Legal Ulcer

Good job Google (GOOG)! I am a big critic of yours but this almost makes up for all of your transgressions, lol

I hope some other companies who consider themselves progressive can follow in your footsteps. And as individuals we can learn a lot from this as well.

As we drink egg nog in front of warm fireplaces its important to remember the billions who live below the poverty line. And its children who suffer the most from poverty; lack of clean drinking water, food, shelter, education.....

This does not surprise me but I would like to create more awareness about the problem if I can. Walmart has gotten bad press over several issues in the past few years so this is just a drop in the bucket. But if you were one of the affected workers the story would be way different.

This hits close to home also because many of the highly trained technical people I work with daily are "contractors" and dont get paid sick days either. Nor do they get health insurance, life insurance, dental insurance, vacation days... and the list continues.

This NY Times article says this problem may worsen the Flu pandemic but that is far from the only side effect. Parents and families already on the poverty line are hit by this and numerous other jabs while the fat cats on Wall St. got bailed out. When will we learn?

"Paid Sick Days"
- Fears That Lack of Sick Leave Helps Spread Swine Flu - NYTimes.com (view on Google Sidewiki)

I love being able to get insights on my competitors and my own sites in one click. Between spyfu.com, compete.com and SEMRush you can get a pretty good understanding of how much reach and marketing dollars a site has. My array of research tools gets much deeper than this though but for a quick snapshot these three are highly useful. I actually checked the numbers and data at these three sites against data from my own campaigns and found that they are pretty accurate. There were slight discrepancies and differences but the overall trends were real and matched up. Do your own research and let me know what you find....

I agree Kevin, a short social media policy for your employees, lawyers or not, is necessary because newcomers might not be aware of the pitfalls and doing damage control after the fact is tedious sometimes. And for a company it could be very dangerous.

Making the list too long might discourage some from participating and make you look like big brother. And considering the possible benefits I would try to encourage it as much as possible.

I love Techmeme...

With developments popping up from all corners of the globe it has become hard to stay current as a technologist. I read multiple sources just for tech news and in total I have over 200 feeds in my news feed reader. TechCrunch, Mashable, blue.PoPurls.com are my main sources after I check whats hot on Techmeme.

And while I am talking about news again I have to give another shout out to http://newsmap.jp/# - This site makes scanning top news almost fun.