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[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]
I got a note from someone who "helps lead the internet and Media efforts" at a fairly well known venture firm.
A click over to their website indicates that he's not a Managing Director or a Partner, not a Limited Senior Advisor, nor a Founding Strategic Director, Principal, Director of Business Development, Vice President or even a Senior Associate. He's an Associate. Which is fine, of course, unless the first thing you told a stranger is that you help lead an important initiative.
Organizations have always been good at title inflation, because it's free and it serves their purposes. The net, though, makes it easy to see what the hierarchy actually looks like, so it's better to just be clear, I think.
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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
Hardball in Wisconsin; Massive Defeat for Unions in Lame-Duck Session Posted: 16 Dec 2010 10:06 PM PST In Wisconsin, governor-elect Scott Walker is in a showdown with state employee unions. "Anything from the decertify all the way through modifications of the current laws in place," Walker said at a luncheon sponsored by the Milwaukee Press Club at the Newsroom Pub.Union supporters did not like the idea one bit and sought legislation in the lame-duck session that would tie Walker's hands. It was a done deal. The votes were there in the house. In the Senate it was 18-14 in favor. Or so everyone thought. Amazingly, at the last moment, two democrats including Senate Majority Leader Russ Decker switched votes sending the bills up in flames. Please consider Dems end lame duck session after failure to pass union contracts Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle's administration announced last week it had completed negotiations on 17 contracts covering 39,000 state workers ranging from teachers to janitors. The deals included no pay increases, factored in 16 furlough days Doyle ordered state employees to take in the current state budget and called for 5 percent increases in health care contributions.I am not sure exactly what happened but I would not be surprised to see either Russ Decker or Jeff Plale, both who lost reelection bids, find jobs with the new administration. Regardless of what did happen, I definitely look forward to some hardball from governor Jim Doyle. Specifically, I want to see him decertify public unions. If he can get that done, I would support him for president. Nationally, we need to kill collective bargaining for all public unions, scrap Davis-Bacon and all prevailing wage laws, mandate Right-to-Work laws, and do something to cleanup untenable public union pension promises, not just going forward, but existing benefits as well. To do the latter, I propose taxing public union pension benefits above $120,000 at 90%, returning the excess to the pension plans until the plans are fully funded using a reasonable rate of return estimate of the long-term T-Bill rate. That rate is currently 4.25%. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Dear Santa Letters Ask For Clothes, Shoes, Not Toys Posted: 16 Dec 2010 02:25 PM PST Looking for the reason behind soaring apparel sales and weak sales at Best Buy? You can find an explanation in Sad Santa Letters that the United States Post Office opens a reads as part of "Operation Santa". With just nine days to go until Santa shimmies down those chimneys, letters to the big, jolly guy are coming in fast and furious. "The common theme this year seems to be a single mom with young kids, the parent has left -- they don't know who the father is, or the father left -- and they can't pay the bills," said Pete Fontana, head of the United States Postal Service Operation Santa in New York. Industrywide Demand for Electronics is Soft Please consider Best Buy cuts outlook as results disappoint. Dec. 14, 2010, 12:55 p.m. ESTAmple Warning There was ample warning for that huge miss at Best Buy. On December 3, a report from SpendingPulse showed Retail Sales Led by Apparel, Consumer Electronics and Appliances Down. Retail sales are way up year-over-year and apparel is leading the way. I have this email from SpendingPulse to share: ....Repeating my ending comment from the above article: It's nice to see shoppers focus on real needs instead of electronic garbage. However, pent-up demand for apparel cannot last forever, nor can apparel sales form the foundation for a lasting recovery. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Plowing Into Junk While Insiders Bail Posted: 16 Dec 2010 10:06 AM PST After an enormous rally in junk bonds in 2009 and 2010, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Neuberger Berman, Guggenheim Partners, and Schroders Investment Management all recommend increased risk. Meanwhile investor sentiment on US treasuries is at a record low and the bull-bear spread on equities has widened out to 36.3. According to Dave Rosenberg, that bull-bear spread is within striking distance of the 42.4 all-time high posted in October 2007. Please consider Junk Spreads Narrow to 2007 Level on Fed's QE2 The extra yield investors demand to own high-risk debt rather than government bonds has dropped 82 basis points this month to 540 basis points, or 5.4 percentage points, the