Special Money Mom Series: Wealthy Healthy and Whole.

Written By Monica Rowland

One of my mantras is "I am Wealthy, Healthy , and Whole. It's actually a favorite and has gotten me through some tough, and lean times. As we move towards the end of 2008, I would like to share with you some tips and advice on how to achieve the balance that most of us are looking for. Starting today we will have Segments on Financial, Spiritual, and Physical Health and Wellness.

I am excited about this series , because I think that it is very important to incorporate all three of these areas of your life in order to achieve balance. Hopefully this series will help to enable some of you to get started and finish strong!

Five Reasons All Women Should Love Michelle

http://michelleobamawatch.com/five-reasons-all-women-should-love-michelle

Posted by SjP of Sojourner’s Place.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Heather Wood Rudúlph, co-founder and editor of SirensMag.com, for setting out the top 5 reasons why all women should love soon to be First Lady, Michelle Obama.

Reason #1: She’s a good mother.
Reason #2: She’s smarter than you.
Reason #3: She’s a realistic fashion icon
Reason #4: She’s a feminist.
Reason #5: She’s a [B]lack woman.

I encourage you to read the impassioned and compelling arguments put forth by Rudolph here. Perhaps you will find yourself “gushing” right along with Rudolph as she urges no one to “underestimate the power of Michelle’s image and presence in the White House:

…a descendent of slaves will be hosting White House dinners!—is an extremely powerful image for our country, and for the world.

Yes, thank you Heather for giving your permission and providing us with 5 reasons for women to “love” our new First Lady who has so aptly been named by the Secret Service Renaissance. I only hope that the next article you elect to write about Michelle Obama would be entitled Two Reasons to Respect Michelle Obama:

Reason #1: She is the First Lady of the United States.
Reason #2: She commands it.

What the Heck Is Web 2.0?

Written by Monica Rowland

In case you were wondering what this new term is that is being thrown around like a baseball on opening day at Yankee Stadium.... I thought I would post a few things to help you out. Now if you don't know what it means, don't feel badly... because most people don't. Even people participating in it, using it and in some cases LIVING it! (You know who you are! You fall asleep in front of your laptop each night on your bed. You are on facebook, MY Space or your favorite blog. Then you wake up with the light on at 4:00am, and a crick in your neck. Yeah..that's you!)

Web 2.0 is the new generation of the internet. It's the internet's offspring or baby so to speak. It is a term that encompasses the entire phenomenon of social networking, blogging, Instant Messaging, and so forth. It is used to describe the world of places on the web like this blog, or other applications like My Space, Facebook, LinkedIn, Classmates.com, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Wikipedia, Second Life, Google Adsense, Napster..... and believe me the list goes on and on!

By now you are probably scratching your head and thinking... "Hey! I am pretty web savvy! How did I miss this baby shower?" Well... you didn't. It sort of just happened. Tech companies came up with one thing after another over time, and now there are really too many of these programs and applications to count.

To describe it better... I thought I should get a "real" definition for you. This is a very long but informative article....however; I only provided a short excerpt. You can read the rest on your own. :wink:

(excerpt from an article What is Web 2.0? by Tim O'Reilly)
http://www.oreilly.de/artikel/web20.html

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

In the year and a half since, the term "Web 2.0" has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as "Web 1.0" and another as "Web 2.0"? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.

Bad News! Sun to Cut Up to 18 Pct of Workforce!

http://news.digitaltrends.com/

By Geoff Duncan
November 14, 2008

Sun Microsystems has announced it is "aligning its business with the global economic climate"...and cutting up to 6,000 jobs, 18 pct of its staff.

Computer and software maker Sun Microsystems has announced it is shifting its business to align with the global economic climate…and that's going to mean cutting between 5,000 and 6,000 jobs, some 15 to 18 percent of its workforce. The company is also reorganizing its software division into three business groups and intends to focus on open source—like MySQL and its new Open Storage offering—to grow new market segments.

"Today, we have taken decisive actions to align Sun's business with global economic realities and accelerate our delivery of key open source platform innovations," said Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, in a statement.

