Reasons for Existence of Economists

Came across this priceless one in an article on US Mortgage situation in Business Week.

... that the only reason economists exist is to make astrologers look good.

Now I should share this with my students in the next business economics class!

KPO Hiring and Talent Trap?

Niladry writes about some possible consequences of KPO hiring. A thought provoking article

The Talent Trap is a situation wherein the best of our college grads get attracted to KPO jobs and do not pursue higher education…which creates a fundamental void in the pipeline for managerial jobs.

Update on the Yahoo India and Malayalam Blogs Saga

Here is more on it.

Finally Yahoo! India (someone at customer care, not an official) responded to our many emails stating:

The Malayalam story was provided to us by Webdunia.com (the content provider) on the express representation that they are duly authorized by the author of the story to publish it. In the circumstances therefore, we do not admit of any copyright violation, as alleged by you.

Although there is no copyright violation and without prejudice to our rights, the said story has been removed from our web site, to avoid any further controversy.Should you have any further concerns on copyright violations, please write in to copyright@webdunia.com and it will be addressed by the webdunia team.

Yahoo even denies that there was any copyright violation, even when they instantly removed it from their servers when caught. If there was no copyright violation, why would anyone care to remove it? Or are they claiming blogs do not have copyright laws?

Business Standard: What Standards?

I became aware of the Business Standard article written by one Devangshu Datta via Abi's post (and via Blogbharti). Hmm, I am getting old. I don't want to spew venom at the moronic words written in the article.

Well the tone of the article at the Business Standard sounds like an immature Desi blog trying to give gyan about gender issues. What else can you call this?

As gender disparities ease, women in the workforce will also revert closer to quality norms and start making just as many mistakes as the men. That's statistical inevitability. It is also statistically inevitable that they will make their mistakes in more bizarrely entertaining fashion. Vive Le Difference! (emphasis mine)

His two (or was it three?) examples make up for 'inevitable statistics'! Finding out two selective examples for men CEO's (or should I find out three to make the claim of inevitable statistics?) who goofed up big time in a "bizarrely entertaining fashion" would not be difficult but why do this pointless exercise?

Malayalam Bloggers Don't Agree with Yahoo India

I became aware that yahoo India has apparently lifted stuff from Malayalam bloggers to lauch its portal in the same language via Om Malik.

There is a blog post detailing the incident and Yahoo’s dealing with the issue.

While we were researching Yahoo’s content providers, we came across a provider, Webdunia (mentioned before). From our investigation, we found that they are the ones who collect information/features/articles to be posted on Yahoo India.

With the knowledge that we had made a formal complaint to Yahoo/Yahoo India, Webdunia came forward with vague options for remuneration as well as an apology from Webdunia and not from Yahoo India.

Cross posted at Blogbharti.

What Makes a Leader a Leader

In the January 2007 of Harvard Business Review many top business leaders talk about their 'leading experience' at the top. The first one to give the views is the CEO of Nokia and I thought good, we get to hear from someone from Finland. He emphasises humility.

Next came the president of Blackwater USA, Gary Jackson and they are into military contracting. Now the president goes gaga about 'energy' and how they want 80% solution that can be done quickly vs. 100% solution that would take 3 weeks to devise.

The word military contracting rang a bell and when I searched the internet for the company I get so much more interesting stuff that adds a lot to 'leading' of companies, what the HBRs of the world leave out. Thank god for the internet.

To Enable Comment or Not?

I was reading about blogs on the net and saw these two articles whether blogs are blogs only if they let others comment.

Here is part of the article from internetnews.com

Google owns Blogger, one of the leading blog creation services. But the fact that Google hasn't allowed comments left some observers questioning whether it really was meeting the definition of what a blog is.

"Without having comments open, the Google blog to me is no more than a press release using half of blog technology, and only exposing part of the heart of the real humans behind it," said Jeremiah Owyang in a posting at his Web Strategy blog, headlined "Google Misses The Boat on Blog Marketing."

Owyang notes that other Google staff have personal blogs that include comments and specifically pointed to one by Matt Cutts, the head of Google's Webspam team, as one that's "embraced the community."

Google's Silicon Valley neighbor Sun Microsystems is very pro-blog. Sun hosts numerous employee-run blogs with the option of allowing comments, which many do, including CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Tim Bray, co-author of the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) (define) and Director of Web Technologies at Sun, has run his own blog for over three years. Up until recently he didn't allow comments but a few months ago decided to allow them.

"I kept receiving encouragement to add comments, but I was dubious about having to deal with problem posts," Bray told internetnews.com. "My feeling is that when you have a piece of the Internet, you're responsible for it."

So far, so good, he reports. "I'm super pleased with the way it's going," said Bray. He mentioned a post on PHP security and several other technology-related posts that generated a lot of "erudite, useful comments."

The other article, from Webpronews has the following take:

I very much like this emotional description. But what about commenting?

Well, I'd look at it this way - comments are to conversations as blogs are to individual and unfiltered expression.

In other words, to have a conversation, you must have either comments on your blog itself or a related device that connects people's expressions, those unfiltered/unedited voices. Trackbacks, for instance, which link and connect content on the web.

But to be a blog, a website doesn't require on-site comments, just the unedited voice of the blogger.

I'd accept that view.

Disguised Advertising on the Rise on the Net?

Got to read this interesting piece from a newspaper from Finnland: HELSINGIN SANOMAT. The article claiims that corporations are disguising their messages on web to make it look like user generated.

In December a blog appeared on the Internet in which young "game console fans" wrote about wanting the new Sony Playstation 3 console as a Christmas gift. Many recognised that the URL of the blog belonged to the guerrilla marketing company Zipatoni. This angered many, and Sony’s reputation suffered.