Monday, June 23, 2008

Online peer-to-peer lending Web sites may be more attractive to Americans than traditional financial institutions.

A new study conducted by Paul Dholakia at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Management shows that online peer-to-peer lending Web sites may be more attractive to Americans than traditional financial institutions.

The study -- “The Democratization of Personal Consumer Loans?” -- analyzed a database of 5,370 peer-to-peer loan auctions from the Web site Prosper.com. Prosper.com, and other companies like it, allows people to lend and borrow money at more attractive interest rates than they find at a bank. The study also found that decisions made by lenders about whom to give loans to are much less likely to be influenced by race or gender.

Online lending sites enable individuals to lend and borrow money directly, without the involvement of any financial institution. By fusing elements of social-networking sites, like Facebook, and auction sites, like eBay, peer-to-peer lending sites allow people who have money to loan to bid on requests from those who need cash for a variety of reasons. Not all requests get funded, but those that do typically yield loans that offer borrowers lower interest rates than bank or credit card companies. The loans also give lenders a better return than they’d receive by investing their money elsewhere.

Before beginning the research, Dholakia wasn’t sure what to expect. On the one hand, he said, plenty of research points to the fact that despite people’s best intentions, stereotypes often influence decision-making. And since potential borrowers often share lots of personal information, including photos, lenders would usually be aware of a borrower’s race and gender. On the other hand, many economists believe that people are rational decision-makers and therefore more inclined to give weight to information such as a borrower’s credit and debt-to-income ratio, all of which is available on the auction sites.

“Since people are investing their own money, they should tend to behave more rationally and seek a return on their investment that takes into account factors other than race and gender,” Dholakia said.

Dholakia also examined the impact of a borrower’s membership in so-called affinity groups on loan approval. Sites like Prosper.com allow borrowers to join a community of their choosing, which can include, for example, alumni of a particular university. Dholakia discovered that having such an affiliation helped borrowers get their loan requests funded.

“The fact that the borrower belongs to an affinity group has a positive effect on the loan success,” Dholakia said.

To read the complete study, visit here.

For more information about Paul Dholakia, visit here.

Monday, June 16, 2008

AP to Define Fair Use! or Just Use "No AP" badge

I hope only regarding their articles!. Moronic people always look to change things so that they benefits them. It like Disney doing the copyright dance or still seem to be uneducated AP, an association of 1500 news papers is going to define what fair use is!
Basically News papers are dying bread. I rarely pick up a news paper unless I am in a hotel and free US News is at my door. That is also only if the hotel does not have WiFi.
Anyone who watch TV know that the news is always covered by two three news stations. Similar way, there are sources more than AP affiliates that reports the same news. It just takes a little time to track down the original source.
I have many times seen AP taking a Company Press Release and post it with AP seal. Just take one more step hunt down the company press hub and refer excerpts or the whole press release from there. (Companies love to get their press releases out there.)

The Following is an excerpt from New York Times! a AP affiliate. Is this fair use? if not how can I make it fair!
"Fair use has become an essential concept to many bloggers, who often quote portions of articles before discussing them. The A.P., a cooperative owned by 1,500 daily newspapers, including The New York Times, provides written articles and broadcast material to thousands of news organizations and Web sites that pay to use them."
Hope some one will create "No AP" badge.
Oops! Some on already did! "So here’s our new policy on A.P. stories: they don’t exist. We don’t see them, we don’t quote them, we don’t link to them. They’re banned until they abandon this new strategy, and I encourage others to do the same until they back down from these ridiculous attempts to stop the spread of information around the Internet."; TechCrunch
Just ban anything from AP! like TechCrunch, ban any linking to AP stories on your blog site. Hope some one will create "No AP" badge.


Friday, June 13, 2008

Functional! Swap Blog Name And Post Title On Blogger, Does Not Break Theme XML

"Working Swap Blog Name And Post Title On Blogger, Does Not Break XML".

