Starbucks Refill Policy is Now Worse!

Part of my daily routine is a cup of delicious coffee at Starbucks. I pick one up on my way to work and then get a refill a couple of hours later for 50 cents (or free if you have a registered starbucks card). The staff by our office is extremely friendly and the experience is great.

Unfortunately, as of March 25, 2009, Starbucks is eliminating free refills (and 50 cent refills) unless you consume the coffee within 1 hours while at the store. The Staff at my local Starbucks broke the news to me last week.

I guess the company is trying to come up with ways to penalize its best customers. I was calculating that because of their prior refill policy I would go to a Starbucks about 50 times a month (2x per day, 25 days a month). Generally I would just buy a coffee (or get a refill) - but about 1/3 of the time I'd upgrade to a higher margin item like food or an espresso based drink.

Under the new policy, I have no incentive to come back in the store for a second time during a day, so I'll probably start going to Peet's in the afternoon. My visits to Starbucks will drop from 50 times a week to probably about 25 times a week. Starbucks will have 1/2 has many touchpoints and opportunities to sell me things.

Looking at these numbers I'm struck by two things. 1) Starbucks is penalizing their best customers who often evangelize about their brand. 2) I go to Starbucks way too often. I should cut back. Seriously.

I feel like we should start twittering

I still can't bring my self to set up a twitter account for myself, but we did set one up at Personforce.com.

You can follow us at www.twitter.com/personforce. Like resurrecting my blog at Silicon MBA, setting up a company twitter account is more an experiment in understanding how social media works than anything else. It seems like everyone else is doing it, so I we should just start twittering.

I'm not sure exactly what we'll do it, probably broadcast recent job listings, blog posts, and "witticisms". We have 10 followers so far, 8 of whom are spambots.

The Principal-Agent Problem & AIG

The employees have gone wild!

I think that's the root cause of this current financial crisis. Basically, employees at financial institutions like AIG took on some big risks in hopes for a huge payday if the bets turned out well. If bets went sour, then the shareholders (or taxpayers) are left holding the bucket.

If we're going to rehabilitate the economy, we need to reaffirm the core capitalist principle - businesses exist to enrich their shareholders, not their executives. Just because asset prices are rising, employees have very little entitlement to share in the upside.

Economists describe this problem as the "principal-agent" dilemma. Owners hire managers to run their businesses. Managers, however, tend to promote their own interests above those of the owners when unchecked. In scenarios where shareholders have weak control over the management, the management inevitable will misbehave by:

1. Taking on excess risk
2. Creating excess volatility
3. Benefiting from the upside of these risks
4. Leaving equity holders or the government to cover downside

Shareholders need to assert their rights over irresponsible management to prevent the inevitable re-occurence of these financial bubbles. When the Obama administration tries to strip AIG derivatives traders of their bonuses, I view this as a fundamental reaffirmation of our capitalist system that prizes equity-holders rights above managerial compensation.

Adsense can undermine your message

I put Adsense on this blog a couple of months ago to better understand how online advertising and monetization of content works. It's still a bit of a mystery to me if/why people click on advertisements so I thought perhaps I could learn by minor experimentation. The downside of using these ads are it sullies the purity of your site while simultaneously not making you very much money (based on the traffic of Silicon MBA anyways).

One weird thing I've noticed so far is that adsense can seriously undermine the message of your post. Yesterday, I wrote about critizing FreeCreditReport.com for engaging in a predatory business model. Today, I open up the post and my site is full of advertisements for FreeCreditReport.com and other online credit led generation services! My message about criticizing it's business model is a little undermined, don't you think?

I imagine this happens a lot. If you write a negative review about some company or practice and then ads endorsing that company or practice start showing up. I wonder how many vegans write blogs financed by ads from Omaha steaks?

Perhaps as Google Adsense gets smarter and understands the semantic meaning of the text, this sort of mistargeting won't take place.

How Acai Berries could save the New York Times

I was struck by two articles I read today about Acai Berries and what is says about why newspapers are failing in this digital age.

Via a link on Hacker News, I found an post on Black Hat SEO about a fellow that makes $15,000 a through Google adsense. The basic formula was 1) Pick a valuable industry 2) Create content in that industry 3) Take steps such at people find this content through Google 4) Profit when people click on valuable advertising.

