Open thread: what do you want from JD?
June 16, 2008
On Friday morning John Donahoe will be giving his first Live keynote speech as President of eBay. There’s been some speculation about what he might say, though frankly, many sellers are hoping there’s nothing else left to come.
So for a bit of fun while Chris and I are on the plane, two questions for you:
- What do you think JD will have to say on Friday?
- What would you like him to say on Friday?
Are you blogging eBay Live?
June 1, 2008
Are you going to eBay Live, and if so, will you be blogging it? Or taking photos? If so, please leave us a link to your feed in the comments below. I’m putting together a “feed of feeds” using Yahoo Pipes so that we can all keep in touch, and those who aren’t attending will be able to see what’s going on.
To keep it quite specific, it would be good to filter out non-Live posts during the event, so if possible, leave the feed address for the tag, category or label you will be using to distinguish your Live posts:
- For those using Blogger, here is how to find the feed address of all your posts with a specific label.
- For those using WordPress, feeds for a specific tag are structured like this:
http://www.YOUR DOMAIN.com/tag/[TAG NAME]/feed
and for a specific category, like this:
http://www.YOUR DOMAIN.com/category/[CATEGORY NAME]/feed
If you’re posting to Flickr, please add your pictures to the eBay Live 2008 Group.
If you’ll be Twittering from Live, please leave us the RSS feed link from your profile page: you can find that right at the bottom of that page. Twitter feeds will be added as late as possible so that people will hopefully be in Chicago when tweets appear in the aggregate feed.
Anything else you want to add but don’t know the RSS feed for, please leave a comment. See you in just a couple of weeks!
TameBay gets a new look
May 17, 2008
If you’re a regular visitor to TameBay you’ve probably noticed the site has just changed as our sparkly new design went live at a minute past midnight today!
We’ve listened to loads of our regular readers and what they want from the site and how they use it so you’ll notice things like featured posts which keep top stories on the front page for longer. The page is a lot shorter but you’ll still find the latest news stories in the center column, and there’s more space on the side to display you, our readers comments.
The navigation bars at the top will help you find the topics you’re interested in and of course the link to the TameBay forum.
As most of you know Sue and I jointly run TameBay, but what you may not know is that it’s Sue who does all of the techie stuff behind the scenes. It’s taken her many many hours of work to create the new site and the result speaks for itself.
Many thanks to all the readers who have let us know what you wanted from the site, but most of all a huge personal thanks from me to Sue, as she’s the one that has designed and built our fantastic new site.
LiveWorld appoints two new directors
May 14, 2008
LiveWorld, the company that eBay outsource the community discussion boards to, has appointed two new directors:
Barry Weinman founded the venture capital company Allegis, which helped over 70 private companies go public. He describes LiveWorld as a “pioneer and leader in social networking”. Bill Cleary is experienced in growing technology-based marketing agencies and founded the CKS Group responsible for launching the likes of Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon.com and Disney.
Social networking is the “cornerstone of relationship marketing for the 21st century” according to Cleary. Certainly devotees of the eBay discussion boards will be no stranger to just how many hours it’s possible to while away chatting about eBay and of course in part carrying out eBay support free of charge.
LiveWorld have a unique business proposition in creating bolt on online communities for companies. As well as eBay the work with AOL, Expedia HSBC, Kodak, QVC and many other leading companies.
Have your say with Skribit
May 12, 2008
Our more scrolly readers may have noticed that for the last few days, there’s been a new widget in the sidebar. This box from start-up Skribit allows you to post questions or topics that you’d like to see covered round here. You can also vote up other people’s suggestions, so we get an idea of which suggestions are more popular.
So have at it. Normal rules around here apply: anything spammy or abusively sweary will be deleted.
And if you have more to say than just a question, pop over to the forum for help, a chat or a rant.
1st May is RSS Appreciation Day
May 1, 2008
Have you ever wished there was an easy way to see which of the blogs you read has posted recently? Or wanted to check the headlines on a dozen different news sites without having to click through them all? Or even wanted to keep an eye on your favourite eBay sellers, searches or competitors? If so, you need RSS.
RSS is a way for you to automatically receive updates from websites without having to visit the sites themselves. All you need is a bit of software to collect the RSS feeds, and you can see at a glance which blogs have updated, what the latest headlines are, or that your favourite eBay seller is having a sale.
All you need to do is look out for the orange symbols like the one above - or sometimes they’re an orange button with “RSS” written on it, like at the bottom of eBay searches. If you’re using Firefox or IE7, you can just click the orange buttons and your browser will automatically subscribe to the feed. Or if you prefer, there are dozens of seperate feed readers: personally I like Google Reader.
And today is RSS Appreciation Day, so if you haven’t discovered just how convenient RSS feeds can be, now’s the time to find out! Oh, and here’s our feed.
TameBay on Twitter
April 9, 2008
For those of you who are using Twitter, you can now get links to TameBay posts as tweets by following us.
For everyone else who’s now saying “huh?”, Twitter is something like a cross between a blog, IM and Facebook status. You can post very short posts (up to 140 characters), which can be useful for telling people you’ve gone to the post office, or - um - being connected. Or pimping your blog out, of course.
An apology
April 3, 2008
Well, that was a fun twenty-four hours. I apologise to anyone who’s tried to get in here in the last day or so; as you saw, TameBay was down. Commenting is currently disabled on all posts. We do hope to restore that as soon as possible, but in the meantime, please come and talk in the forum.
Consulting the community
March 15, 2008
TameBay’s nearly 18 months old now, and frankly, it’s time for a new look. Personally I’d like something where people aren’t forced to scroll down and down to see if there’s anything they’ve missed, where what’s new is all visible at the top of the page. And I’d like to be rid of the lumps of white space at the sides; I’m sure there’s something more interesting we can do with those.
As Wordpress have a major release due any day, I won’t be changing anything immediately, so now’s your chance. If there’s something you want to see, something you want to see the back of, something you’d like to change, say now.
Editing comments
February 9, 2008
Just a quick note to say that as requested by Lynne, Jade and others, it’s now possible to edit comments. You have two three minutes (approximately) from leaving your comment in which you can edit it: after that time, the edit function will not be available.
Please feel free to have a play with this function in the comments on this post 
If you have any problem with it, PLEASE PLEASE leave me a comment including what error message you got, if any, and exactly what you saw and how that differed from what you were expecting to see. Also let me know what browser you’re using. (Mac people, that goes double for you; my current Mac testing facilities are horribly out of date, so I’m relying on you 
)
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