luni, 8 noiembrie 2010

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog


Content Optimization: Revisiting Topic Modeling, LDA & Our Labs Tool

Posted: 08 Nov 2010 05:29 AM PST

Posted by randfish

Many times as SEOs, we think about the "on-page optimization" process as simply following the best practices for placing our targeted keywords (and possibly, some variations of them) on the page. My previous blog post about Perfecting Keyword Targeting covers this in some detail. But, we also know that search engines aren't nearly naive enough to care only about the individual terms/phrases that the user queries. For years, search engines have been doing work with topic modeling (this paper from Berkeley researchers does a nice job exploring the concept as it relates to IR).

While it's challenging as SEOs to know where this work has taken them, we can certainly assume that the words and phrases you use on a page likely influence its ranking, as well as how and where you use the targeted query term.

For those of you who've been following our blog posts about research into this area over the past few months, you know we've hit some stumbling blocks. Initially, we thought the free LDA Labs Tool had an extremely high correlation with Google.com rankings (higher even than most link-based metrics). However, after analyzing some results from others who ran tests, we saw biasing in our results and went back to the drawing table.

At the PRO Training Seminar in London, Ben Hendrickson shared our latest findings - much more conservative numbers, but consistent with the data and defensible.

LDA Corrrelation October 2010

As you can see, these numbers are lower than our previous datapoints, and the true correlation of the tool in its current format (which has been re-engineered) is now between the "LDA even vs. odds" and "LDA w/ bias" numbers. This makes our version less predictive than, say, # of links or linking root domains, but more predictive than any other on-page factor we analyzed (save features around exact/partial keyword match domains).

Since this research and the tool was released, people have been asking me "How Do I Use This?" Luckily, this video put together from WebProNews is an excellent resource to help answer that.

 

If you've got more questions about LDA, the tool, topic modeling in general or anything else related, feel free to ask below. We're still very excited about this topic, and while Ben is taking a short sabbatical until January (his first vacation in 3 years), I'm happy to help where I can. We hope that sometime in Q1 of next year, we'll have even more work on our LDA model, better correlations, and recommendations of specific words/phrases that may be adding to or hurting scores.

p.s. For those who have been following the posts closely, you may have noticed that a number of individuals who often don't like the work SEOmoz publishes were particularly vehement in criticizing our LDA research. I don't have much that can address those concerns other than to say - as before, we're still in the early stages of work on this. It's very challenging to do from a coding, mathematics and analysis perspective, so more polished results may still be several months away.

We've been excited to have others analyze our work (which is how we discovered our initial error on the correlation numbers) and we look forward to more people experimenting with it. We do feel, however, that despite the criticisms, we're going to continue conducting and presenting research like this, with similar caveats. If you believe our work is wrong, misguided or non-useful, there's certainly no obligation to use it. We can promise that until we feel very strongly about our research, evidence and the value it provides, we won't be making this a formal part of our Web App, PRO tools or best practices. But, in the meantime, for those who like playing on the cutting edge, we feel it's part of our core values to continue working and sharing in areas like this.


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How to Get Your Community to Build Links For You

Posted: 07 Nov 2010 01:02 PM PST

Posted by Geoff Kenyon

Building links is widely regarded as one of the most difficult and time consuming aspects of SEO. If you have a community centric site, you should spend some of your time allocated for link building on creating features that will get your users to do your link building for you.  Implementing these community link building features can result in a scalable flow of links to your site.

Profiles

If you give users a self-serving reason to link to their profile, they will be much more likely to link to it. Turn the profile into a portfolio; use a member’s profile to show off their achievements and their top contributions to the site.  Double up the incentive and enable members to be freelance through the site – have a “hire me” button on their profile. Something like this would work well for sponsorship sites like Hookit, which has done this well (image from a hookit profile below), putting a "Sponsor Me" button bellow the name and profile shot of each athlete. 

Sharing Call To Actions

While this is pretty basic, there are many sites that do not ask users to share their content in any visible way. This can be as simple as adding buttons to share the content in a ribbon at the end of content or in a sidebar.  Be careful not to go overboard on the buttons though.  While your users may be on many different networks, poppularity of these networks tends to follow the Pareto Principle, where 20% of networks receive 80% of your users’ submissions and attention.

