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But the Employee of the Month at JP Communications? They enjoy the health and recreational benefits of the Hawaii Chair

Try to top that, Other Wholesale Search Engines! I’m hula-ing my way to a slimmer, sexier me, as we speak. (eww)

Anyway, watching the video I take note that:

a) the guy at the beginning is gesturing and talking to “Tamara” who clearly is not there.

b) Then he sends it over to Erin Lee, who in both her shots on this clip, looks like she is barely able to stay on the thing. In her second scene, she looks like she’s trying to stay on a mechanical bull.

c) The guy who says “It feels great on my abs” : is either confused about anatomy or didn’t feel comfortable saying where the Hawaii Chair was really working.

Ask Jason Prescott, I have long predicted that Microsoft would make a bid for Yahoo!, but it still was a strange surprise to wake up to this morning.  In the above story, there’s a bit from an analyst that claims this is all about advertising revenue from search:

“This deal is mainly about advertising, and mainly about search-based advertising,” said the 451 Group, based in Boston. “It combines the second and third players in that market to take on the number one, Google. The main thing this brings Microsoft is a profitable advertising business, something it has not managed to achieve with its own online services business, which loses money.”

…that’s a pretty shallow look at things, probably they just had an early reading in on the memo that Ballmer sent to Microsoft employees, which is nothing more than a leak to the blogs and the press directly from Ballmer. It’s definitely not just about search. Microsoft has been making a sustained effort to drive entertainment and lifestyle options over a Microsoft software and increasing hardware platform platform. Yahoo is certainly more than just search advertising. Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Personals are all powerful competitors in their space. It fits in seamlessly with Microsoft’s powerful Xbox platform and gives it a much broader userbase to compete against Google’s Gmail and the other Google Apps like Google Docs. Google is still really just getting started in terms of taking on Microsoft’s dominant office productivity software, but it is definitely part of their mission, leveraging the super appealing Gmail and trying to wedge it and their improving online office suite into the picture for business customers.

Where’s Bill?

Maybe its a coincidence but I think it’s interesting that this comes immediately on the heels of a press offensive to celebrate Bill Gates’s retirement. Especially since the public celebration comes 6 months before his real departure in July.

Is This the Front Lines of Microsoft’s Endless War Vs. Open Source

One of the things, most people don’t know about Yahoo! is that they are one of the big champions of open source software, the free community developed applications that are like garlic to Microsoft’s software sales and licensing vampire. Yahoo is mainly deployed on FreeBSD, and a Microsoft takeover would be a crushing blow to many open source initiative, including Yahoo acquisition Zimbra, which has been emerging as a worthy alternative mail server to Exchange. Read more in this thread at Slashdot

No surprise YHOO closed up 47%

Yahoo’s Story About Microsoft Trying to Buy Yahoo
Funny Bitterness: An Ex-Yahoo Employee’s Advice to Microsoft

Check out this comment:

I have contacted a few mid level management people at Yahoo who could be described as, ‘Yahoo Purple Lifers”. They have intimated that they will stay and work to make any cultural changes to the organization, and I quote, “as painful as possible for the new Microsoft directors and division Veeps, short of insurrection”.

I’ll try and write something up on this attitude that seems pervasive, on my blog, over the weekend. There has been plenty of bitterness over the layoff’s already.

They are very different companies; although one could reason that this acquisition is the lawful and logical harvest of equity for Yahoo’s long term investors and employees with stock. But it takes more than a mere decision to make such a gargantuan move work.

They are Very Different cultures.

Hey! There’s one reason you might not want to buy the stock…

It’s been a fun first month of blogging for Top Ten Wholesale, and I wanted to thank everyone for reading and pitching in on this blog. Top Ten is a quality product, with top notch staff support, and my resolution for 2008 is to make this blog just as effective as the search engine itself.

Have a Happy New Year and a great 2008! I hope you are looking forward to the year ahead as much as I am.

As an online marketing specialist, I’m PO’d. I like to be surprised from time to time and wish I could slap my palm to my forehead and yell, “I still don’t agree with this clown, but that’s a new wrinkle in this dirty street fight. It even makes a tiny bit of sense.”

Instead I get snores and zzzzzzzzz. On the subject of net neutrality, which affects Internet fairness and the ability of all but the hugest eCommerce businesses to operate profitably online, the elites who want to kill off the Internet Golden Goose have zero imagination. They don’t come up with surprising or logical or reasonable or even moderately interesting objections to a free, open, fair and NEUTRAL Internet. Zip. Bupkiss. Nada.

