The Power Of Twitter

-I am using RSS less and less lately. Mostly due to FriendFeed, but also because of Twitter ...

-People worry about companies starting to use Twitter for marketing. If companies misuse Twitter, block or unfollow them. Problem solved. Remember, it's who you follow that defines you...

-Twitter is the public square. Lots of noise, little signal. Blogs are like a speech. Signal, but little noise ...

President Bush has continually expressed his opposition to a housing bill that proposes to include $4 billion in grants for local governments to buy and refurbish foreclosed properties.

Apart from becoming more and more unpleasant, recently business travel is also becoming far less necessary. With videoconferencing technologies improving and fuel prices rising, more businessmen and women seem to be choosing the option to stay put and use new technology to cut down on travel.

Nobel laureate and former US vice-president Al Gore recently made a speech advocating that Americans abandon fossil fuels completely over the next ten years. His solution is ???that the price of carbon-based energy include the costs of the environmental damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn. This is the single most important policy change we can make.

When you walk around the Bangalore campus of technology-outsourcing giant Wipro, something feels familiar. Sure, it's India, so the sun is too hot and the women float by in a rainbow of saris. But there's still a sense of d??j?? vu. At lunchtime, young employees (average age: 27) swarm into cafeteria cliques, or stream into computer labs, or exit en masse from one three-story lecture hall into another. Oh, that's right. It feels like college.

On a prematurely springlike day in Cincinnati, Len Sauers's workday begins as it often does -- with a meeting. On the 11th floor of Procter & Gamble's corporate offices, seven members of its Sustainability Leadership Council huddle around a table in a small conference room. Ten others listen in by phone from P&G offices around the world. The topic at hand is the company's commitment to develop $20 billion worth of "sustainable innovation products" in the next five years, a significant addition to P&G's current $76 billion in annual sales.

Although Toyota's Prius has peaked interest, SUVs are still selling. "Surprisingly, there is still a good majority of people buying full-sized pickups and SUVs," Mark Bruschi, general manager at Shore Toyota, told The Press of Atlantic City. "We are off about 15 percent for those vehicles from where we were."

Apart from the incentives offered, Bruschi reports that SUVs are doing well because people have kids, they're going skiing, or to the beach, or towing their trailers.

Flashy and innovative, concepts offer auto designers the opportunity to let their imaginations run wild. From beginning to end, designers can spend anywhere from six months to two years bringing a concept to market. Some have already gone into production; others we can only cross our fingers about.

BMW GINA Light Visionary Concept

Recently, at the E3 games summit in LA, Microsoft announced its redesign for Xbox Live, which places more emphasis on social games like its social karaoke game, Lips. Playstation has its own similar social karaoke game called Singstar. The emphasis on social gaming comes at a time when the video game market is expanding rapidly.

Some guy in Japan just bought the farm by working too hard. You heard right. He was 45, the lead engineer for a Toyota hybrid car division. While he was helping us reduce our dependence on oil, the poor guy ran out of gas. And he didn't even live as long as some of our aging rock stars. You know the economy is in bad shape when an auto worker doesn't last as long as Keith Richards. Prior to his death this dedicated worker had been averaging over 80 hours of overtime per month. Which I guess should now be referred to as "six feet undertime."

Two days ago, in contrast to previous European rulings on the subject, the Federal District Court in Manhattan ruled that eBay does not have any legal responsibility to control the sale of counterfeit Tiffany goods sold on its site. As long as eBay removes the material upon complaint, it does not have to actually filter its marketplace for trademarked material.

The counsel for Tiffany, James B. Swire attacked the decision, stating that it undermines "the principal purpose of trademark law," which is protecting consumers and then brand owners.