CNET Sharing Bar

Sharing your content doesn’t guarantee links as social links are often nofollowed, but social is thought, by some, to be a factor in the ranking algorithm so encouraging users to share shouldn’t be neglected.

Voting Content Helpful

Do you enable users to vote content up or down? What do you do with it after it's been voted helpful? When a user votes something up, it means they think the content is good content but they may not be thinking of sharing.  You can remind them with an async overlay that appears after voting up. This could easily become annoying, and cause people to stop voting content helpful so it might be a good idea to only do this only one out of every seven or ten times. An easier implementation of this is putting the Facebook “like” button on your site as “liking” content automatically publishes it to your wall.

Cheap MTB

Promote Controversial Content

Content that gets people riled up also has a tendancy to get a lot of links. Look at Derek Powazek’s rant on how SEO’s are a bunch of Spammers. Everyone reading the SEOmoz Blog would probably agree that Derek’s rant isn’t valid, but he got a lot of links out of it. Open Site Explorer reports 2,374 links from 423 root domains – some of them from really strong sites like Search Engine Land and Newsvine. Mission Accomplished. Regardless of whether he wrote this as link bait, it became link bait. If there are controversial threads on your site, promote them like crazy. Try and stir up that hornet’s nest and see what happens.

Derek Powazek

One really easy way to keep these threads/posts going is to promote the most active discussions in the sidebar or at the bottom of other threads. There are a lot of "top discussions" plugins that will highlight content so that you don't have to worry about manually promoting controversial content. That said, if you do notice controversial content, it would probably be smart to promote it in other ways such on Twitter.

Awesome Community Badges

If you have a strong community that loves you, create badges for the community and make a big deal out of them when you release them. Sometimes you can get multiple links out out these badges, but you need to be really careful about how you go about this. I would suggest reading the Unofficial Google Widget Bait Guidelines and Widgetbait Gone Wild.  SEOmoz did a great job with their badges and has received links from 485 different root domains with the alt text: i <3 seomoz. Feels good to be loved.

SEO moz Badges

<a href="http://www.seomoz.org"><img src="http://www.seomoz.org/img/i-heart-seomoz.png" alt="I &lt;3 SEO moz" /></a>

Ego Boosting User Centric Badges

In addition to creating badges highlighting the community, you should create badges that are focused on the users and their achievements. This will play to the ego of your community members so these badges should really hype up how awesome your users are. Give your users the ability to “level up” and then graphically distinguish between levels of users on the badges; this gives users a) pride in their accomplishments and b) motivation to contribute more to the community. Experts-Exchange has done a great job creating badges, shown below, that show off a users's accomplishments. In the badge below, you can see the user's top categories, how many questions they have answered, how many articles they have written, and how many points they have.

Experts Exchange

Email Users at Critical Points

What the critical points of interaction for your site? When a users registers, contributes content, “levels up”, when the user's content is voted up, and when users’ content is promoted by staff are some of critical action points that many community sites have in common. Identify which points of contact are critical for your site, then email users at these points and ask them to share either the site or what they have just done. For example, if a user’s review is going to be promoted on the front page or on a popular category page, email the user and let them know that they created something great and that their review is going to be promoted. Encourage the user to tell their friends about their review being promoted on the homepage.

When users register, collect their Twitter names. When their content is being promoted, as in the situation above, you should tweet about it. SEOmoz does a good job of this; when a user's content is published on YOUmoz, SEOmoz tweets it and includes the @username.

Embed Photos

Like videos, photos are shared frequently; the catch is that most sites that host their own videos offer you the ability to embed the video. Most sites that offer photo galleries don’t offer this option. Sites like Pink Bike could stand to benefit from this by having code to “embed this image” below the photo with a couple different sizing options. This is applicable to any site, not just sites offering galleries; if you allow users to upload images to a forum or for a review, you should enable and encourage users to embed the image. Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on Linkbuilding Through Embedded Content. There are so many opportunities to leverage embedded content, most sites could find a way to build links through embedding content. This is an example of how photo galleries should incorporate this:

 

Create a Leaderboard

Stroke your top contributors’ egos a bit; dedicate a page to your top users and make sure they know about it so that they can promote it on their own blogs. While a lot of sites do this, I think Medpedia Answers does an especially good job. They provide the avatar and name of the contributor, how many point they have, qualifications and accomplishments, and they link to each members profile and another page with their answers. Medpedia, a medical Q&A site has done a good job recognizing their top users, below is part of their leaderboard.

