Scott Adams Outranks Christensen, Bennis, Gladwell, Others
Automating the International Affiliate Sale
Geoffrey Moore on Becoming More Zen
Safer Browsing
Debating the War Powers Act in a Post 9/11 World
M&A Ladder - Flipping Businesses Like Real Estate

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Tuesday, December 6, 2005

Unable To Connect

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I love this!

unable_to_connect.png

Courtesy of the hosts file I found via Gregor.

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 1:06 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Security

Trend Watchers Resource List

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A list of resources for trend watchers, from Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute. Published at StartupJournal. [via TP Wire Service]

Recommended Reading For Trend Spotters

Current events form future trends, says Gerald Celente, founder and director of the Trends Research Institute, which has been tracking business, consumer, social and lifestyle trends since 1980.
[...]
Here is a selection of books Mr. Celente counts among the exceptions, as well as his daily online reads for spotting trends.

secret_econ_small.jpg The Secrets of Economic Indicators: Hidden Clues to Future Economic Trends and Investment Opportunities by Bernard Baumohl. "Whether you're tracking pop culture, high fashion or health care, all things are connected, and economics is the tie that binds them all."

battle_soul_capitalism_small.jpg The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism by John C. Bogle. "Tracking trends is a way of seeing where we are, how we got here and where we're going. And John Bogle's new book does just that."

china_inc_small.jpg China, Inc. : How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World by Ted C Fishman.


chinese_century_small.jpg The Chinese Century: The Rising Chinese Economy and Its Impact on the Global Economy, the Balance of Power, and Your Job by Oded Shenkar. "I'm among those who believe that while the 20th century was America's, the 21st will be China's."

self-reliant_living_small.jpgThe Big Book of Self-Reliant Living: Advice and Information on Just About Everything You Need to Know to Live on Planet Earth by Walter Szykitka (Editor). "One of hottest trends we see is the rapidly growing desire of more people to be self empowered, non-reliant, and 'off the grid.'

Haaretz, Al Jazeera, the Independent and China Online. "These four are our daily must-read news sites."

Drudge Report and the Raw Story. "We log on to these two Internet sites daily because they generally span the ideological spectrum."
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:57 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Books, Business & Finance, Policy & Regulation, Strategy


Monday, December 5, 2005

Euan Semple Discusses Real-world Use of Blogs, Wikis, and Social Software in Business

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Just had a listen to Euan Semple, International Information Industry Awards 2005 Information Professional Of The Year, on BBC Radio Five Live talking about the process of managing internal blogs and wikis within the BBC. Interesting stuff.

Me on the radio

I have just been interviewed by Chris Vallance for the Pods and Blogs section of Up All Night on BBC Radio Five Live. It is meant to be going out live at 2.50 am GMT but when it gets to "Listen Again" I'll post a link.
I listened to the show live. I guess we'll have to wait a bit for the archive link to be posted. I listened to a little bit of the subsequent segments out of curiosity - a bit on Indian music podcasts and some news about UK taxes on oil companies. Pretty good stuff. I rarely listen to news anymore, or watch it on TV. Just too tiresome.
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 10:04 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Collaboration, Strategy

On Value Transactions for "Free" Content

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Morespace has dropped the registration requirements for downloading free essays. This post looks at the complaint that spurred the change and the logic behind value transactions.  [More...]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 5:32 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Strategy

Tab Sidebar for Firefox 1.5

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This is a nice extension. Shows thumbnails of the pages in all the open tabs. Not sure how useful in the long run, but interesting enough to keep it installed for a while. [via Marc Orchant]

Tab Sidebar for Firefox 1.5 update

Tab Sidebar

The Tab Sidebar extension for Firefox 1.5 (only) just got a cool update. The previews for each page in the sidebar now offer navigation controls that allow you to stop loadig a tab, navigate forward or back for that tab’s recent history, or refresh that tab’s content. Nice.

Other features this extension offers:


  • Provides options to reload or close any tab.
  • You can move tabs around with drag and drop.
  • You can drop links and local files anywhere you like in the preview list.
  • Displays the security status of tabs.
  • Automatically refreshes the tab preview.
  • Lets you hide the main tab bar when the sidebar is open.
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 3:03 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 

Scott Adams Outranks Christensen, Bennis, Gladwell, Others

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Suntop Media has listed their Top 50 Business Thinkers for 2005. Interesting list. Most interesting is that anti-management pundit Scott Adams of Dilbert fame is ranked 12, well ahead of such auspicious names as Clayton Christensen, Warren Bennis, Ricardo Semlar, and Geoffrey Moore. Number one on the list is consumate theorist Michael Porter. Number 2 is consumate practitioner Bill Gates. And no, my name doesn't appear anywhere on the list. Just an oversight, I'm sure.
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 2:44 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance

Automating the International Affiliate Sale

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This morning Matt Mower sent a link to Toronto-based programmer Scott Ambler's site, where Scott has created an Amazon Affiliate page with links for US, UK, CAN, AUS, and JP geographies. Matt has bought a few books from recommendations here, but has never purchased via my Amazon links becasuse they are US-based and he is in the UK. Matt thought Scott's setup was good and recommended I do something similar so he could purchase via here in the future. He went on to say:
It also occurs to me that, with one of those things that can look you up via your IP address, you could dynamically generate a link to the correct associates site (US/UK/etc...) without needing to provide a whole bunch o'links (but obviously providing fall-back to a page with all of them in case it goes wrong).
This seems like a good idea but I don't know anything about it - how difficult is it, are there existing tools, etc. An inquiry to AJAX and Remote Scripting guru Brent Ashley on the feasibility of Matt's suggestion led to hostip.info which has some interesting examples of what can be done with ip lookups. Below I've pasted in a snippet of code that should (if all goes well) display the national flag of an individual page viewer.

