Here we go again, but this time the discussion is finally happening among those who can benefit from the discussion the most – the PR industry. We took the conversation offlline to convince PR to be more effective with press releases first, before they can worry about the “why, how, when, and where” related to social media releases.

EBay’s still king of the online shopping ring, and then some, according to numbers released by Hitwise. Amazon, Wal-Mart, Craigslist, and Target combined can’t match the grip the incumbent online auction powerhouse holds on the online shopping public.

The Yahoo! Daily Wire, which was an email newsletter that included Yahoo Picks, New & Notable Sites, Full Coverage and Daily Entertainment news has announced it will stop being delivered via email sometime this month.  The notice can be seen below.

A student at Stanford has come up with a  cool app for Google Earth called gCensus. 

Currently, only the US Census 2000′s Summary File 1 (displaying population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping but there’s no doubt the developer and others will mashup more Census data in the near future. 

Bravo announced today the purchase of TelevisionWithoutPity.com, an Internet site for the television "junkie". The site features episode recaps and fan forums for televisions most popular drama and reality shows. Details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

If you’re looking for a job in or around NYC you might want to visit the Google’s job openings page. With the opening of their new office in Manhattan, it’s no wonder that they now have 191 job positions to fill.

The April deadline to file taxes in the United States is fast approaching, and with it comes the time of year when tax accounting firms usually see a peak volume in their business. With all the questions surrounding new tax laws, deduction advice, and audit defense, H&R block is looking to bolster its brand against all others by setting up shop in Second Life.

In my original post I mentioned that in order to help reduce my blog’s load time I often use Web Page Analyzer and Octagate SiteTimer.

Since that post I have received a couple more suggestions for tools to use in order to help reduce Web Page Load Times.

At work, I switched from Windows to Mac about 4 months ago. So far, I’m very happy with that. The MacBook Pro I got from work is an Intel Core 2 Duo machine, the OS X interface is beautiful and virtually all software I need runs on Mac.

I thought it would be interesting to look at all of the top presidential candidates and see what they are using for analytics for their site. I visited each site, viewed source, and looked for Javascript code or any other trace of analytics code I could find.

As a small business owner, I’m concerned about the growing costs of health care. This year our insurance went up 16%…nothing to sneeze at. We also upped our company contribution to 60% (from 50%), so I’m acutely aware of this cost on our bottom line.

A few weeks back, BusinessWeek ran an interesting story called Get Healthy–Or Else, about how Scotts, the lawn-care company, is tackling the high cost of health insurance. Some might argue their approach is forward thinking (one employee’s life was saved by being nagged to go to a physical) or invasive (another employee was let go for failing a drug test for…tobacco.)