The fellow gave an example of creating a site about Acai berries and how he makes $5 everytime someone clicks on a link on the site. After setting up the site, he basically has very little to do and makes some nice passive income. People who coming to his site have "purchase intent" for things regarding Acai Berries and therefore are valuable leads for advertisers.

That same day, the New York Times has an article about Acai Berries. It's a well researched, intelligent piece about Acai Berries. Because the New York Times is such a reputable source, many people will find this content through search engines when they are seeking Acai related products.

How does the New York Times monetize this valuable content? Through flippin ads about Ralph Lauren clothes! It's nuts, this is possibly the worst way to make money from this content. The people who are reading this content are interested in Acai Berries - serve them some ads about Acai Berries. Of course the New York Times has some Google Adsense advertisements on the page in the lower right hand corners where no one would have click.

It seems the little guys might understand internet advertising business models better than the big guys like newspapers. Newspapers need to understand:

1. Many people will find their content through search engines
2. Many people who see their articles will have purchase intent regarding that content
3. This is not ideal advertising space for "branded advertising"
4. This is ideal advertising space for products related to that purchase intent.

Newspapers - learn it and love it; these are the rules.

The FreeCreditReport.com Business Model & Ethics

The internet is full of scams and deceptive practices centered around "recurring billing solutions". While technically not fraud, how many businesses make their livelihood by convincing consumers they are getting something free (or a one-time fee) but in reality charging the unsuspecting consumer every single month for the service? The best recent example are all the "stimulus checks" websites out there today.

I call this the FreeCreditReport.com business model. Credit reports are actually available for free, but not through this company. Their entire business model is built around convincing someone to sign up and then making it very difficult for them to cancel. This business a pure wealth transfer between the unsuspecting and the predatory - it creates zero value for society.

The current push among Web 2.0 companies to move from a "ad-supported" to a "paid-subscription" business model. I hope that as people make this transition, the companies take care to avoid this predatory model. In the jobs space, I see companies are increasingly charging job seekers monthly fees to access "exclusive jobs". I hope that these services are providing real value and not just taking advantage of people's insecurities about finding work right now.

The world doesn't need another FreeCreditReport.com. I hope entreprenuers will remember that as they design their businesses. Moreover, I hope the ad network and websites (like Google, Yahoo, Facebook) will work hard to make sure that they deceptive business are not allow to advertise on their grounds.

Google Checkout raises prices

When we first started using Google checkout, it was free. Then they raised the price to 2.2% + $0.20.

Now Google is announcing a massive price increase. A tiered structure that penalizes the vast majority of merchants. See below.

---------------

Hello,

We're writing to let you know that on May 5, 2009, Google
Checkout's transaction processing fees will be changing. We'll be
transitioning from our 2.0% + $0.20 per transaction rate to a new
tiered fee structure, where the rates will vary depending on the
dollar amount of your monthly sales processed through Checkout.
The rate you'll be charged beginning on May 5, 2009 will be based
on your sales processed through Checkout during the month of April
2009. Each month thereafter, we'll continue to use the prior
month's sales volume to determine your transaction processing
rate. For more details about the new rates, please visit
http://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

We'll also be discontinuing the AdWords free transaction
processing promotion on May 5, 2009. Any AdWords transaction
processing credits accrued during April 2009 will be applied
towards transactions that occur on May 1-4, 2009.

Fees are the same for all payment types (Visa, MasterCard,
American Express, and Discover) and there are still no monthly,
setup, or gateway fees. For cross-border transactions, there will
be an additional 1% fee assessed per transaction. To learn more
about Google Checkout fees, please visit
http://checkout.google.com/seller/fees.html

Google is committed to the continued growth and development of
Checkout and to helping merchants increase sales by driving more
leads and higher conversions. Advertisers who use Checkout have
the opportunity to display the Checkout badge on their ads, which
has proven to be an effective way to differentiate ads and attract
user interest. Checkout users click on ads 10% more when the ad
displays the Checkout badge and convert 40% more than shoppers who
have not used Checkout in the past.

For more information about this change and how it affects the
product, please read our post on The Official Google Checkout
Blog: http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2009/03/google-checkout-fees-in-2009.html

If you have any questions, please visit our Help Center at
http://checkout.google.com/support/sell/bin/answer.py?answer=134473
Thank you for using Google Checkout.

Sincerely,
The Google Checkout Team

MBA rankings (that are actually right)

Whenever, I look through the business school and mba rankings produced by magazines, I'm struck that the rankings are stupid. It's as if they just randomly selected criteria, scored the schools along the criteria, and then said here are the rankings folks!

