Here's a snapshot from a long, long time ago!
COVER GIRLS!Nicki Minaj & Rihanna!
Even if you are clued into the downside of chasing after initial public offerings, and you were content to watch from the sidelines last week as LinkedIn’s IPO more than doubled in its first day of trading, your portfolio could soon face more risk courtesy of LinkedIn.
The relative merits of LinkedIn as an investment, whether it be at its IPO price of $45, or its close (as of Friday) at $93, is somewhat beside the point...
...it will be interesting to see if a string of more eye-popping IPO debuts sets off a broader — yes, here it comes — stock market bubble led by the tech sector. A reprise of the 1990s tech bubble is certainly the story line that emerged after LinkedIn’s one-day double. And it was on Larry Summers’ radar the day after the LinkedIn IPO.
A similar story over at the Wall Street Journal, where Dave Kansas thinks of LinkedIn as "an IPO that popped, then fizzled.""Hype surrounds a hot offering, such as LinkedIn, and the details of the ensuing months are covered more episodically. Folks move on to the next hot IPO -- last week, a Russian Internet company, Yandex ("The Russian Google"), grabbed headlines with a hot offering. Its shares soared 40% on opening day.Kansas goes on to detail his own experience being involved in and part of an IPO - you can read that here.
With the success of LinkedIn and Yandex, other companies are busily huddling with lawyers and bankers to get in line for their own IPO. Big names out there include Facebook, of course, but also Groupon, Zynga and LivingSocial.
Anything that can fit into the Social Network/Internet box now looks like a hot ticket. But as my own experience can attest, the markets are fickle. Bankers talk about "the window," meaning the period when the market will gobble up certain offerings. Windows, by definition, open -- and close."
Secretary of State aide Huma Abedin may be the next "Good Wife" to launch a mad crackdown on her hubby: she may have some "competition" ... or not ...
Hover & CLICK on the image for the Daily NX Story!
A little changing, a bit of re-arranging on this beautiful NY Sunday afternoon. I've got two cookouts coming up: one this afternoon at 5 and another on Memorial Day. I'd like to call your attention to a test-ad running just under my blog header: a way you can help increase your blog's earning potential via PR7 links! It's well worth investigating for any of you looking to make serious full or part-time income from your blog. (And if you're earning some coin already, this will help your income multiply!)WARNING! A high bounce rate doesn't mean bad things! Going back to 2005, I've had people comment on particular posts - and it is quite obvious they read the post - and when I match the comment IP to the one in stats - "Time spent on site = 0 minutes." So these stat and site meters may not be recording as much data as they would have us believe?I was able to go into the data and see which posts attracted these readers - there were 14 specific posts, each visited by more than one individual. I already knew netizens would find these particular posts interesting. The same ones show up on a daily basis when I check my stats. So, my mission is to figure out how to write more of these types of posts.
  | Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - youtube.com 3 min - Pieces of a Man (1971) Also watch on: Dailymotion - dailymotion.virgilio.it - WAT TV |
Notsojolly Roger says : "Go Facebook if you like and built your own prison cell, call the other inmates 'friends' and enjoy a sad but safe virtual life..."Facebook users can also find themselves directed to bogus online retailers hoping to pick up credit card details. Inadvertently befriending a fake account also unlocks access to personal tidbits that may seem innocuous but amount to a treasure trove for hackers seeking access to personal Web sites like bank accounts. They frequently hint at passwords and usernames, as well as the answers to common security questions.
According to security experts, these nefarious friends are overseen by a diffuse, elusive network of individuals located all over the world.
"Very often, these are executed by loose networks of folks who specialize in their particular niche and collaborate to attack, then make money off of the account," said Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum. "They know each other from spammer IRC [Internet relay chat] channels where they brag about exploits and alliances. It is not a particular giant spam company."
The unknown friends may also be covers for real people, such as law-enforcement agents on the lookout for incriminating information.
In a memo penned in 2008, the Department of Homeland Security's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services described the goldmine of personal information to be found on online social networks and instructed agents how to take advantage of people's "narcissistic tendencies" to sniff out fraud. [1] Do I Know You? Fake Friends Adding Fresh Danger To Facebook . Bianca Bosker
So how to remove the social networking albatross? Read on!
To begin the Facebook account deletion process: do not try to login to your Facebook account; you may want to clear your browser cache and delete your cookies so that you don't login inadvertently. Click the link below and follow the instructions OR bookmark this page for future reference.
WARNING!!! FB does NOT make it straightforward and easy to delete your account. Here, we look at how to deactivate as well as delete a Facebook account – and the difference between the two.
From Helium:
Anything put online will follow a person forever, said Penny Perkins, a communications professor at The Sage Colleges, who teaches about social networking.That's BS! The Net CAN indeed be "wiped clean" -
"This is your personal brand, your reputation," Perkins said. "I wouldn't post anything I wouldn't be happy to see on a billboard on 787."
Many people, she said, don't understand that Internet postings are always out there. She pointed to deleted items on such sites as www.archives.org, which tracks web postings since 1995.
Legendary folk troubadour Bob Dylan turned 70 this week! Gander at Dylan through the lenses of these photographers and magazines:
Enjoy!
In this picture (credit: Jim Wilson, New York Times) Darren Kitchen, 28, of San Francisco shows off his wares: he tells the NYT he makes $5,000 a month selling products on his Web site, Hak5.org, which offers a weekly video show about computer hacking. Read his story and more on "My Blog Is Also Paying My Bills"... below find a sample lifted from his website.
The "Cloud Wars" Have Begun! However, even the best-laid plans of GaGa can run afoul......the real reason why books are going to vanish is the remarkably un-businesslike business model of the publishers. Think of General Motors — decades of inefficiency, but without the federal bailouts.JA Konrath believes that eBooks "will become the dominant format for reading fiction. They'll proliferate the US and Canada, the UK and Australia, and eventually the world. There's no ebook bubble. There is only unlimited potential sales." Konrath referred to it in a different post as a Gold Rush.
In no other industry do producers actually wait passively to see what products are suggested to them, instead of doing market research to see what people really want to buy. Yet publishers seldom generate book ideas; instead they wait for literary agents to submit proposals. Houses decide which book to publish based on little more than a gut feeling that says, “I think we can make money selling this!”
Yet the books that publishers choose are almost entirely of zero interest to actual bookbuyers. After 9/11, there were a ton of books about 9/11, which nobody bought. Same thing with the Iraq War, the rise of Obama, the economic meltdown and even, inexplicably, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Or the books are rehashed business lessons, religious truths, sports clichés, motivational babble, exercise fads, weight loss techniques or pandering to the political left or the right. Who wants these books? Almost no one.
Most of the major publishers today are owned by international conglomerates who, at some point, will awaken to the realization that English majors in their employ are spending millions of dollars on books that no one wants to read.
As a result, few trade books earn real money for the publisher (and certainly not for the author!). That’s because the publisher bears the entire risk of buying, editing, printing and shipping copies of the book to bookstores all over the country on a 100 percent returnable basis. If your local Barnes & Noble doesn’t sell a particular book, it goes right back to the publisher, at the publisher’s shipping cost, for a full refund. Especially in the Internet era, you can’t make money putting books on trucks and hoping someone buys them.
