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As a follow up to my earlier post in March, here is the updated video on Shift Happens, from Karl Fisch, using all the latest stats.

Update:

I just watched the entire movie now - it’s brilliant! Much better than the original! Also, at the end of the video, there is a message that the author, Karl Fisch, has setup a Shift Happens Wiki. Here is the excerpt from the landing page:

This wiki is designed to give you a little more background on the “Did You Know?” presentation. The wiki also will connect you with some resources to learn more about the shifts that are occurring in our world and their implications for K-12 and higher education.

Because we are educators in the United States, our experiences and perspectives are going to be somewhat America-centric. However, we believe that the themes of Did You Know? are global in nature and apply to schools and children around the world. We want all children to be successful. We do not view the growing importance of India and China as negative but rather as additional opportunities for everyone in the world. We do not mean to gloss over the very real issues that countries such as India and China face, and we recognize that globalization and “flat world” factors have downsides just like other societal shifts. We prefer, however, to focus on the positive benefits and on doing what we can to help children learn and grow so that they may become successful digital, global citizens.

We’d like your help. Everyone must be involved in the conversation if we are to come up with a system of education for our children that prepares them for the 21st century.

I was fortunate enough to get featured in one of the cover stories in this month’s GQ magazine (South Africa) - pick up a copy if you live in SA, it starts on pg 70.

Alternatively, here is the online version, which will only be up for a month, until end of July 2007 (they don’t keep the content up permanent).

Apologies for not writing this past week - things have been pretty hectic. Synthasite finally moved into our new offices in Gardens, Cape Town and it’s taken a bit of effort to get everything together! I’ll be posting some pictures soon.

I have a couple of posts that I’ll posting this week - started on them, but haven’t finished, including some lessons learnt from launching a Web Application (Synthasite received nearly 5,000 user signups in 2 weeks - thanks to all for spreading the news!). I also have a post on Widgets that will be coming.

Clicks2Customers unfortunately didn’t win the Linkshare Golden Link Awards, but we were runners up in the Best New Affiliate category - well done to the team, and congrats to the winners, Discover Card!

I managed to catch the Lion King (musical) in Johannesburg last week - absolutely fantastic - it’s a must see!

Here’s to an exciting week!

Michael Arrington sums it up quite nicely, so here is the short version:

Not much commentary is needed on this one. Here’s what happened:

1. eBay doesn’t allow merchants to use Google Checkout to settle eBay transactions. Google invited eBay online sellers attending eBay Live! in Boston this week to a party that they called the Google Checkout Freedom Party.
2. eBay decides to pull all U.S. advertising on Google.
3. Google backs down, cancels the party.
4. Google looks like a complete wimp; eBay looks like a bully.

The party appeared to be nothing more than Google poking a little fun at eBay’s restrictive policies. eBay hit back with the biggest weapon they had, suggesting that tension between the companies goes very deep.

That was a seriously good laugh this morning!

So the big question… who’s “Click” is bigger? Adam Viener does a quick roundup on Revenews as well.

Bottom line, is that Google & eBay are becoming more competitive with each other every day and such a conflict was inevitable, to answer my question though, I would argue that Google has a much bigger “Click” and if they REALLY had to pull out all the stops, they could easily “improve” their algorithms to factor in a lot of the “Search Engine Optimization” work that eBay have done across their companies - and users would find that eBay would appear a lot lower in the natural results.

But then let’s remember that Google’s motto is “Do No (Relative) Evil”!