It’s S.O.S. – Same Old “Stuff.”

Who are these S.O.S. elites who want to take away the “superhighway” lanes of the “Information Superhighway?” Who are these boring macaws, who simply repeat the same old opposition to Net Neutrality, over and over, without defending their point of view? Bad Polly; No Cracker.

Opponents of a fair and neutral Internet that gives everyone equal access and the same roads, without bribes (premium prices), now include the Bush Administration Department of Justice. Add the DoJ to the original Neutral-Net-Haters who lobby government regulators for favors, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association.

Yawn. I’m too bored by this unsurprising link between U.S. Regulators and the Mega-Bucks Industry Associations Who Lobby Them … against the interests of all the rest of us. In petroleum markets, that’s called a “cartel.” If you want to see a quick overview of the Net Neutrality issue – complete with impacts on marketers, plus links to the Pros (Save The Internet) and the Con Artists cited above – see Jason Prescott’s “The President’s Lounge” perspective at this page link:
When I’m done being bored by foxes guarding the hen house who co-opt the coop owners, I’m going to keep writing my Congressional reps and senators, asking them to support Net Neutrality and to oppose a TeleCom Industry-controlled Internet. Especially now that the issue of Net Neutrality is all mixed up with illegal wiretapping of Americans’ phones and email. (The same old solid citizens of the TeleCom Industry Association who oppose Net Neutrality also helped the Bush Administration illegally wiretap Americans without required FISA warrants … and without a peep about the laws they were breaking. Now they want a get-out-of-jail-free card: Immunity from prosecution for breaking U.S. law. See this activist social media site for details and links on that S.O.S.

It’s over, baby. The surprise and bubbles are gone from our relationship. I get no high from Monopoly TeleCom Champagne, Registered Origin: Greed-ville USA. Let’s tip a few to Net Neutrality.

In the day-to-day operations of running a successful online commerce business, it is easy to get exhausted putting out brush fires.

Daily e-Commerce Brush Fires

• Drop-shipping SNAFUs
• Catching a free-fall in your conversion-to-sale rates
• Cost-per-click keyword bids that jump and take your Click-through Charges with them
• That stuck feeling when you learn your purchase of last-season Girl’s Accessories just hit the “No Way” list at Crunch.com
• Burning up your planned paid-ad budget for three months in only 30 days
• Learning about the toy safety recall after your lot cleared imports

Sometimes it’s challenges we can’t see clearly through the thick layer of smoke on the daily horizon that pose the greatest threats to our ROI, profitability and business survival. The issue of Net Neutrality is one of those distant fires. Let’s clear some smoke.

Net Neutrality in a Nutshell
A threat to online commerce is from the opposite of Net Neutrality: A planned system of restrictive tollbooths on the information superhighway. These non-neutral Internet tollbooths will control access, speed limits and road conditions to all big-bandwidth packet streams (your content) by travelers (your dealers or customers with searches and purchase transactions) idling at their browsers while backed up at Internet on-ramps.

We all know that the “free” Internet has a planet-sized backbone and access control points, such as Internet Service Providers and national domain filters. (The latter includes censorship policies placed on Google, Yahoo! and other search providers for results allowed to China’s 100 million Internet users. Also, Yahoo! is being questioned by the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee for its possible role in arrest of a Chinese journalist who sent an email criticizing Chinese media restrictions.

Aside from official censorship roadblocks, anyone with ISP Internet access anywhere can use the superhighway and go where they like.

Enter the tele-communications lobby. Long-term plans were to set up tiers of commercial service on the information superhighway, charging content providers and web destinations extra for the privilege of a big, wide, high-speed road on which their potential customers or readers reach them.

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The I-road narrows, clogs and gets bumper-to-bumpier for users trying to reach non-paying destinations, like smaller e-Commerce sites, start-ups, news and opinion sites and non-profits. Once you’re on the toll-free roads — Internet roads where smaller, lower-revenue businesses live and won’t pay extra to ISP networks — then you’re off the maps of tollbooth operators like AT&T, Verizon, Time Warner or Comcast. Customers may still reach your virtual storefront, but they will have stalled and hit potholes before crossing your digital threshold.

