STEVE WODA'S BLOG

Procrastinators head to stores this week: NRF survey – DMNews As the holiday shopping season is getting shorter, the biggest procrastinators are men, according to NRF’s 2007 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch. The survey found that 19.4% of men had yet to begin their holiday sho Buyers of illegal software can get rewards when they blow whistle Software pirates who peddle their goods on eBay, watch out. A software industry trade group is h

The Week Before Christmas, and All Through the Town – FocusOnCrofton.com blog A parody of Clement Clark Moore’s "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Margaret Woda. Yes. Margaret is related to me. She is my mom, and she is really teaching me a thing or two about how to blog for business. Keep up the great work Mom! BidPay Abruptly Closes Online-Payment Service December is an unlucky month for one online payment service. BidPay.com sent an email to users on Wednesday informing th

Blogosphere Reacts to Google Knol – Advertising Age – Digital It has been called a competitor to Wikipedia, Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo, Seth Godin’s Squidoo and Yahoo Answers: Knol is Google’s foray into knowledge aggregation. Knol lets users produce web pages devoted to various subject matter. Cyber Crime 2.0 – washingtonpost.com The year 2007 may go down in the annals of Internet crime as the year when organized cyber criminals finally got serious about their marketing strateg

Blog Marketing Takes Commitment – Search Engine Watch Some marketers think "social media marketing" or "social media optimization" means "social media manipulation." There is a steady stream of how-to articles describing how to game the system of sites like Digg, or to develop linkbait to drive untargeted traffic to your site. A better way to approach social media is to remember that behind every successful blog is a person. Reaching out to bloggers and building a relationsh

Technology Review: Microsoft buys Multimap for undisclosed amount Microsoft Corp. said Wednesday it has acquired a United Kingdom online mapping company to enhance its existing Windows Live Web-based services.The software maker did not say what it paid for Multimap, which provides street-level maps, travel directions and local information. Multimap also offers hotel and restaurant-booking services and builds private-label mapping tools for companies, including Hilton Hotels a

Trend Watch: What’s Hot in osCommerce This is the first in a series on osCommerce, the popular free, open-source shopping cart alternative, and the industry it has spawned. I found this article to be an excellent overview of the history of osCommerce shopping carts, the major osCommerce players as well as the technical support resources that exist for the osCommerce products. As you may know, buySAFE is available for most of the osCommerce shopping cart platforms including os

Happy Holiday for European Web Shops? – eMarketer Retail e-commerce continues to grow in the largest Western European economies. 160.6 million European Internet users visited online retail sites in the month of October 2007. This article provides a number of other interesting facts about European ecommerce. eBay Watch: PayPal Offers Storefront Widget This week PayPal released a new Web widget that lets you embed a virtual storefront onto your blog or any Web site that uses H

Should eBay CEO Meg Whitman Step Down? Henry Blodget writes in Silicon Alley Insider that eBay CEO Meg Whitman is "one of the Valley’s most celebrated and admired executives" but thinks it is becoming increasingly clear that Whitman is not the right person for the job. In this blog post, Ina asks the hard questions. Consumer Reports Warns of Counterfeit Items on Sites Like eBay A Consumer Reports press statement on the problem of counterfeit items said consumers should be sus