Eubie's notes

2 Web Sites Push Further Into Services Real Estate Agents Offer: The sites will help consumers obtain more accurate real estate sales information and automate the bidding process for houses online.

Really?: The Claim: Baby Deliveries Are in Sync With the Moon: Many ancient cultures looked upon the moon as a sign of fertility.

What’s Online: Eyeballs Are Back, or Maybe Not: An article in Business 2.0 titled “The Return of Monetized Eyeballs” could send shivers down the spine of anyone who suffered through the Internet bubble’s half-decade of buzzwords.

NY Times: Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis

Software: Privacy for People Who Don’t Show Their Navels: More and more consumers are looking for ways to remain anonymous online and to foil hackers.

It May Look Authentic; Here’s How to Tell It Isn’t: Photo-manipulation has proved particularly troublesome for science. One journal is showing the way in a new offensive against fraud.

Digital Domain: How Google Tamed Ads on the Wild, Wild Web: Without intending to do so, Google set in motion multilateral disarmament by telling its first advertisers in 2000: text only.

Basics: Deleted but Not Gone Maintaining privacy in the era of digital information requires work on a number of fronts, but one basic measure is easily overlooked: proper data destruction.

Timid Mice Made Daring by Removing One Gene: Scientists working with mice have found that by removing a single gene they can turn normally cautious animals into daring ones.

Short Cuts: Demystifying the eBay Selling Experience: Daylong seminars, held in different locations around the country, introduce people to “Selling Basics” or “Beyond the Basics” in eBay speak.

Your Money: Buying Used Just Could Turn Out to Be the Next New Thing: There are robust marketplaces for used products, which are just as good and significantly cheaper.

A Little Sleuthing Unmasks Writer of Wikipedia Prank: A joke ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker losing his job and Wikipedia suffering a blow to its credibility.

The End of Pensions: Corporations were happy to offer rich retirement plans to their workers as long as accounting tricks and federal insurance made it easy to delay the day of reckoning. But now the game is up.

‘Blink’ Meets ‘Freakonomics’: The blog of the hot new book “Freakonomics,” which applies economic analysis to a range of human activity, picks up where the book leaves off.

Personal Data for the Taking: Students have proven that all it takes to obtain reams of personal data is Internet access, a few dollars and some spare time.

NY Times: As the job market tightens many owners of very small businesses find they cannot compete with the salaries and perks offered by larger companies.

The Christian Science Monitor: Several government reports this week tell the story. For the first year since the Great Depression, the personal savings rate went negative in 2005. Pay and benefits, meanwhile, rose just 3.1 percent last year – the lowest rate since 1996 and not enough to outpace a 3.4 percent jump in the consumer price index.

Charity Navigator: We help charitable givers make intelligent giving decisions by providing information on over five thousand charities and by evaluating the financial health of each of these charities.

Philip Greenspun is an interesting writer. His latest piece is about retiring early. Retirement forces you to stop thinking that it is your job that holds you back. For most people the depressing truth is that they aren’t that organized, disciplined, or motivated.

Years ago, he wrote Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing, a book I read and re-read when it was new. Another good article is Why I’m not a writer.

WSJ: Larry Ellison’s Leveraged Lifestyle Revealed in Lawsuit Documents

In mid-2000, for instance, documents originally prepared by Mr. Ellison’s personal financial adviser, Philip Simon, show that the Oracle co-founder and chief executive owed a total of more than $1 billion to five different banks, just $328 million shy of tapping out his line of credit. At the time, Mr. Simon anticipated additional spending by Mr. Ellison of more than $700 million over the next three years, including $20 million a year for “lifestyle,” $194 million for a new yacht and $80 million for Mr. Ellison’s America’s Cup yacht-racing team.

NY Times: An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of “To Kill a Mockingbird” drew Harper Lee, one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters.

Science Blog: Using a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, scientists have unveiled statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and developed a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country. This model is considered a breakthrough in the field.

NY Times: Many people in their 20’s are abandoning traditional media channels, posing a challenge to marketers trying to reach them.

Highlights:

Mr. Hanson almost never buys newspapers or magazines, getting nearly all of his information from the Internet, or from his network of electronic contacts.

“Papers are so clunky and big,” he says. If those words are alarming to old media, they are only the beginning of a larger puzzle for today’s marketers: how to make digital technology their ally as they try to understand and reach an emerging generation.

and

Among those with access to the Internet, for instance, e-mail services are as likely to be used by teenagers (89 percent) as by retirees (90 percent), according to Pew researchers. Creating a blog is another matter. Roughly 40 percent of teenage and 20-something Internet users do so, but just 9 percent of 30-somethings. Nearly 80 percent of online teenagers and adults 28 and younger report regularly visiting blogs, compared with just 30 percent of adults 29 to 40. About 44 percent of that older group sends text messages by cellphone, compared with 60 percent of the younger group.

NY Times: (M)ore than 450 advertising and marketing professionals listened to speakers tell them how to reach customers using some alternatives to traditional advertising, like viral and buzz marketing, that are becoming increasingly popular within the industry.