The problem with this approach is it is wrong. The two reasons it are wrong are 1) The criteria are arbitrary 2) The variance in the results (the fact that the rankings change ever year dramatically) is completely unexplained and probably wrong.

Since I've noticed a lot of the traffic to this blog is by people looking for information about MBA programs, I'm going to give you my opinion about business school rankings.

I think better approach rankings schools would be to ask the question - what schools do people want to attend? Using a statistical method called "conjoint analysis" you can look at what schools did people get in to, and based on that choice set, where did they choose to attend. If someone chooses Stanford over Wharton, you can rank Stanford over Wharton. If someone chooses Wharton over Tuck, you can rank Stanford and Wharton over Tuck. With a large enough data set, the preferences are fairly stable.

As my data set, I'm going to use my "vague memory" of what business schools my peers decided to attend based when I was at Mercer Management Consulting (now Oliver Wyman). I'm also not actually going to perform the analysis (that is beyond the limits of me and this actual faux data), but instead guesstimate the results based on observed behavior. I hope another institution (maybe someone like McKinsey that would have large data set) would perform this actual analysis some day. This is of course biased by the time at Stanford GSB and all my other biases since this guesstimate is essentially a qualitative assessment.

MBA rankings by Silicon MBA

1. Stanford
1. Harvard
3. Wharton
4. Kellogg
5. Tuck
5. MIT
5. Chicago
8. Columba
8. Berkeley
10. NYU

There you go. You'll notice they mostly fall in bands/tiers. Again, this result is heavily based on my own opinion, but my opinion is informed by observations of what business schools prospective applicants actually choose to attend.

Facebook takes on Twitter!

Facebook's announcement to allow 1-way following of friends amounts to a direct assault on Twitter.

If you haven't heard, Facebook members can now have as many friends/followers as they like. Moreover, the can allow people who they don't know to follow them without having to reciprocate.

What has made Twitter popular is it gives anyone the ability to broadcast to the world. Facebook is now opening up this feature to its 175 million active users. Will users start using Facebook as a broadcasting platform? The companies has a few advantages over Twitter:

1. 175 million users is huge head start
2. With Facebook you can broadcast more rich and interesting information since you're not constrained by 140 characters.

Hitherto, Facebook has just been used to connect people who know each other in the real world. Will it take off as a broadcasting platform? Only time will tell.

SEO for Job Sites - a Race to the Bottom?

Google is the starting point for most people's navigation of the internet. For hr, recruiting, and job sites, this is no different. As a result, job sites focus intently on SEO (search engine optimization). SEO broadly refers to making the content on your site accessible to search engines (ie The Google!).

People Google the term "jobs" about 150,000,000 times a month. Because of this, almost all job sites want their pages to show up for common (and long tail) search terms. The result is that job search sites are all following the same best practices and focusing more on the question "will Google find this content?" than on "is this good content?"

Try searching for any job-related search term on Google. Try the term "miami jobs". Look at the first 10 sites; they are all following the same employment SEO formula, have similar page titles and meta data, and show the same jobs. Not one of the results gives you a website that is generally that useful or unique for someone conducting a Miami specific job search. This pattern continues for almost any job-related search, no matter how obscure.

I don't want to call the results spam, but they are just not interesting. Many sites out there have great content, but it seems the industry is focused more on gaming the Google SEO guidelines and less on producing interesting content. The result is that most sites are pretty much repackaging the same ole crap, competing against each other in a race to the top of Google, but to the bottom of the job seeker experience. More and more, all the job search sites out there are just starting to look the same.

Google, to its credit, recognizes that when sites create content for the sole purpose of search engine optimization, the quality of search results goes down. I wonder how Google will adjust it's algorithm to ensure fresh interesting results for career sites. It certainly will create a ripple in the industry.

13 point checklist for startups

Paul Graham at Ycombinator recently published a great essay entitled Startups in 13 Sentences. The essay stands out for its elegant simplicity - clearly a lot of experience and data are neatly reduced to these thirteen tips about starting a company. Like all aphorisms, the tips don't apply to all companies and all situations, but they are surprisingly robust in my opionion.

The tips are great advice for someone thinking about starting a startup. I think it's quite useful as a diagnostic tool for all startup founders as well. Go through each of the 13 points and rate yourself on a A-F scale. Based on the the results, what would you do differently? What are you you doing well and where can you improve?

