I joined Yahoo! 360° last summer as a part of virtual community site testing.

With 360°, I have to admit, that rarely I have been that confused when learning and testing about new site. This may be, because I started as a blogger at Geocities and somehow I managed to create a Yahoo! 360° account simultaneously. And for one blog, Yahoo provides three different domains.

Yahoo! 360° provides some basic community tools for members: Top Page, Blog, Feeds, Friends and Lists. The features are not that different and the value of Yahoo! 360° depends very much on your friends, you manage to gain at site.

I have been interested in the current situation at real estate markets both globally and locally. As I live in Euro area, I’m mostly concerned with ECB (European Central Bank) interest policy, but I also follow FED’s and Bank of England’s interest rate decisions.

Earlier this week ECB decided to leave the interest rate at 4 per cent and according to Money Magic News site, Bank of England freezes interest rates. The Bank of England has frozen interest rates at 5.25 per cent, reportedly due to a concern over inflation risks. And it is the inflation, which worries ECB even more than recession.

In USA the situation looks problematic. FED should low the interest rates to avoid recessions and Europe’s reserved interest policy makes the decision hard for them. If FED lowers interest rate, it will increase inflation, which is already a problem at USA. Lowering interest rates will also make dollar weaker. But the situation with economics is not that bad in Europe that it is at USA.

Now the new house buyers in Europe face a different situation. The economics will not provide automatically low interests for house buyers and buying skills are needed, if consumer wishes to have cheap Mortgages now days. The good thing which may follow from this situation is, that real estate prices may fall a little at Europe, because the raise of funding costs.

I have previously written about my experiences with Windows Live and Vox and now it’s MySpace turn.

I’ve been MySpace user now a little over a year. I have not been using MySpace that much, because it’s just a huge mess of different features with low usability. Sorry Tom, but MySpace sucks.

However, I have found one slightly usable feature at MySpace, which is the blog. First I used it as a place to write fiction, but  then I quit. (I tried to search for an example, but because poor usability of blog search function, I failed.

I know, that some people are able to take a huge benefit out of site, and bands also publish their material at there, but I have not found the greatness of MySpace yet. For me, it’s just the mess, where I cannot find anything.

Keypoint Claims is a company, which provides legal services and helps it’s customer to get right compensation, to get the right advice and to make the right choices. If you have faced unfair bank charges or bad advice to get out of the state pension, Keypoint Claims will help you. Now Keypoint Claims has expanded it’s services include personal injury and accident compensation claims.

In my organization, where I work, I’m also the industrial safety delegate. Our first task is to avoid accidents, but it is not just possible to avoid all of them. So we have to be prepared also for the first aid, and other actions after the accident, including accident compensation. And to make sure, that same accidents do not happen again.

Many people suffer injuries, which are not their own fault. These personal injuries may be physical pain, loss of earnings and a general lowering in the quality of living for the sufferer. However, the one who is responsible about the accident is not always willing to pay anything voluntarily and legal help i needed. In this cases, Keypoint Claims is a good solution, instead of just giving up own rights.

Few days ago, 12 “old members” of the Newsvine community decided to make a joke at Newsvine. The idea was to write an imagination story to other “Drollhouse” member’s news column. Why to do something?

The first part of the answer is “Because we’re the Drollhouse…that’s what we do.”

The actual joke has been talked about at Newsvine in several articles afterwards, so I do not go to details here. Here are links to few of them written by Firsty, Raveson and by Newsvine co-founder’s, Calvin’s official: Response to Newsvine Prank. This blockquote is from Calvin’s article:

The “joke”: 12 of Newsvine’s most popular contributors carried out a prank, by assuming each others’ accounts for a few hours to write outrageous articles in each others’ names.

The result: Many Newsvine users were duped by the articles and there is a general backlash against those who carried out the prank. A smaller group is currently defending the 12 and saying that all of this was carried out in good humor. At present, the backlash against the 12 has actually caused more of a ruckus than did the prank articles themselves, by dominating the Newsvine front page.

Calvin Tang has made a request, that articles related to prank should not published to all of Newsvine, and because I’m not a member of Newsvine elite, I’ll have to follow the rules. However elitism is such a nasty feature, that it should not be left alone and Newsvine has no control on my own blog, so I can write about it here.

As far as I see, the elitism is a destruction of the social network. There just cannot be a free community with different rules for other members. Every member – new or old – stupid or intelligent, has to have the same rights and responsibilities to write and comment than any other.

Elitism is not a new feature at Newsvine. Some old members have managed to gain a position to be able to brake the Newsvine Code of Honor (CoH), when needed without anyone commenting. And if someone dares to comment, there is a punch of “old Newsviners” backing up each others violations. Other feature is that comments or articles related to certain topics, which feels to be more accepted to “old members” are more tolerated and vice versa, as unpleasant articles are reported more easily, even if there is absolutely nothing against CoH.

Elitism is not just Newsvine’s problem. If the founders of the community are not skilled enough in handling the situation, it is likely to exist.

Social sites should not build mechanisms which support elitists groups actions. One feature is Digg’s bury feature, which allows a punch of users to sink an article, they don’t like. This has created a bury brigade problem at Digg. These kinds of features have been demanded at Newsvine too. No one likes the censor word, so usually other words are used like bury, quality control etc. At Newsvine, rewarding a member with RAV can be seen as a feature supporting elitism. Like in real life, some people are more skilled in handling power than others. The power does not bring privileges but responsibilities. However the opposite behaviour is too common.

Elitism, Wikipedia

Elitism is the belief or attitude that those individuals who are considered members of the elite — a select group of people with outstanding personal abilities, intellect, wealth, specialized training or experience, or other distinctive attributes — are those whose views on a matter are to be taken the most seriously or carry the most weight; whose views and/or actions are most likely to be constructive to society as a whole; or whose extraordinary skills, abilities or wisdom render them especially fit to govern [1]. Alternatively, the term elitism may be used to describe a situation in which power is concentrated in the hands of the elite.