College Textbooks Outrageous fees

Instructors could stop requiring students to purchase textbooks for their courses. Instructors could rely on information readily available for free.

clipped from www.eschoolnews.com Copyright fight looms over college textbooks Soaring costs have led to rampant sharing of textbooks online According to the College Board, the average college student spent between $805 and $1,229 on books and supplies alone during the 2007-08 school year. In the National Association of College Stores' 2008 Student Watch Survey of Student Attitudes & Buying Habits, students surveyed estimated they spent $702 on required course materials annually. Required Course Materials include: printed texts (both new and used), electronic textbooks, and course packs and customized materials. But if the campaign to curb textbook file-sharing follows the same arc as that of the music industry's efforts, it's possible this movement could shift its focus onto the students themselves who download or make available copyrighted texts online--especially as publishers realize how hard it is to keep up with an ever-changing lineup of textbook-sharing web sites.

User feedback drives sales

clipped from home.nestor.minsk.by Comodo Usertrust Provides Emerchants With A Powerful And Free Social Networking Platform Proven To Drive Revenue Through User Feedback This kind of transparency is proven to increase trust and conversion, since according to Social Shopping Study (2007), over 70% of end users cite user feedback as one of the main reasons they choose to buy from one eMerchant versus another. Current online marketing programs often rely heavily on targeting consumers via online advertising, hoping the ads reach the best demographic possible to influence their buying decisions. This approach has limited success and value because it is both costly and hard to manage, as recently reported by BusinessWeek.

Malware comes from legitimate sites that have been hacked

"The URL is no longer an accurate representation of the source content from the Web page"

clipped from blog.washingtonpost.com Three Quarters of Malicious Web Sites Are Hacked Three-quarters of all Web sites that try to foist malicious software on visitors are legitimate sites that have been hacked, a report released today found. Even worse, most of these compromised sites are social networking communities and some of the Internet's most popular destinations. Websense found that 60 percent of the Top 100 most popular sites this year have either hosted malware or forwarded visitors to malicious sites. The company also says that nine out of 10 of those compromised sites were social networking or Web search sites. Browser add-ons like Site Advisor and Web of Trust (WOT) can help people searching the Web determine whether the sites they are searching for have a nasty reputation. But such services do little to aid in flagging legitimate sites that were recently hacked and seeded with malicious software.

Can you choose?

I moseyed over to Simple.ology blog because there was an interesting post

"What to Do When "Picking One" Is Too Much for You"

Bean Jones offers a clear description of what it is like to be overwhelmed with choices and then includes an action plan for dissipating the feeling.

I have one more item to add to the action plan:

Hire me!

My clients are relieved of the "maximizer" syndrome. They have a professional reader sifting through all that data and delivering the information most relevant to them.

If you are the type of person who needs to know "all options were considered" and is mentally stalled because of the insurmountable task then hire me!


Technorati Tags: simpleology, professional reader, the data digger, decision

Paycheck Fairness Act

clipped from www.capwiz.com Stop the Economic Crisis for Women Workers House Could Vote on Paycheck Fairness Act THIS Wednesday! Women on average continue to be paid only 77 cents to the dollar paid to their male counterparts. With a record 69 million women in the workforce, wage discrimination hurts almost all of our nation's families and disadvantages women in nearly every occupational categories. In addition, wage discrimination lowers total lifetime earnings, reducing women's benefits from Social Security and pension plans and inhibiting their ability to save not only for retirement but for other lifetime goals such as buying a home and paying for a college education. A vote on the Paycheck Fairness Act is a critical step forward in our goal to close the persistent and sizable wage gap between men and women working full-time year round, even those in the same or similar jobs.

Resource: Appropriate ways to interact with Social Media community

clipped from blogcouncil.org Member Login Disclosure Best Practices Toolkit This document is a draft series of checklists to help companies, their employees, and their agencies learn the appropriate and transparent ways to interact with blogs, bloggers, and the people who interact with them. We believe in the principles of transparency and openness, and this document is a way of making this real on the inside. Our goal is not to create or propose new industry standards or rules. These checklists are open source training tools designed to help educate the hundreds or thousands of employees in any large corporation the appropriate ways to interact with the social media community. Disclosure of Identity Personal/Unofficial Blogging and Outreach Blogger Relations Compensation and Incentives Agency and Contractor Disclosure Creative Flexibility This is an Open Source Document Share and change this document as much as you like. Please attribute the Blog Council and link to www.blogcouncil.org/disclosure.

"The One Piece of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without"

A fellow Virtual Assistant, Denise Aday of Aday VA Solutions recommended the Rain Today site to me. While I was there, I downloaded this report. If you are looking for quality information to help you market your business, then this free report is worth the read.

"The One Piece Of Advice You Can't Generate Leads Without"

http://www.raintoday.com/pages/2749_advice_you_can_t_generate_leads_without.cfm

Thank you for the link Denise!