This old dog wears a new digital collar: In 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court held that a telegraph company is a “common carrier” and obligated to provide non-discriminatory service to anyone who asks. Today’s Internet version of common carriage is Net Neutrality.

What’s In Net Neutrality for You?
This payment for special treatment (not being slowed or blocked) would be called “paying the vig” in a TV episode of The Sopranos. The telecom lobby calls it the “cost of doing business” or “the price of heavier data demands on networks.” What the National Cable & Telecommunications Association counted on is people not paying attention because the issue is “too complex.”

Apologies to readers who find the above too simplistic. For details, go to Net Neutrality sites at Common Cause < www.commoncause.org/NetNeutrality/ > and Save the Internet < www.savetheinternet.com/=faq >. For the other side, check NCTA’s site at
< www.ncta.com/IssueBrief.aspx?contentId=2715 > . Detail wonks can check “Broadband Internet Regulation and Access” at < www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RS22444.pdf >.

One thing online commerce free enterprisers can do is support Net Neutrality, especially to their U.S. senators. Legislation to make the FCC enforce Net Neutrality failed in both houses in 2006, in a vote that fell along party lines. However, advocates in the Senate left open voting on a bigger telecom bill; and largely anti-Net Neutrality Republicans lost control of Congress in November 2006. The vote is coming back.

Congress hears from lobbyists on why commercial Internet tollbooths are needed.

Congress also needs to hear from e-Commerce entrepreneurs who don’t have deep pockets or revenues of an eBay, Google or Fortune 1000 company. They need to hear from marketers like you; that is, once you stomp out that daily brush fire.

Just as video killed the radio star, it now seems that Internet may kill off local newspapers, according to a research report released today by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

The study, “Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet,” closely examined a year’s worth of traffic to 160 different Websites.  According to the study, overall traffic to newspaper sites has generally leveled off.  Nationally known newspapers, on the other hand, seem to be gaining an online audience.  Site traffic to papers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today have increased by 10 percent over the course of the past year.  But the Websites of most other newspapers—whether in large, medium-sized, or small cities—seem to have lost their audience.

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Non-traditional news providers seem to have gained the most readers.  The sites of search engines, service providers, aggregators and bloggers grew faster on average than the sites of traditional news providers, whether print, broadcast, or cable.  Google, Yahoo, AOL, and MSN, along with sites such as newsvine.com, topix.net, digg.com and reddit.com, saw large traffic increases during the past year.

“Our evidence suggests that the Internet is redistributing the news audience in a way that is pressuring some traditional news organizations,” the study says.  “Product substitution through the Web is particularly threatening to the print media, whose initial advantage as a ‘first mover’ has all but disappeared.”  Newspaper distributors will have to reinvent themselves if they wish to remain major media contenders.  Otherwise it looks like they’ll be left behind in the not-so-distant future. 

It’s that time of year again!  With kids and parents gearing up for the start of the school year it’s only a matter of time before Halloween is upon us.  It’s about time to be thinking about placing orders for Halloween costumes, decorations, party favors and the like.  Trick-or-treaters of all shapes and sizes now have more variety and choices than ever when it comes to costumes, hats, masks, and costume accessories.  And the same goes for Halloween party planners.

Everyone loves a good Halloween party.  What better way to celebrate the most spookiest day of the year than to throw a fun but cost-effective Halloween party?  How does one throw a cost-effective party, you ask?  Well, by ordering wholesale party supplies, that’s how.  If you buy your basic party supplies through a wholesaler, like your plates, utensils, and balloons, you can save lots of money and apply the savings to extras that will make your party one for the ages. 

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My husband and I applied this same concept to a party we threw a few years back; we saved where we could by purchasing cheap dollar store items so that we could have more money for awesome extras, like our animated zombie which removes its head and growls upon motion-detection.  We had gravestones, zombies, dry-ice—the works.  We had the scariest yard on the block and had our neighbors talking ‘til Thanksgiving—and we did it all on a budget.

Halloween party planning can be a fun and creative activity, especially when you start preparing for it in advance so that you have plenty of time.  I’ve almost made a game of it, trying year-by-year to see how much I can save on my Halloween decorations, costumes, etc.  It is by no means a difficult task to undertake.  You simply need to know where to look.  You can find something extraordinary for your celebration (or for your customers’) by browsing TopTenWholesale.com for Halloween and other seasonal wholesale suppliers.