Shoestring Theory

Blu-ray wins the format war. Editor’s note: For Sale is a regular feature highlighting what the auction traffic is like on eBay in relation to particular events. This decade’s format war has concluded, with Wal-Mart and Netflix firing the last shots into a staggering HD DVD. Reuters (based on a Japanese news source) has reported […]

Mr. Fluffy Toes avoids the temptation to cross the picket line. Pic by fweez on flickr (CC license) The plan for members to strike/boycott eBay has been floating around since the day eBay announced the new changes to the site. I hadn’t posted about it as: a) I don’t think it will accomplish anything and […]

The Huffington Post’s FundRace 2008 tool taps into the public records of campaign finance to let anyone find out who contributes to presidential candidates. You can search by name, location, occupation or employer. A company as large as eBay is bound to have employees with a variety of political opinions, so I wouldn’t take the […]

Editor’s note: For Sale is a regular feature highlighting what the auction traffic is like on eBay in relation to particular events. During Valentine’s Day parties as a kid, I remember getting little handmade cards with those hard heart candies glued/stuck to them. We all got those, right? But for the life of me, I […]

Jonathan Coulton rocks. Period. This is a fact, not an exclamatory statement. No exclamation point needed. Coulton did the closing credits song for Portal, which might be the best video game song ever. He did some guest bits on the show with zefrank. You should check him out at his site. I won’t even seriously […]

Apparently, lots of people reported that PayPal massively under-delivered January’s money market dividend payment. The correct dividends started to be deposited in the last few days. I had missed this until I saw it mentioned in passing in a CNN story last night. Full disclosure, I do have a PayPal money market account. But, I […]

The two glitches I reported on last week have been resolved, according to the Systems Announcement page at eBay. It’s disturbing that no mass message was sent out to eBay users (or if it was, no one I know received it). This glitch could cost sellers customers, sales and money because of the appearance of […]

eBay announced today that they will cut listing fees further in several media categories, which will include books, music, movies and video game software. $0.01 – 0.99 (auction-style only) Original Categories Insertion Fee: $ .20 [Previously announced fee: $0.15 -ed] New Media fee: $ .10 $1.00 – 9.99 (auction-style and fixed price) Original Categories Insertion […]

From Daniel Keys Moran’s blog: There’s more than one right way to perform most tasks … but there are an infinite number of ways to perform a task incorrectly. Customer image from Amazon.com. DKM is a programmer and science fiction author. While Moran was talking about programming and writing in this post, the principle certainly […]

Alt.def will provide alternative definitions to phrases previously defined by Shoestring Theory. The Shoestring Theory: the theory that most businesses and projects can be launched on a shoestring budget and still succeed. Usually used with the definite article “the”. Contrast with “shoestring theory” as used with the indefinite article “a”. The shoestring theory has guided […]