Sean’s Rant

Hiring & Managing a Virtual Assistant (VA)

Featured sites and tools for the day:

1. Google Reader shares widget for Wordpress or any other blog or site: : http://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my#overview-page

The way to actually get to the popup windo that shows the code that you need to put into a text widget in wordpress shows up under the above link, if you already have a Google Reader account. It is under: Settings/Folders and Tags/ and there is a hyperlink on the right. 

Low priced products make money fall out of pockets like there is a hole in them. It doesn’t take a lot of thought to spend $5 on something. In other respects too, in certain industries it is easy to make a decision about something. Like the Sprint instinct. It was $129. Or the new iPhone at $199. When the price is easy the purchase is even easier.

The Amazon.com 1 click feature harvests the, “hmm, this is interesting - should I buy it? Well its only $X and its only 1 click. F-it.” type of thought. This is a great concept but dangerous too. If people start to catch on that whenever they even go to Amazon.com they make a purchase and if they’re using a site like Mint.com to review their financial activity, eventually the might think to themselves: “Wow, I am spending way too much on 1-click purchases, and should really go to the library more often”. If their library has the book in question. For those irregular purchasers it sure makes the “closing” part of selling a hell of a lot easier for Amazon.com. If a service like Pandora adopted this, I could see the same issue with music spending (good and bad, listen up Pandora…..).

Could a Virtual Assistant (VA) do website maintenence. Yes. Am I still not comfortable with letting go of the reins due to th possible loss of content. Yes. Could I back up that information. Yes. There is just something about that that I don’t want to let go. Anyone have any direct experience with the use of a VA for maintaining their website?

There was some talk today of Pandora shutting down because of the high costs of internet radio royalties. Even though this problem is obviously because of legislation and the unreasonable charges imposed on internet radio versus standard radio, here are some ideas to SAVE PANDORA!