Feeling empowered personally is important to everyone. No one wants to think their opinions, ideas, and contributions have little value to their employer. Unfortunately, too many people feel their workplace doesn’t provide them with recognition or sufficient opportunities for personal growth. Too many employees sense they lack empowerment on the job.

Priceline.com has entered into an agreement with Zagat Survey, which will provide exclusive online hotel reviews for priceline customers to access for free.

Zagat survey information will cover hotels, restaurants, attractions in the US and some international locations. The Zagat information, along with traveler reviews from priceline customers will feature more than 600 cities and thousands of hotels, restaurants and attractions.

As any type of company or consultant, the WRONG clients can destroy your success. It is often very tempting to keep clients, since the money seems nice, but when you drill down to the nitty gritty, they are often not very profitable at best, and a complete resource drain that can damage your pocket book and your quality of life at worst.

The relaunch of the people-powered PreFound search service goes a little farther than the color scheme shift from orange to blue.

Kevin Federline, who is mostly notorious for his former marriage to Britney Spears, hasn’t exactly burned up the charts with his musical endeavors as of late. In an attempt to boost his popularity, Federline (or K-Fed, as it were) has partnered with Yahoo and Prodégé to build his very own search engine.

If you take a search engine, add a floundering pop star, and throw in prizes for searchers that run queries on the site, then what will you come out with?

Don’t worry; I’m not quite sure either.

Yahoo announced today that it is making its Yahoo oneSearch service available on the mobileWeb in the United States. The search service first launched in Yahoo Go for Mobile 2.0 is now available to 85 percent of mobile phones.

In a recent update, Google has added a new feature to its personalized homepage that might signal a focused effort to snatch another one of Yahoo’s strongholds away. By allowing users to give their Google homepage a more artistic look and feel, the company is sending a clear message that it wants to become the primary portal for everyone’s Internet experience.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, and nothing I say should be taken as any sort of informed legal opinion.

Judging by a patent application filed by Google for ranking blog search, one of the three things a blog should have is a blogroll, and being included in some high-quality ones will help too.

Ian Murdock of the Debian project will move into the world of Solaris as he joins Sun Microsystems as Chief Operating Platforms Officer.

As their names might have led you to guess, Yahoo Health and HealthiNation have similar focuses and goals.  Now, thanks to a new deal, they’ll be working together in pursuit of them.

Not to brag as much as give thanks:  it’s nice to live in a place where you won’t go to jail for having something to say. "Cyber-dissident" Zhang Jianhong (pen name, Li Hong) can go to jail for it, and is, for six years.

We can also be thankful phrases like "reeducation-through-work camp for counter-revolutionary propaganda" still sound to us like something out of a George Orwell fantasy.

A client asked me today for more control in their Wordpress control panel. Specifically, when posting they wanted to control the font sizes, colors and do a bit more. As a designer I always freak at that question as I think the code is going to be filled with massive amounts of font tags and out of order strong tags and ohhh the madness. But, then again, maybe I’m overreacting.

Gerald Baron, Founder and CEO, PIER System/AudienceCentral; Author, "Now Is Too Late: Survival in an Era of Instant News" made some pithy comments about the ‘news as entertainment’ trend and its effect on PR in today’s Daily Dog.