I went through the excercise for Personforce and found it illuminating. I'll spare you the results, but it definitely highlighted areas where we can improve.

Here's an abbreviated version of Paul's startup tips that you can use are a scoring sheet:

1. Pick good cofounders: ___

2. Launch fast: ___

3. Let your idea evolve: ___

4. Understand your users: ___

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent: ___

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service: ___

7. You make what you measure: ___

8. Spend little: ___

9. Get ramen profitable: ___

10. Avoid distractions: ___

11. Don't get demoralized: ___

12. Don't give up: ___

13. Deals fall through: ___

Definitely read the full version with Paul's explanations here before taking the test.

Email fax by RingCentral is amazing

When we started Personforce, I was amazed at how much faxing went on in the industry. Before this experience, I had used a fax machine maybe once or twice in my entire life. After we launched though, I was paying usurious rates to the Stanford GSB practically every day to send and receive faxes to and from clients.

When I graduated from school and started Personforce fulltime, one of our first purchases was our own fax machine. For a while I was pretty happy about it. Whenever the fax machine starting ringing my ears perked up - it was generally the sound of a new order coming in, which was very exciting. Actually, lots of times it was spam telemarketers which was quite disappointing.

When we changed offices we had to change telephone lines so I revisited our fax service. We decided to try out an email fax service (efax) because it just seemed like the modern thing to do. RingCentral seemed reasonably priced and full featured so we choose them.

It turned out switching to RingCentral has been an incredible experience. The software is well designed and easy to use. You can very easily replicate all the core features of sending and receiving faxes.

The best part of RingCentral is that it puts your fax "in the clouds". That means I can access it from my laptop, anyone else's computer, from my phone, or from any device that can connect to the internet. Now when I get a fax I can check it out on my iPhone whereever I am. I'd contrast this to having to physically go to the Stanford GSB fax terminal after class and see if anything came in.

The other great benefit of email fax services is that they cut down on paperwork. All your documents come to you digitized so there is no need to phyically file documents. I almost never need to file paper documents anymore now.

Anyhow, I highly recommend putting your fax in the cloud. I don't know much about other services but we're quite happy with RingCentral. I particularly like the nice "ding" sound when a new order comes in.

Getting your MBA online? I'm skeptical.

As part of a side project, I recently tried researching online MBA programs.

First off, I learned it's really hard to research almost anything in the online education space because of the vibrant lead generation business. Basically, there are a lot of companies that are willing to pay a lot of money for customer leads of prospective students. As a result, there are lots of spammy sites about online MBA programs that just try to get you to click on their advertisements.

As a rule, if a company is will to pay a lot of money for a customer lead, they are generally taking advantage of their customers. That got me thinking, is getting your MBA online worth it?

First of the pro's. An online education is accessible to lots of people because it's flexible around your schedule and personal life. Also, you can avoid the time-consuming application process for a traditional program. Some employers will increase your pay scale if you can check a box saying you have an MBA, so it seems worth it if you work at one of those places. Finally, I assume these programs actually teach you something about accounting, finance, operations, and strategy, and learning is generally good.

However, I think the bad certainly outweighs the good. First off, you're deprived of most of the benefits of the MBA - the network of alumni and the signaling effect associated with your school's brand. Second, a lot of the learning in an MBA program (specifically in areas like Strategy) is experiential; I'm skeptical that can be recreated online. Finally, these programs charge you an arm and a leg; it seems like highway robbery for a product which has very low variable costs.

What I would suggest is that instead of getting an MBA online, you should get an accounting degree online. I think most of the concrete book knowledge in the MBA program can be captured through accounting and finance. Moreover, accounting is the sort of thing that you can probably learn online well and that a deep knowledge of makes you immediately marketable. Just my two cents!

Reflections on Entrepreneurship from Stanford GSB

Going through an old notebook of mine, I found a page of things I had learned about startups and entrepreneurship from my time in the MBA program at Stanford GSB. I wrote it on 6/12/07, about a week before i graduated. I culled these from things I learned from various classes, lectures, meetings, books, and during the early days of starting Personforce.