IP Address Lookup

If there is a zooming map and a flag above this worked, if not it didn't. I can't see the HTML in Qumana so I don't know how this will be formatted. But it seems to me that using an ip lookup service such as hostip.info combined with a little server-side scripting one could do what Matt suggests. I don't know how useful it would be. Probably not very for any one individual - I've sold a whopping 10 books through Amazon since October 1, generating roughly $10 in affiliate fees. Can't imagine that would be much higher if I'd had CAN/UK affiliate links available. But then again...
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Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 2:18 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Automation, Books

Geoffrey Moore on Becoming More Zen

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Highly-regarded technology market and business strategy consultant Geoffrey Moore, of Crossing the Chasm and Gorilla Game fame, has started a blog. It's good. I'm subscribed. Here he talks about the need for better UIs to support genuine multitasking. I am adding the phrase "becoming more Zen" to my daily lexicon. [via Marc Orchant ]

Renovating

[...] Except that the UI on our PCs is not constructed to optimize this mental landscape. It is too single-state oriented. It reminds me of, well, me. These days I like doing things in single-threaded fashion. I think of it as becoming more Zen. My wife and children, on the other hand, think of it as, “Don’t talk to Dad when he is driving.” Be that as it may, I am certainly not the target demographic for the next PC.[...]
Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 12:14 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 


Saturday, December 3, 2005

Safer Browsing

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I’ve been using the three pieces of software below since I read Gregor’s post a few days ago. While I don’t disable Flash or Java, I have done the other things he lists. Installing NoScript, TargetKiller, and the hosts file has speeded my surfing and caused no noticeable side effects. Recommended additions to the anti-virus/anti-spyware arsenal..  

safer browsing

here is what i am currently using to make browsing safer and less annoying:
  • Use Firefox (duh)
  • Don't install the Flash plugin
  • Turn off "Allow sites to set cookies" and keep a small whitelist
  • Use NoScript to only allow javascript on a small number of sites
  • Install this hosts file to remove most advertising
  • Use TargetKiller to get rid of pages opening up in new windows
  • Disable Java
It's amazing how much faster and pleasant the web becomes if you take the garbage out..
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Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 9:03 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Security, Technology

Debating the War Powers Act in a Post 9/11 World

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Reminder to me for some books I saw during a debate on the War Powers Act. All by academics and probably too dense and obtuse to be really useful, but the debate was interesting. Three different views presented, ranging from conservative to liberal. The debate was held in Berkeley and the conservative guy (John Yoo) was obviously prepared to be harassed by the audience. To the audience's credit, they managed to hold their abuse until he finished speaking.

All three eventually get to a similar conclusion - that our gutless, *ussified, bought-and-paid-for, corporatist Congress has abdicated/abandoned/lost/misplaced it's place in the political process and is the crux of the problem (whatever they perceive the problem to be.) They have different ideas about what the Congress needs to do, but not much disagreement about how woefully broken Congress is. Amen to that.

imbalance_small.jpgImbalance of Powers: Constitutional Interpretation and the Making of American Foreign Policy by Gordon Silverstein, Oxford University Press, 1996, 0195104773

war_powers_small.jpgWar Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution by Peter Irons, Metropolitan Books, 2005, 0805075933


powers_of_war_and_peace_small.jpgThe Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 by John Yoo, University Of Chicago Press, 2005, 0226960315

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 6:19 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Policy & Regulation

M&A Ladder - Flipping Businesses Like Real Estate

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The TLC show Property Ladder is reality TV about short-term investors who take on a residential property, dress it up, and sell it as fast as possible. How long before someone combines it with “The Apprentice” and chronicles the hilarious antics of fatcat CEOs pocketing millions for selling broken companies? Instead of cheap new carpet and shoddy brickwork we could get the inside scoop on cooking the books and pumping up the bottom line with cuts that destroy the company’s future. A surefire ratings winner… [via Oligopoly Watch]

Paydirt!

A recent BusinessWeek article ("Fat Merger Payouts for CEOs", 12/12/05) details some of the big paydays coming out of recent mergers and acquisitions, what the article calls "golden bungee cords." They include:

Several of these CEOs were presiding over out-and-out failures, most notably MCI and AT&T. As the article states, "Some skeptics suggest that supersize payouts perversely benefit CEOS whose companies' weaknesses made them vulnerable to takeover." Those cynical skeptics!

And the practice distorts the motivation for takeovers. "Others see the tendency as spawning a generation of serial dealmakers whose specialty is dressing up companies for sale," the article notes. Prime examples are the aforementioned Kilts, who had made a killing selling Nabisco to Philip Morris (now Altria) and Capellas, who had done very well offloading Compaq Computer to Hewlett-Packard. As one analyst notes in the story, CEOS are more and more thinking "What am I doing running the business for the long term when I can just flip it and make more money?"

Posted by: Send an e-mail to Terry Frazier Terry Frazier at 3:17 PM  | Permanent Link  | Trackback URL | 
Categories: Business & Finance
Terry W. Frazier
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