Michael Phelps

I am not sure how many people know, but this past week Michael Phelps competed at the FINA World Championships held in Australia. During the course of the meet he won 7 gold medals and set 5 world records. I am here to make the argument that his performance during the past week was the greatest individual sporting performance in history of not only swimming, but all sports. In a sport where 1,2, or 3 tenths of a second seperate the winners from the losers, Phelps domolished the competition, and his own world records by as many as 4 seconds a race. This type of domination is unheard of in this sport. This article argues both sides of the question, whether he is the greatest athlete of all time or not. At this point the concensus is that he is far from it, but I to differ. Any true sports fan should at least take a look.

Products Enhanced by the Web

I thought that the example given in class of a product improved by the web was a great one. The news industry is having to be completely overhauled and are forced to think of new ways to get the news out to the public. People can now have up-to-the-second news on any issue they want to hear about. This is definately an improvement over the stagnant, twice a day news most people are used to. It is unfouranate that many of the prominent newspapers throughout the country are struggling to sell their paper editions, but I am sure they will have some creative answers to replace that revenue. I am confident of this because news will always be in high demand from the general public, so they will be willing to conitnue to pay what they were paying for paper editions in other ways.

Internet Curfew!?

While looking at the new topics on slashdot I came across an article titled "Internet Curfew for College Students." While the article is written about top Indian engineering schools, and not Americans, it still strikes me as absurd. The article states that the school cuts off all internet acccess at night to the dorms. The Dean of Student Affairs says its because the hardrives of students are filled with bad content. I think this is not only crazy but also a detriment to the school. College students live a very different lifestyle than the average person, and in this lifestyle they often do work very late at night. I think this will dramatically reduce the productivity of the students, not to mention a possible uproar it would cause. I guess I am writing this all from an American perspective, where I would hope this type of policy would never be able to go into effect. Maybe in India this is not such a violation of human rights and is much more accetptable to the citizens. Personally, I still think its a bad idea and I would be outraged if a similiar program ever took place in the U.S.

Listening to Customers

Throughout college, marketing classes have taught us that building a good relationship and meeting customer demands is an important part of being a successful business. While this seems apparent, the reality is many companies are not doing this at all, and are continuing to abide by the sell what you make framework instead of vice versa. In this interesting blog Dell tried to do just that by allowing customers to voice their opinions and then take initiative to try and please them. While the customers has some good suggestions, Dell determined that many were not feasible. This ended up backfiring on Dell somewhat because people did not believe Dell's response. This shows how difficult and careful a company must be with achieving these goals, because obviously even sometimes with the right intentions it can end up hurting you.

Google Buys Again

While looking at some of the headlines on ClickZ I saw that Google, Inc. was once again in the news. It should come as no surprise that they have made another acquisition, this time of Adscape Media. The article does not outline the terms of the deal, as they have yet to be disclosed. However, what it means for the company is that they will be able to expand their advertising to in-game mediums. This is just another way that google has expanded into seemingly every online landscape over the past few years. While it is not surprising to me, it is still extraordinary.

Katie's Fraud Post

My teamate Katie posted about the occurence of phishing on the internet. Like her, I have found this to be a very common practice. I recieved upwards of 15 junk emails a day, and often they include some type of phishing in them. For the most part I have found that they are relatively poorly done, but there is an occasional well done scam that almost catches me offguard. Luckily I have yet to be a victim of one of these phishing scams and hopefully I never will be. Her post can be found here.

Vanity Search

While reviewing for the exam one of the notes suggested doing a vanity search by typing your own name into googles and see what comes up. I thought this was an interesting idea and went ahead and did just that. My Results were somewhat interesting. Eight of the first nine responses were actually about me, and this very blog was the 8th response. Most of the rest were about different swimming events in my career; from my summer league to high school to college. It was good to see that nothing bad showed up!