• Entrepreneurship is about building something with little to zero resources
• Do rather than analyze. Err on the side of speed than precision
• Building a company is an iterative process. Test and learn.
• There is a mental inflection point when the startup moves from idea to actual business
• The micro-details of the product, the sales pitch, the contract matter.
• There is a way to solve any problem. There is a way to sell anything. It might just be harder than you are prepared to work.
• Differentiated businesses require lots of hard work
• Do the dogs want to eat the dog food?
• Your sheer force of will is a competitive advantage
• Work with people who have different skills but similar values to you
• You have to give equity away to make the pie larger
• You have to strike and scale while the iron is hot
• Successful entrepreneurs are just normal people
• You need to commit to something to succeed. Good things start happening and it provides focus. "Throw your cap over the fence"
• Little is gained by secrecy, good things happen when talking to smart people
• Act weak when you are strong. Act still when you are about to move.
• Little companies can crush competitors
• Achieving public success has an irrevocable price
• Don't add costs to the business
• To succeed, you need to be contrarian and right
• Selling into existing markets can be easier to sell to. Creating new markets can be powerful.
• Great businesses create an impact far in excess of the capital invested in them.
• Every early decision has strategic and ethical implications
• Before every fork in the road, ask your self exactly what it is that you are trying to accomplish
  

Perhaps at a later date I'll write about which of these points I found to be true, especially true, or not sure true in starting a business.

LinkedIn is Not a Social Network

LinkedIn is a fantastically useful service, but I'm not sure I'd call it a social network. LinkedIn's rich database of contact information is a highly valuable business tool, but the company's value as social network is limited.

In a social network, you get utility from fact that your friends are on it. On Facebook, I can see the pictures my friends upload, get invited to events, and generally keep in touch with my network. If I were on Facebook with a random set of people I didn't know, I'm certain the service would be of little value to me.

On the other hand, I get almost no utility from having "friends on Linkedin". Sure, it's a nice way to store the contact information of professional contacts, but I can do so in Outlook, through Plaxo, in an excel spreadsheet, or on my phone; each of these options is only marginally less useful than LinkedIn at saving people's contact information. LinkedIn has some value as a social network, but it pails in comparison to its value as business tool to find contacts.

LinkedIn's primary value is as a giant database of contact information. It allows you to get in touch with the right person, at the right company, at the right time. It's hard to emphasis how valuable this is (or will can be) for facilitating sales, hiring, and business development. If you are a paper salesman in Scranton, you can look up the contact information of who is the purchasing manager at the local law firm, send them a message, and then hopefully connect. If you are a recruiter, you can find people near you that have the skills that your client is looking for. Before LinkedIn, you were reliant on your own network of contacts or cold calling into the main company line and working your way through a phone tree blindly.

I'd say that 99% of the value of LinkedIn is that people on it are NOT my friends. In fact, the fact that I can only freely see the contact information of my friends is a clever "freemium" strategy by the company -- I have to pay up if I want to view the information of people who are not my friends.

By calling its self a social network, LinkedIn got its users to sign up, invite their friends, and populate the database. Calling its self a social network has been a great marketing technique to get users to build a data asset. In fact, companies that have marketed themselves as large databases of contacts (Plaxo, Jigsaw) have been far less successful than LinkedIn.

I think LinkedIn knows that its primary value is as a business tool to connect people who don't know each other but who should do business with each other. The company is still in the preliminary stages of developing this tool, but it one of the most valuable data assets in the world today.

Business School Acceptance Rates Will Be Brutal

When I got my MBA at Stanford GSB, I think the acceptance rate was around 12%. We all felt like we got in by the skin of our teeth.

In 2008, the acceptance rate at Stanford GSB was 8%. At Harvard Business School (HBS) it was 14%, and at Wharton it was 17%. Yikes.

For everything I'm hearing, this year is looking brutal. Round one results came in a few weeks ago and it looks nasty. I've heard of a lot of people that got rejected or wait listed at Stanford GSB that I think ordinarily would have gotten in; you know the type - saved babies while working at a top tier private equity firm, ran a hedge fund out of their ivy league college dorm, etc.

I guess it's not suprising that acceptance rates are low -- everyone is trying to wait out the recession from the sidelines at school. Not only that, but private equity firms, hedge funds, banks, and consulting firms have fewer job openings, releasing a flood of candidates into the market.

If I had to guess, in 2009 the MBA acceptance rates will be brutal. Here's my guess: Stanford GSB 6%, HBS 11%, Wharton 14%. Best of luck to everybody applying this year.

Text Links Ads + College Newspapers = BAD

Through my capacity at Personforce, I've gotten to know the college newspaper industry reasonably well. It's a delight to work with the students and faculty at these fantastic training grounds for journalism and media management. I can't say enough good things about the caliber of the people at these institutions and the journalism they produce.

