money-tree.jpg One cannot be a marketer and not use advertising as a means to accomplish marketing success. Yet, there’s nothing I dislike more in marketing then ad prostitution (which seems to be rampant on the Internet).

I do believe that there can be a balance between good content and ways to monetize this content. Lately I’ve been researching different ways to turn blogging into a full time profession.

What is the Daily Lunch Box?

tdlb01.jpg To kick-off the new tradition of “The Daily Lunch Box” I will share with you my three all time favorite websites:

(1) Pandora.com – Pandora offers you a radio experience without commercial interruptions. What is fun about Pandora is that the site is trying to map out the music you are interested in. It will send you different songs and you vote on whether you like it or not. I have one station so fine tuned that I rarely get a song I don’t like.

wikipedialogo.jpg Wikipedia is an interesting beast when it comes to marketing. I’ve learned this lesson from the article Scott wrote on me in Wikipedia.

My business partner Janet completely freaked when she heard that I had blogged about being on Wikipedia. Janet blogs daily on Wikipedia for Podango and felt from her research that anyone who boasts about being in Wikipedia gets removed.

Sure enough, not two days after blogging about being in Wikipedia someone tried to delete the Wikipedia article. I am not quite sure why the article wasn’t just outright deleted, but rather a notice was posted that if the author didn’t respond the article was going to be deleted.

tdlb01.jpg This week I started a tradition at my work called: “The Daily Lunch Box”. Every morning I send out an email to my department concerning three to six really fun websites.

I stole this tradition from an old co-working who said that he used to do this practice several years back. I decided to resurrect the tradition because my head is so full of cool websites that it’s leaking all over the place.

I title it “The Daily Lunch Box” as a disclaimer. I informed my co-workers that the email should be investigated on their lunch break. I don’t think anyone at Oracle cares if they look at the sites not on their lunch break, but I am just covering my bases—you never know with corporate America!

wikipedia.JPG So I finally discovered who wrote the Wikipedia article about me. My friend in Iraq, Scott, wanted to thank me for blogging about their humanitarian effort by writing an article in Wikipedia on me.

Scott is quite web savvy, so it made me smile when he told me this. He knew that it would help my blog ranking if I had a link from Wikipedia.

He called me from Iraq to let me know that he finally was able to not have Wikipedia delete his post on me. In case Wikipedia does delete Scott’s thank you—which they probably will—I’ve posted below what he wrote (you can also click here to read it on Wikipedia until it vanishes).

dollar_sign.jpg So this is kind of a personal/business blog post. I just couldn’t let my readers miss out on a recent conversation I had. Just a few days ago, I talked to my lawyer friend “Brenda” (not her real name because I don’t need the lawsuit; but I know she will absolutely adore the pseudonym I chose for her ).

Brenda falls into my close friends’ category who can always make me laugh. You never know what to expect to come out of her mouth, but you do know that it is going to be full of sass and humor.

Brenda is also the type of friend who falls into my “Never In A Million Years Will I Date This Girl” category. This sounds harsh but I know I fall into her “Never In A Billion Years Will I Date This Guy” category. We just have this understanding that it would never work out with us; and even it could work out, we wouldn’t want it to.

recycled_can.jpg So my co-worker, Bryan, taught me that entrepreneurial ideas abound everywhere—even in corporate America.

Bryan came over to my desk the other day asking if I knew whether or not the janitors recycled our pop cans. Oracle stocks a fridge full of free drinks. So any given day we go through quite a lot of soda and juice.

Bryan realized that he could make a few extra dollars by recycling our soda cans himself. He came up with this idea when his neighbor told him how he made $20 by recycling a garbage bag of trash cans.

scholarship.jpg I have been meaning to blog about Scholar.ly for the last week.

The best way to describe Scholar.ly is that it is a mashup between Facebook and Digg. With Scholar.ly you have both the elements of a college social network and a voting community. This voting network is wrapped around the ultraistic idea of providing scholarships to the masses. Scholar.ly was created to give every person who desires a higher education a chance—regardless of finances, ethnicity, grades, talent, age, or athletic ability.

The site is new and has not been marketed. Janet and I launched Scholar.ly on May 29th and we still have a lot of work to do. Yet, what has been done is quite amazing.

crm.jpg As mentioned before, my day job is with Oracle. Many of my friends often think I work on databases all day (databases are Oracle’s bread and butter). Instead I am on the business applications side of things, specifically CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

I work with the large enterprise accounts, such as Dell, Texas Instruments, Ericsson, and others. As I work on these accounts there are many competitors I have to fight against. For some reason Oracle headquarters think our biggest competitor is SAP.

I have to disagree; I believe our biggest arch nemesis in this arena is SalesForce.com (SFDC). They are in every account I work on and believe me they are annoying.

I need to announce the different winners of the challenges given to Ms. Draper’s class. First, I have to admit that I am seriously impressed with these students. I issued three challenges: The $100 Challenge; $5 Challenge; and The Name Challenge.With each challenge I was impressed with the effort the kids put into it. I did notice that there were a core group of kids who worked hard at every challenge I offered. I have a lot of hope in these kids. I really believe they will be our future successful leaders in whatever they decide to do.

Out of all the winners the one I am most impressed with is the winner of the $100 Challenge. This challenge was to find a five letter word or less in dictionary.com that was not registered as a dot com. I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect anyone to win the $100.

However, I was surprised when I received an email from Zach M. who had found the word “slaie” (slaie: a guide used in weaving). I went and checked with dictionary.com and whois.net, sure enough, it was a word and it wasn’t registered as a dot com.