Combining Tactics FTW!  Creating a leaderboard can help you get links, but people might not think to link to it on their own, but with a little encouragement...it could become awesome. When users make it onto this list, they should be informed that they made it on to the list of top contributors. Email them. They can again be notified once they have cracked the top 10, top 5, and 1st place. In the notification email, give them the URL and tell them they should share it with their friends. You could also include a special badge for top contributors (with a rank number) that communicates their accomplishment. Leaderbeard, Email, Sharing, Badges. Double Rainbow.

Interview Top Users

The key to interviewing members is to promote it well. If you prominently position the interview on the site, the contributor will be more likely to feel a sense of accomplishment about the interview, as the article will inherently get more attention because of its prominence. Since they feel proud of their interview, the user is likely to blog about the interview (maybe having an active blog could be a screening requirement for choosing interviewees).

Interviewing experts is often a way to get links as these experts will want to mention these interviews either on their blog or on Twitter. Take this concept and apply it to your users with blogs and strong social media accounts.

What is really important is to always publish interviews to the same URL and make sure that this is the URL that you share with the user, for example: domain.com/user-interview/. When you have a new interview to publish, simply move the old interview to a different location (domain.com/user-interview/username-date.html) and keep the links concentrated on the interview page.

Syndicate Your Content

There are a lot of sites that are hungry for content and would be willing to feature some of your content with an attribution link. If there is a popular news site in your industry, you could ask them if they would be interested in featuring a weekly article, review, blog, photo… that they could feature on their site. Make sure you get attribution links out of it though. An example of a good attribution line would be: How to Fight Bears (link) is part of a weekly series by Adrenaline Adventures (link).

To get users to syndicate your content, offer them custom widgets that could be easily placed on their site or blog. The widget could highlight their recent contributions to the community. This widget would act like an RSS feed that would sit in a user’s sidebar. This Whiteboard Friday is a good resource if you are looking to learn more about syndicating content.

Ask Your Community to Help Grow the Site

If you have a strong bond with your community, explain the basics of SEO to them and ask them to help you out. You can ask them to link to your site and share the content through social media. If you are feeling bold, you can even ask them to link to you using your keywords as anchor text. It is really important when you are directly asking your community to help you with SEO is that you emphasize how this will help the community and how it will help the user who links to the site. Etsy does a great job of explaining what SEO is and how their community members can help to optimize their contributions.

Having a page about helping a new site grow isn’t that uncommon. On these pages, sites will often ask users to link to the community and offer the user badges they can put on their site to show their support. BallHyped, a new sports community, has done a great job of asking people to link to them by putting an emphasis on it being beneficial for the user and the community. As a result, they are having success getting users to support their site with their “Vote For Me” badges (shown below).

ball hype badges

 

While not all of the strategies in this blog post will work great for every site, there should be at least a few that will work for most sites. I hope you are able to apply some of these and have your community bear some of your link building burden. How do you get your community to build links for you? Let me know in the comments.

 

Hi everyone, my name is Geoff Kenyon and I recently joined Distilled as an SEO Consultant. This is my first post on the SEOmoz blog, but you can expect to see me writing here and on the Distilled Blog. If you have questions or want to say hi, hit me up on twitter @geoffkenyon.


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Help Streamline Your Government


The White House, Washington


 
Good afternoon,

Knocking the way government works makes for an easy political talking point. What’s hard is actually changing the way it works, and we want your help to do just that.  Launched last year, the President’s SAVE Award is about fostering a culture of accountability among all Federal employees, as well as tapping their first-hand knowledge of how to streamline and modernize government, and you choose the winner.

The President invited all Federal employees from every agency and department to submit their ideas for saving taxpayer dollars, and to evaluate and discuss the ideas submitted by others for how to make government more efficient and effective.  Our budget gurus then went through every single idea with a fine-tooth comb to see what we were already doing, what needed a closer look, and which qualified as our four finalists.