lowest since Nov. 16, 2007, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch's U.S. High-Yield Master II index.That is about as lopsided sentiment ever gets. The time to buy asset classes is when everyone hates them, not when everyone loves them. Nonetheless, extreme sentiment is only an indicator of extreme risk (or opportunity), not a timing mechanism. The Inside Bet Meanwhile corporate insiders (those most likely to actually know something), are bailing stock at a near record pace as Mark Hulbert explains in The Inside Bet. Vickers Weekly Insider Report is a service that analyzes the insider data, calculating each week a ratio of the number of shares that insiders have sold that week to the number that they have bought. Over the last four decades, according to Vickers, this ratio has averaged between 2 and 2.5 to 1. As a result, the firm considers any reading above 2.5-to-1 to be bearish, since it indicates an above-average pace of selling on the part of insiders.Insider sales, together with extremely bullish equity and junk bond sentiment, and extremely bearish treasury sentiment, along with numerous technical divergences in the stock market, sounds one of the biggest warning bells in history. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
EU Agrees to Agree in 2013, Bickers Like Mad Now; Smoldering Greece, Smoldering Politics Posted: 16 Dec 2010 01:37 AM PST Pretty speeches regarding solidarity will not solve the European debt crisis. Yet, as Greece smolders in riots and firebombs over various austerity measures, pretty speeches, untenable pledges regarding haircuts, and continual bickering remain the only action items of note coming from Europe. Smoldering Politics Greece is not the only thing smoldering right now. Eurozone politics is on the front burner, with the heat on high. Please consider Europe Staggers as Critical Summit Looms Europe's smoldering financial crisis flared up on Wednesday, with riots over austerity spending in Greece, new signs of troubles in Spain and little indication that European leaders were moving any closer to agreement on a systemic approach to long-term stability.Untenable Pledges Regarding Haircuts and a "Crisis-Proof" Euro Does that look like a good backdrop for heading into a summit? I think not, and given that the Euro is in the midst of a crisis, Merkel's statements about crisis-proof certainly look absurd. Moreover, once Ireland's finance minister is thrown out on his ass, we will see just who is in fantasy land regarding haircuts on bonds. My position is that the sooner Ireland tells the IMF and EU where to go, the better off Ireland will be. For more on this angle, please see To Ireland With Love. Agreement to Agree in 2013 The summit is about to start but there is so much bickering going on that the current discussion pertains to what the agreement will look like post 2013. Bloomberg reports EU Faces 'Gridlock' on Debt Crisis, Nears Deal on Post-2013 Tool European Union divisions widened over how to contain the debt contagion that threatens the euro, limiting a summit starting today to agreeing on a crisis- management mechanism that takes effect in 2013.Crisis Won't Wait One thing I am sure of is the crisis won't wait until 2013. Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Peer Steinbrück, former German foreign minister and former German minister of finance respectively, came up with a multi-point proposal that could conceivably work. Please see PIGS Exposure Table, Explaining the Panic by Numbers; Credit Warning in Spain, Belguim; Piecemeal Proposals Doomed for details. That's the good news. The bad news is the Steinmeier-Steinbrück plan would require agreements on haircuts, debt guarantees, E-bonds, fiscal policies, and debt rescues. Good luck with that. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
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6 New Tools Every SEO Should Check Out Posted: 15 Dec 2010 03:27 PM PST Posted by randfish There's some terrificly useful new tools on the market that very few SEOs are aware of or using (at least, if my experience is any indication). It's my duty, therefore, to share with some of these shiny new sites and let you explore, engage and apply to your campaigns and efforts. Hopefully, these will add great value for you, and expose them to folks who really need their help. Ontolo: An Expert Link Builder's DreamLink building is hard - really, really hard. Ontolo tries to productize many of the manual tasks, searches and tracking processes of link building with an extensive, diverse toolset. You can see a big list of their link building tools here, everything from .gov/.edu finders, to competitor link searches, to content research and backlink tracking/monitoring. They even have some nifty "productivity hacks" (small, simple tools to help with menial tasks like combining keywords or removing duplicates from lists). Below is a screenshot of Ontolo's Authority Links searching tool. As you can see, there's a multitude of options including clever sorting/filtering systems. Ontolo isn't for everyone - you should be a professional or semi-pro link builder (the tools and their results, rely on a lots of prior knowledge), but for those it's geared toward, the reviews have been outstanding and Ontolo's team (Ben Wills + Garret French) are constantly upgrading