It has been argued that from a SEO point of view, it is better to have the post title appear as the page title instead of a generic blog title first. You get noticed on search engines easily and your pagerank may go up. What ever the reason it looks neat and cleaner. Like for an instance, this article would appear;

"Geemodo : Working Swap Blog Name And Post Title On Blogger, Does Not Break XML."
on search engine results. That is fine in the beginning to get your blog name out. But once it has been established, your want your articles to have prominence in search results. So swapping blog name and post title became a challenge for Blogger, blogpost users. Earlier there were widgets that allowed smoother operations of this task and later those failed due to changes made at Blogger, the new blogger. Imagine if you have a name like "MyAdlets, The Viral Frontier", you article name get lost behind the Blog name!
I have been searching the internet for a solution and had multiple versions of this code hack saved. I tried them all, until I came across the following. I am not sure of the author but I am sure it is not me! ;). The other solutions that I tried broke the template XML and made a mess of the layout if you were to add new elements.
I tried this at MyAdlets and it is working fine.

To get working, you need to do some hacking on your template. Login to your Blogger account, select layout tab.
Within Layout tab select "edit html" and click on the "Expand Widget Templates" check box. To be safe I alway save my template by selecting "Download Full Template", so that I can go back if I make a mistake. I strongly advise you to do so as well.

Find (If you are using Firefox, select Edit -->Find in This Page | and cut and paste the following)



<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>

and replace it with the following;

<!-- Swap Blogger Name-Title change -->
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title>
<data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/>
</title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>
<!-- End of wap Blogger Name-Title change -->

You are done, save the changes, view the blog.
Now you can make a post and see how search engine bots see your post! Now the name and the title is always swapped.

Warning, as with all advise, it is a risk that you make a mistake and mess up your blog. We take no responsibility for any loss that happens by following these instructions. We have actually tested the method and have positive results. If you are not at ease, contact an expert!

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

GeeMoDo, What Is In A Name, "Thousand Dollar Opportunity Of Our Times".

Yes Gee More 'll do, I like that better. If you follow the first post on this blog, it was done with bringing new ideas and the last deduction was that this is a "thousand Dollar fashion point". But it also could be "Thousand Dollar Opportunity Of Our Times".
We will continue to write in the same manner but we will focus more in making bloggers life easier. There are enough people bashing M$ anyway. (We will certainly write if we find the right thing).
The idea came because, one of our Blogs, MyAdlets, which is dedicated to Internet and Online Advertising, had to write about; NoFollow, DoFollow ! U Comment, I Follow with iFollow. We also promised to continue to provide information the subject. Doing reserch about the subject revealed that we will have to write more than one article. That is throwing MyAdlets, the advertising blog, out of the path. So we decided that we will bring the subject over here and continue to write thousands more articles on the same lines and thoughts.
So let us make a Gee More.
Geemodo: What is GEEMODO?

Snow Leopard, Leaked, Misreleased and Really Released Mac OS X 10.6 Press release

With a new plans for Geemodo, this will be the last of these type of general postings and I am happy to have done it with news about Apple. I would have preferred it to be a news item about Linux but Mac OS X is not that far apart!

Here is the press release;

SAN FRANCISCO—June 9, 2008—Apple® today previewed Mac OS® X Snow Leopard, which builds on the incredible success of OS X Leopard and is the next major version of the world’s most advanced operating system. Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation. Snow Leopard is optimized for multi-core processors, taps into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enables breakthrough amounts of RAM and features a new, modern media platform with QuickTime® X. Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 and is scheduled to ship in about a year.

“We have delivered more than a thousand new features to OS X in just seven years and Snow Leopard lays the foundation for thousands more,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “In our continued effort to deliver the best user experience, we hit the pause button on new features to focus on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system.”

Snow Leopard delivers unrivaled support for multi-core processors with a new technology code-named “Grand Central,” making it easy for developers to create programs that take full advantage of the power of multi-core Macs. Snow Leopard further extends support for modern hardware with Open Computing Language (OpenCL), which lets any application tap into the vast gigaflops of GPU computing power previously available only to graphics applications. OpenCL is based on the C programming language and has been proposed as an open standard. Furthering OS X’s lead in 64-bit technology, Snow Leopard raises the software limit on system memory up to a theoretical 16TB of RAM.

Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone™, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari® with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.*

For the first time, OS X includes native support for Microsoft Exchange 2007 in OS X applications Mail, iCal® and Address Book, making it even easier to integrate Macs into organizations of any size.

*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. Benchmark based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test on an iMac® 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Mac OS X Snow Leopard, with 2GB of RAM.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

Press Contacts:
Jennifer Hakes
Apple
jenniferh@apple.com
(408) 974-7439

Bill Evans
Apple
bevans@apple.com
(408) 974-0610