Now, you get to decide which idea will be the winner of this year’s SAVE Award -- and which finalist will get to meet the President.  We want public input on this final stage of the process, so have your say:

The President's Save Award. The four finalists have been chosen, now vote for the winner. Submit your vote.

I’ve been in public service a long time, but the ideas that made the final cut are all new to me. That’s because it’s the people on the ground who know the nitty-gritty of how the government really works, and how to make it work better. 

  • Paul Behe, a Paralegal Specialist for the Department of Homeland Security out of Cleveland, Ohio, pointed out how advertising seized property online could not only tighten up advertising budgets, but also move these goods out of storage more quickly.
  • Marjorie Cook of Gobles, Michigan, is a food inspector.  She pointed out that while important samples need to be shipped express to be analyzed quickly for public safety, the containers they’re sent in can be sent back much less expensively.
  • Trudy Givens of Portage, Wisconsin is with the Bureau of Prisons and noted that the Federal Register gets printed and mailed to nearly 10,000 recipients in the Federal workforce every workday, yet the Register is available online.
  • Thomas Koenning of Littleton, Colorado works on mine safety, and gave a prime example of how streamlining government can not only eliminate waste, but allow government to do its job better and ultimately keep people safer by simply having mine operators and contractors report quarterly coal production and worker hours online.

As I said, these ideas are all common sense, but the only people who could have known that these things needed to be fixed were the people on the front lines who deal with them every day.  And beyond these four ideas, the thousands that were submitted all helped us – and other federal workers – think in new ways about how to serve you better.

Come to WhiteHouse.gov and cast your vote to take part.

Sincerely,

Vice President Biden

 
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The First Lady Joins Students in a Diwali Dance

The White House Your Daily Snapshot for
Monday Nov. 8,  2010
 

Photo of the Day

President Barack Obama watches as First Lady Michelle Obama dances with students during a Diwali candle lighting and performance at Holy Name HIgh School in Mumbai, India, Nov. 7, 2010. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Standard Time. India Standard Time is 10 hours and 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Standard Time.

11:15 PM: The President and the First Lady participate in official arrival ceremony

11:55 PM: The President and the First Lady participate in a wreath laying ceremony

12:35 AM: The President holds a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Singh

1:20 AM: The President holds an expanded bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Singh

2:05 AM: The President drops by business leaders luncheon

2:50 AM: The President and Prime Minister Singh hold a joint press conference

4:35 AM: The President meets with Vice President Ansari

5:05 AM: The President meets with Opposition Leader Swaraj

5:35 AM: The President meets with Sonia Gandhi

7:00 AM: The President delivers a speech to Parliament

9:05 AM: The President and the First Lady meet with President Patil

9:30 AM: The President and the First Lady attend state dinner

11:30 AM: The Vice President meets with Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer to discuss Recovery Act implementation

4:15 AM: The Vice President meets with Bill Gates

WhiteHouse.gov/live  Indicates Events that will be livestreamed on WhiteHouse.gov/live.

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog.

Weekly Address: Priorities on Taxes
President Obama lays out his priorities for the coming discussion about tax cuts, calling for compromise but making clear he cannot accept $700 billion in deficits or an increase in middle class taxes.

A US-India Partnership on Open Government
Samantha Power, Senior Director and Special Assistant for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights, describes President Obama's visit to the Expo on Democracy and Open Government in Mumbai.

Intern Picks: 10 Must-See White House Videos
New Media interns Ben Forer and Jordan Harp present their ten favorite White House videos.

Get Updates

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Seth's Blog : Problems and constraints

[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]

Problems and constraints

Gravity is a constraint. If you're a designing an airplane, it would be a lot easier without gravity as a concern, but hey, it's not going away.

A problem is solvable. A constraint must be lived with.

For years, Apple viewed retail distribution as a constraint. They had to live with cranky independent computer stores, or big box mass merchants that didn't display or sell their products well.

Using the internet and then their own stores, they eventually realized that this was actually a problem that could be solved, and it changed everything for them.

On the other hand, there are countless entrepreneurs who believe they can solve problems relating to funding or technology that are out of reach given their scale or background. They'd be better off if they accepted them as constraints and designed around them.