the service and functionality. _ SEO Gadget's Keyword Research BetaRichard Baxter is constantly lauded as one of the SEO industry's best, brightest and most driven minds. I curse myself for not smuggling him into the US, forging documents so he can stay, slapping an American accent on him and chaining him to a desk at SEOmoz (OK, maybe that's a little extreme). Luckily for you, my evil plans are for naught, and Richard's talent has born fruit for all of us in the field with his remarkable new keyword research tool (currently in beta). You create campaigns (similar to the SEOmoz web app), plug in your Google Analytics account, and sort keywords into relevant groups. The tool then lets you visualize potential opportunity for keywords you're already ranking for and those you haven't yet targeted by combining rank data, traffic data + search volume data (via Google's AdWords API). It's a brilliantly useful tool for those seeking new ways to ID the keywords that matter and take action on the low hanging fruit. _ Trunk.ly: Terrific Tracking for Your Twitter LinksTrunk.ly is a deceptively simple, currently free, application from the brilliant minds at BinaryPlex (who also built the much more full-featured Tribalytic, an Australian-focused social platform for measuring influence and share of voice). Plug Trunk.ly into your Twitter account and you'll get a page like the one below that shows a timeline of the links you (or your friends) have tweeted. How is that useful you say? Because people tweet some pretty brilliant stuff and they show, through tweets, what they care about. Whether you're relationship-building with a new contact, seeking topics for linkbait or content creation, attempting to determine the impact a particular individual has on clicks/rankings via their account or just interested in what someone has to say, Trunk.ly's a great way to do it. I've been surprised at how often I use it just to find the things I tweeted! (BTW - Trunk.ly's currently in private beta, but Alex + Tim, the creators, may have some invites if you leave comments in the post or tweet at them) _ Markup.io: Flawlessly Simple Screenshots + NotesYou know what's a pain in the butt? Taking a screenshot of a page, pasting it into Photoshop, adding notes to it, saving the file to be small and emailing it as an attachment to a developer/designer/marketer/manager/co-worker. Markup.io to the rescue! In a stroke of simplicity made brilliant, markup.io lets you drag a bookmark to your broswer that will, on click, show an overlay that lets you "mark up" any page on the web with text, lines, arrows, boxes and circles of various thickness, size and color. From there, you can directly export or share the resulting screen image. It works so intuitively that our team at SEOmoz has been finding massive utility and time savings by employing it vs. a manual process. _ Content Optimizer: Leveraging LDA for Keyword SuggestionsI already knew Russ Jones and the team at Virante were pretty smart, but this time they're just making me look bad :-) One of the biggest frustrations with our Labs LDA tool (warning, it's still in super beta and may not be particularly performant if lots of folks are actively using it) is that it doesn't recommend words and phrases to add or take away from a piece of content to help make it more "topically relevant" to a query. Building that would require a ton of very hard computer science work... Or would it? The team from Virante got impatient (a great trait in any startup) and built their own recommendation system. It's not perfect, but in many cases, like the example above, it can help. Basically, it grabs the top results from Google, checks for words those pages have that your page doesn't and runs LDA scores for your page (through the labs tool) with and without those keywords. Pretty sweet hack, right? _ Andrew Wright's + Ben Huff's SERPs Analysis Worksheets (MS Excel)A couple months ago, I presented a methodology of how to understand the ranking algorithm for an individual search result graphically to help figure out why the top ranking results are ahead of those below them (and what metrics you might need to tweak/improve to reach the top). It's certainly not a perfect strike, but many folks were excited and interested. In fact, Andrew Wright, one of the crackerjack consultants from Bloom Media in the UK, put some serious time into improving my models and the Excel spreadsheet to make it more usable, understandable and useful. But, that's not all. SEOmoz's own Ben Huff looked over Andrew's work and had some tweaks of his own. In the Box.net folder I've linked to, you'll find both versions of the Excel worksheet. By Q2 of next year, we hope to have this SERPs analysis system included in our web app (so they'll be no need to go crazy in Excel). In the meantime, though, we invite you to check out the work of these two, building one on the other (Ben Huff worked on the initial version with me for the face-off in London) and give feedback. It may not be the most scalable way to analyze a search result, but currently, it's the most comprehensive and likely to produce a good answer. _ If you've got any other great, lesser-known tools that will benefit web marketers and SEOs, please feel free to share them in the comments. |
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