Working with college newspapers , I'm struck that perhaps a pernicious force has infiltrated these otherwise sterling institutions - inadvertent influence-selling through text link ads.

In today's media landscape, it's very important to understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and make sure you abide by ethical online practices so that Google will find you. Google is the starting place for where most people find content. Jeff Atwood discusses that after launching his startup StackOverflow, he now gets 83% of his traffic (over 3 millions visitors!) from Google. So in today's media landscape, it's important to play by the rules or you'll get black listed and shut out of most of your traffic.

Almost all search engines use links as a currency to measure a website's authority. If you get lots of good inbound links from high profile websites to your website, Google rewards this by giving your site a high Page Rank. A high Page Rank means that people are more likely to find your content through Google. The more people can find your content, the more traffic, the more revenue for your newspaper.

One thing that struck me though is that most college newspapers have very low page ranks in Google. Even more startling - their page rank keeps falling. This was extremely surprising to me for a variety of reasons. First, all of these institutions publish first rate, original, sophisticated content. Yet somehow they have page rank of 4, the same as a mid-level blogger. Second, almost every college newspaper has been publishing online for over 10 years, but from Google's perspective they look like a brand new publication of questionable authenticity. Heck some of these newspapers have been around for over 200 years!

So why is this going on? Digging around the answer is clear - text link advertising. For some bizarre reason many college newspaper have insidious text link ads all over their websites. Text links ads are when an advertiser pays to have a link on your site so they can get some of your "google authority" and look like they have authority because your newspaper is linking to them. In essence, the advertiser wants the newspaper to link to them so their company shows up higher in search results and they willing to pay for it.

Virtually no reputable newspaper, blog, or publisher accepts text link advertising today for a big reason - when you sell a text link you are selling your influence. It is the technical and ethical equivalent of publishing a favorable article about a company in your newspaper because they paid you to do so. Ethical issues aside, Google thinks less of newspapers that do this and punishes them tremendously.

Matt Cutts, a Google search engineer and evangelist for the company writes:

Google (and pretty much every other major search engine) uses hyperlinks to help determine reputation. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and link-based analysis has greatly improved the quality of web search. Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results.

Remarkably, Matt Cutts specifically calls out college newspapers for selling text link ads:

When the Berkeley college newspaper has six online gambling links (three casinos, two for poker, and one bingo) on its front page, it’s harder for search engines to know which links can be trusted.

When text links ads are sold without using the "no follow" attribute, Google knows you are doing this and penalizes the newspaper as a less reputable source:

If you want to buy or sell a link purely for visitors or traffic and not for search engines, a simple method exists to do so (the nofollow attribute). Google’s stance on selling links is pretty clear and we’re pretty accurate at spotting them, both algorithmically and manually. Sites that sell links can lose their trust in search engines.

So if any college newspaper is wondering why it has a 4 or a 5 page rank instead of a 6 or a 7, this is probably the answer. Most likely some company is taking advantage of students who think text link advertisements are a conventional form of advertising. In reality they are the purest form of payola and taint a site's reputation. The New York Times, Washington Post, or any newspaper wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole.

Given the prevalence of all these text link ads for college newspapers, my next question is where are they coming from? Who is taking advantage of the students at these colleges?

An experiment in audience building

As an experiment in audience building, I started a blog call The Police Jobs Review. I'm trying to see if I blog regularly about a fairly narrow subject, what exactly happens. A few things to note:

1. I don't know much about Police employment and issues
2. I'm trying to write most days
3. I try to scan the current events about police and work and see if i can comment on it
4. I don't plan on marketing the blog, participating in social media interactions or anything

It's a pure experiment. Let's hope I can blog enough to keep it going!

FanBridge, stop spamming the crap out of me

Every day I get about 3 or 4 pieces of spam from FanBridge, the email delivery service for bands.

Normally email delivery services like Constant Contact, iContact etc make sure that you opt in to the list before they deliver email from their customers to you. They provide the valuable service of mail deliverability by ensuring that users want to receive these emails.

FanBridge claims on on it's website that users must opt in to receive messages, but this is a bold faced lie. So FanBridge, how about it? Will you stop spamming the crap out of everybody?

Tax cuts and police employment

Covering how tax cuts for business affect police employment over at the police jobs review. Obviously, we don't solve anything, but its an interesting example of the prisoner's dilemma.