The art is in telling them apart.

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duminică, 7 noiembrie 2010

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


World Bank President says Gold has Role in next Monetary System

Posted: 07 Nov 2010 09:00 PM PST

The current dollar-based global monetary system known as "Bretton Woods II" is on its last legs. We all know it, but what none of us know is what will replace it.

Inquiring minds should be interested to discover that World Bank President Robert Zoellick mentioned a role for gold in the development of a new monetary system to succeed "Bretton Woods II".

Please consider, The G20 must look beyond Bretton Woods by Robert Zoellick.
... Fifth, the G20 should complement this growth recovery programme with a plan to build a co-operative monetary system that reflects emerging economic conditions. This new system is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and a renminbi that moves towards internationalisation and then an open capital account.

The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values. Although textbooks may view gold as the old money, markets are using gold as an alternative monetary asset today.

The development of a monetary system to succeed "Bretton Woods II", launched in 1971, will take time. But we need to begin. The scope of the changes since 1971 certainly matches those between 1945 and 1971 that prompted the shift from Bretton Woods I to II. Serious work should include possible changes in International Monetary Fund rules to review capital as well as current account policies, and connect IMF monetary assessments with WTO obligations not to use currency policies to remove trade concessions.
Don't expect any serious movement along the lines of Zoellick's suggestion until there is a major currency crisis involving the US, Japan, or Europe. In the meantime, it is nice to see a role for gold floated in high places.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Correct Translation of "Clueless" from German Reader; Geithner Backs Off His Own Plan

Posted: 07 Nov 2010 04:45 PM PST

In German Finance Minister calls Fed "Clueless"; G20 Showdown with China; Why Geithner's "Non-Plan" is Nothing but Hot Air I quoted a Reuters article that called the Fed "clueless".

It seems there is a bit of a translation error to "clueless"

Michael from Germany writes ...
Hi Mish,
have been a follower of your writings for a very long time now - many thanks for all your work !

Please allow one remark to the "clueless" quote from German finance minister Schäuble.

While his comment was indeed very strong language for a German official towards the USA, the "clueless" quote is not the proper translation of what he said.

In German, he used the adjective "ratlos". Literally, that means "helpless", "at a loss what to do", "baffled", "perplexed". That is definitely less strong language than "clueless" - which I believe also implies that Bernanke does not understand how he got himself into the mess.

And "Ratlos" also does not have that colloquial touch to it.

Having said that, however, I cannot recall that German officials have ever commented any Fed decision less favourably than they did last week.

Hope that helps a bit,
Please do keep up your excellent work,
kindest regards from Germany,
Michael
Thanks Michael. Always happy to make a correction as appropriate.

Geithner Backs Off His Own Plan

As long as we are doing corrections, it seems Geithner, perhaps under pressure from China and emerging markets, has abandoned his plan to save the world via current-account targets.

Bloomberg reports G-20 Conflict Risk Eases as U.S. Says Surplus Goal Unrealistic
U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner refrained from pushing for current-account targets while China softened its stance on the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing days before a summit of the Group of 20.

"It looked like there was going to be quite a lot of conflict or lack of agreement going into the G-20 but this suggests there may be a bit more accord," said Mitul Kotecha, the Hong Kong-based head of global foreign-exchange strategy at Credit Agricole CIB. "There is some toning down of the rhetoric on the Fed's policy but in return, the U.S. will be looked upon to tone down" its push to shrink trade and investment imbalances.

While the Treasury chief said last month that 4 percent of gross domestic product was "likely to emerge as the basic benchmark countries look to," he refrained from repeating that guideline in Kyoto. He instead noted policy makers have tried to address persistent trade and investment imbalances since the 1940s, and "it's a process that's going to take some time."
Since we have had problems since 1940 and since the problems dramatically worsened after Nixon took the US off the gold window, it is safe to point out that the process has already taken one hell of a long time.

Now that Geithner has backed down off a plan that cannot possibly work, there is less chance of fireworks.

This is what I wrote earlier about Geithner's plan ...
Geithner's Non-Plan is Just Hot Air

Geithner's plan to limit current account surpluses and deficits to 4 per cent of gross domestic product is flat out silly. Actually there is no "plan", just hot air.