Sun's sudden shift can't be seen as anything but a serious move to keep the company afloat, as sales of its high-end enterprise-level servers have all but dried up and the company has watched it stock price plummet, driving Sun's market value of the company lower than the amount of cash the company actually has on hand…meaning, in the eyes of the financial and investment community, the company effectively has no value. Sun has been struggling with serious financial difficulties for most of the decade, and the trouble have recently been fueling rumors the company might be picked up for a song by a larger computer maker like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, or IBM. Sun posted a loss of $1.7 billion for its latest quarter, after writing down the value of its business by some $1.45 billion.

Ironically, about a dozen years ago, Sun was seriously considering buying Apple.

Sun believes the re-organization and workforce reduction will save the company between $700 and $800 million per year, although it will have to pay $500 to $600 million over the next year in severance and other restructuring costs.

Sun is also saying goodbye to its software chief Rich Green, who has decided to leave the company. Sun said Green "has been an instrumental force in evolving Sun's software strategy and successful business execution."

Michelle Obama To Oprah: "Back Off!"

linked from:www.babble.com

New First Lady, Michelle Obama is apparently not happy with Oprah Winfrey. Why? Oprah was a supporter of President-elect Barack Obama, so why would Michelle be so upset?

Seriously, there's a Michelle Obama and Oprah feud? Well yes, according to the GLOBE. Are they like The Enquirer? I'm thinking yes.

Reportedly, Michelle told the queen of the talk shows, to "back off!" because Oprah was using her influence in "Barack Obama's White House." At least, so says "insiders." And we all know those "insiders," they have all the, uh, inside information.

No word on the details of the alleged feud between the two women, but friends are calling it "nasty."

Yes, I'm sure we'll see those two, very powerful, mature ladies, having a knock-down, drag-out fight. In the meantime, Oprah has a show to produce and host, and Michelle has a husband to support and children to raise.

CNN: The Next Net 25

A new Web revolution is picking up steam, and the next Google or Microsoft could emerge from the companies that are in the vanguard.

By Erick Schonfeld, Om Malik, and Michael V. Copeland

March 3, 2006: 3:30 PM EST

SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Things are really crackling in Silicon Valley these days. There's the frenzied startup action, the rising rivers of VC cash, even the occasional bubble-icious long-term stock prediction (Google $2,000, anyone?).

(See the list and gallery: The Next Net 25)

There's so much happening that the buzzword recently employed to try to encapsulate the era -- "Web 2.0" -- now seems hopelessly inadequate, defined and redefined into near meaninglessness by squadrons of aspiring entrepreneurs, marketers, and other fortune hunters.

So it seems a particularly useful moment to wave away the smoke and home in on what's really core. Don't be distracted by the Valley's hype-o-meter pushing toward the red: There's something very real -- and very powerful -- afoot.

Driven by ubiquitous broadband, cheap hardware, and open-source software, the Web is mutating into a radically different beast than it has been. And that is leading to the creation of entirely new kinds of companies, new business models, and oceans of new opportunity.

We are in the early stages of what might be better thought of as the Next Net. The Next Net will encompass all digital devices, from PC to cell phone to television. Its defining characteristics include the ability to interact instantaneously with any of the more than 1 billion Web users across the globe -- not by, say, instant messaging, but by evolving instant-voice-messaging and instant-video-messaging apps that will make today's e-mail and IM seem crude.

The Next Net is deeply collaborative: People from across the planet can work together on the same task, and products or tools can be rapidly tweaked and improved by the collective wisdom of the entire online world.

The new era is also creating a realm of endless mix and match: Anyone with a browser can access vast stores of information, mash it up, and serve it in new ways, to a few people or a few hundred million.

Most striking, the Next Net creates endless possibilities for entrepreneurs and established players alike to take advantage of the Web's new power. They are building on the success of early standard-bearers -- Flickr, MySpace, Wikipedia -- but also moving beyond those pioneers in creative and fascinating ways.

In the pages that follow, we identify 25 companies, in five Next Net categories, whose approaches help illuminate where the Web is headed and where the opportunities lie. Most are startups, a lot of them with less than 10 full-time employees. Few are currently making money, and it's a given that many will fail. But it's equally likely that somewhere within this group lurks the next Google or Microsoft or Yahoo -- or at least something that those giants will soon pay a pretty penny to have.

See the full list and photo gallery: The Next Net 25

Find this article at: http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/23/smbusiness/business2_nextnet_intro/index.htm