For starters, why would the surplus countries who want to increase exports agree to it? Even if they did agree to it, pray tell what is the enforcement mechanism?

Unless Geithner proposes an enforcement mechanism that can actually stick, there is no plan.

The key point here is there is no enforcement mechanism, nor any discussion of one. There has been no enforcement mechanism since Nixon closed the gold window. That is all you need to know.

Thus, G20 will fail to accomplish anything. However, the show might produce some exciting fireworks for a change, given that currency wars have escalated.
Fireworks may be on hold. It's too bad. We needed some. Now all we are likely to see is a bunch of lies regarding agreements to agree at later date.

Fireworks would be more entertaining and with some massive fireworks there would be a better chance (although still slim) of accomplishing something.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


German Finance Minister calls Fed "Clueless"; G20 Showdown with China; Why Geithner's "Non-Plan" is Nothing but Hot Air

Posted: 07 Nov 2010 10:36 AM PST

Outside the blogosphere and into realm of high ranking government officials, it is rare to hear words like "clueless" to describe the Fed. That such talk is now occurring shows just how upset the rest of the world is at Bernanke's policies.

Reuters reports US Policy 'Clueless': German Finance Minister.
Europe needs to strengthen economic governance and agree on a permanent crisis resolution mechanism, all the more so given current U.S. economic weakness, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said on Friday.

France and Germany should maintain their leadership role in Europe, Schaeuble said, especially in order to harmonise its economic policy and bolster stability given current economic uncertainties.

These are being worsened by reckless policy in part from the the United States, Schaeuble said, sharpening his criticism of the Federal Reserve's program to buy an additional $600 billion worth of U.S. government bonds. Pumping more money into the economy will not solve the country's problems, he said, adding that the world needed U.S. leadership that was currently lacking.

"With all due respect, U.S. policy is clueless," Schaeuble said. "(The problem) is not a shortage of liquidity. Late on Thursday, Schaeuble said Germany would take up this point critically with the United States both bilaterally and at next week's G20 summit of industrialised and emerging nations.
G20 Showdown

The Financial Times reports China tees up G20 showdown with US
China has curtly dismissed a US proposal to address global economic imbalances, setting the stage for a potential showdown at next week's G20 meeting in Seoul.

Cui Tiankai, a deputy foreign minister and one of China's lead negotiators at the G20, said on Friday that the US plan for limiting current account surpluses and deficits to 4 per cent of gross domestic product harked back "to the days of planned economies".

"We believe a discussion about a current account target misses the whole point," he added, in the first official comment by a senior Chinese official on the subject. "If you look at the global economy, there are many issues that merit more attention – for example, the question of quantitative easing."

China's opposition to the proposal, which had made some progress at a G20 finance ministers' meeting last month, came amid a continuing rumble of protest from around the world at the US Federal Reserve's plan to pump an extra $600bn into financial markets.
Complaints about QEII Continue to Pile Up

The list of complaints about QEII is long and growing: South Korea, Hong Kong, Brazil, China, Volcker Complain about Bernanke's QE Policy.

Add Germany to the list.

Geithner's Non-Plan is Just Hot Air

Geithner's plan to limit current account surpluses and deficits to 4 per cent of gross domestic product is flat out silly. Actually there is no "plan", just hot air.

For starters, why would the surplus countries who want to increase exports agree to it? Even if they did agree to it, pray tell what is the enforcement mechanism?

Unless Geithner proposes an enforcement mechanism that can actually stick, there is no plan.

The key point here is there is no enforcement mechanism, nor any discussion of one. There has been no enforcement mechanism since Nixon closed the gold window. That is all you need to know.

Thus, G20 will fail to accomplish anything. However, the show might produce some exciting fireworks for a change, given that currency wars have escalated.

Addendum:

A German reader suggests that Reuters improperly translated the German adjective "ratlos" which literally, that means "helpless", "at a loss what to do", "baffled", "perplexed", as opposed to "clueless".

Also, Geithner is now backing off his plan to use current-account surplus mandates to save the world's economy.

Please see Correct Translation of "Clueless" from German Reader; Geithner Backs Off His Own Plan for details.



Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Sunday Funnies 2010-11-07 Reflections on Quantity vs. Quality

Posted: 07 Nov 2010 01:55 AM PDT

Reflections on Quantity vs. Quality



Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List


Police may boycott NHL's Winter Classic; Winchester Union Shoots Self in the Head

Posted: 06 Nov 2010 11:18 PM PDT

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports Police may boycott NHL's Winter Classic
City police officers are threatening to boycott the Winter Classic in dispute with the Pittsburgh Steelers over holiday pay, raising questions about whether there will be adequate security at the nationally televised outdoor hockey game, which is due to draw tens of thousands of fans to Heinz Field on New Year's Day.

At issue is whether off-duty officers scheduled to work during the Jan. 1 Penguins game against the Washington Capitals will receive holiday pay, or 2 1/2 times their normal rate, which is what they are paid under their contract with the city to patrol on a holiday.

Even though it's a hockey game, the pay dispute involves the Steelers, who have a lease on Heinz Field.

The Steelers have proposed paying officers time-and-a-half, which is what they make working security at games that do not fall on holidays, said Sergeant John Fisher, who schedules 36 officers to work inside the stadium.

Mr. Fisher sent the officers an e-mail this week urging them not to work for anything less than holiday pay. He said he sent the note after conferring with Lieutenant Thomas Atkins, who schedules about 30 officers to work outside the stadium, directing traffic, among other duties.

"As of writing this, it appears as though we will not be working this event," Sgt. Fisher wrote. "Due to the fact that this is a major police holiday we have informed the Steelers and Heinz Field that the appropriate holiday pay rate is applicable. Heinz Field and the Steelers have balked at this rate and have indicated that they will not pay the same, they have taken a position where they want to dictate our pay rate to us and this simply cannot be permitted. ...

"I would implore all of you to stand together on this issue and not work this or any other detail, on a holiday, at a reduced rate. It would be unwise and foolish to break from this standard," he wrote. ...
What's unwise and foolish is for Pittsburgh to have an agreement with the police mandating double-time-and-a-half for holidays. It's no wonder Pittsburgh is having financial difficulties.

The Steelers ought to bid out security to the lowest bidder. I bet many private security guards would take the offer at time-and-a-half or perhaps even straight time.

Moreover, and not just for this event, Pittsburgh should outsource ALL traffic direction jobs to an outside firm. It does not take a police office to do this duty in the first place.

Public Unions vs. Private Unions

The problem with pandering to public unions is ordinary taxpayers suffer the consequences when politicians get in bed with unions. In private industry, when unions wreck the company it goes under. Alternatively, unions stupidly vote themselves into oblivion.

In a case of the latter, the Firearm blog reports Union negotiations fail. Olin (Winchester) moves 1000 jobs.
Olin Corp. is moving its Winchester Centerfire plant to Mississippi after the Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 9. Union rejected their proposed contract for the second time. BND.Com Reports Olin to move 1,000 jobs to Mississippi after union says no to new contract

The Clayton, Mo.-based company said that its Winchester Centerfire division in East Alton and the unit's approximately 1,000 jobs will be relocated to a new 500,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art plant to be built in Oxford, Miss. The relocation is expected to take place over several years.

The union voted "no" Tuesday in the revote -- 593 to 470. The union also voted against this contract on Oct. 17 by a two-to-one margin. St. Peters said most workers refused to accept concessions because they believe the munitions manufacturer has been profitable.
Winchester Union Shoots Self in the Head

Bang. Just like that, 593 out of 1063 voted that it was better to have no job than take a pay and benefit cut.

Heaven forbid union members have to give up a 5th week of paid vacation. Lordy! Admittedly the 7-year wage freeze Olin demanded sounds bad, but not when the alternative is working at Walmart or wherever for minimum wages (assuming jobs can be found at all).

The smart thing to do would have been to accept the contract, keep the job, and if the opportunity arose, take a better job elsewhere. Instead it's goodbye Alton, Illinois; Hello Mississippi.

Olin was the sixth-largest employer in the metro-east. It will be impossible to replace those jobs.

In general, Illinoisans don't seem very bright. This is proof: 33% Tax Hike Will Hit Illinois; Another Stiffed Illinois Vendor Stops Servicing State

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
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