Unlike eBay's existing blogs and forums, which focus on more traditional (and sanitized) corporate communications, eBay Ink aims to give readers a peek inside eBay's internal operations. Brewer-Hay has pledged to write unbiased entries about what he observes as an all-access employee of the $7.7 billion dollar company.

Though eBay Ink is not a direct response to the recent seller boycott and frustration over ongoing changes, eBay's communications team says that a forum for frank discussions is long overdue. "There hasn't been one place where investors, industry analysts, employees, [eBay] buyers and sellers, and PayPal and Skype users can talk to someone from the company, or listen to someone from the company discuss what changes mean from a high level," said company spokesman Jose Mallabo.

Brewer-Hay was hired in January and has spent the past two months learning the ins-and-outs of the corporation. Fortune Small Business got first crack at him; below are edited excepts of our conversation about his ambitious mission and why he believes eBay Ink, launching in April, will change the dynamic between eBay's top executives and its user community.

eBay will launch a new blog in April that it told Fortune Small Business would be an unfiltered link between users and the company. Two things just jump out at me. First, the newly hired blogger has never sold anything on eBay. And secondly, while he says the first thing he did when he got to eBay was to meet with industry bloggers to find out "how we can work together," he has never reached out to AuctionBytes.

Other industry bloggers who linked to the FSB article do not mention having heard from him either: Randy Smythe, PowerSellers Unite and Tamebay, for example.

FSB: Your blog will be linked from eBay's PR webpage. How much influence will eBay have on what you write?

RBH: My words go straight up onto the blog, unedited.

It's got to be transparent. There's got to be an authenticity to it, an honesty to it, otherwise there's no point in doing it in the first place. I'm going to open up my e-mail to questions from folks. People can comment, too, and comments are going to be open. You're going to get the good, the bad, and the ugly.

It kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning. They hired from outside the organization. I have no prior agenda with any of the execs or people in the company. I'm still in the process of getting to know them. I haven't met a lot of them yet. That's a big, important thing.

The other thing is, this is my job. There are no other jobs that I'm doing. Some corporate blogs are just side gigs for existing employees, but I'm doing this 100%, day-to-day.

Toth dresses like Elvis, sings an employment law rock 'n' roll anthem and asks interactive questions in what he claims is an effort to encourage companies to pay more attention to employment law.

"Don't get me wrong. I like attorneys. I am an attorney," Toth said. "It's just that I'd like to help companies avoid paying lots of money to attorneys unnecessarily."

The blog is designed to "make employment law fun and engaging, but educational at the same time," Toth said.

Mr. Nakagawa's simple Web site has become the center of the "LOLcats" phenomenon, a booming online subculture built around digital images and deliberately bad grammar. There's not much to it: Take a digital photo -- often one of household pets, particularly cats -- and purposefully place misspelled text on top. Anyone with elementary skills in Adobe's Photoshop or Microsoft's Paint software can make their own.

Nearly nine months after launching icanhascheezburger.com, Mr. Nakagawa's site receives around 200,000 unique visitors and a half-million page views each day, according to Mr. Nakagawa.

Visitors can browse a sprawling gallery of lolcats, vote for their favorites and post comments. Mr. Nakagawa says he receives up to 500 submissions a day, thanks in no small part to his site's tool that helps people build their own. He says every entry is screened for merit and originality before earning inclusion.

Only 12 or so submissions make the gallery a day. "It's ridiculous," Mr. Nakagawa admits, "but we do go through all of them." He certainly has the time. Revenue from ads on the site is "more than enough to pay my bills."

Stealing some of his material from LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman on the matter, Nye said people will build one profile for their personal life and another for their professional life. The argument, self serving as it is, makes a certain amount of sense. Not good to have a prospective employer stumble on to those photos of you freshman year in Delta Kappa Epsilon.

After the inevitable social net shakeout, Nye says, Facebook and MySpace will remain standing and will compete to supply an outlet for personal self-expression and community. Meanwhile, in the Nye/Hoffman scenario, LinkedIn will dominate the business of business networking - serving as a "productivity tool," used for professional reference checking, recruiting, and to get expert advice.

Granted, LinkedIn's current growth does look promising. With upwards of 11 million members already signed up, the site is now adding 180,000 new members each week, and fully half of these live outside the United States. Thus, Nye professes little fear of would be competitors like the European front-runner Xing.com. "We are clearly going to win the English speaking world and adjacent economies," he said. "And that already is pretty meaningful." In Silicon Valley, he added, "LinkedIn is now so prevalent that you sort of have to join it."

Welcome to the Google "geo" blog. As web mapping (dare I say "the geoweb"?) matures, we're finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated -- not only to each other, but also to the web at large and to things like search. Things are changing so fast we thought a blog focused on this topic would be the best way to communicate with you, both about our products and about the overall development of geo on the web.

So... what is the "geoweb"? Some people will scratch their heads and call it buzzword proliferation. Others, including Mike Liebhold, who has a long history of thinking and writing about this area, have a very well defined notion of what they believe it is (or should be). I don't think that there is agreement on what the geoweb is, but I think there is a lot of enthusiasm and energy across many fronts to make it happen. I expect the "it" will evolve substantially over the next few months and years as we (the geo ecosystem on the web) collectively figure out how "earth browsers," embedded maps, local search, geo-tagged photos, blogs, the traditional GIS world, wikis, and other user-generated geo content all interrelate. Those of us who work on geo products and services at Google believe we have an opportunity to make the web more useful -- and ultimately, to improve people's lives through better information and understanding.

In one blog entry, Heald tells of a passenger who was upset that the shops in Naples, Italy, refused to take U.S. dollars. "I explained that in Europe the euro was the accepted currency, but this lady was adamant that the dollar is accepted all over the world," Heald writes.

In another entry, Heald recounts a passenger's anger that John would encourage tours of Istanbul's mosques. "The passenger felt that for various reasons it was wrong and that I was promoting terrorism -- he left by calling me "the Sperm of the Devil." Heald says he's seen a lot of things over the years, but was unprepared for both this man's wrath and his reasoning.

It turns out Heald is a multi-media guy, and some of his best blog entries recount stories from his daily TV show, which is broadcast each morning to all the staterooms aboard ship. In addition to shipboard news, the show features passenger requests and questions. One such request came from a passenger whose luggage had been lost by her airline. The woman, who was quite large, was able to find some clothes that fit, but she couldn't find a comfortable pair of plus-sized underwear. She begged John to help, so he put out a panty call to everyone watching the show. Result: seven pairs of underwear from sympathetic fellow passengers. Heald sent each of the kind ladies champagne with a thank-you note.

The weather was fine today but the smell was not. No, you do not need glasses, I did say smell. There are natural gas reserves in this area of Greece and today those reserves were being...well...less than reserved. The sea smelled like it had eaten 1 million eggs for breakfast and was giving our guests the resulting good news.

James Paone, a partner at Lomurro, Davison, Eastman and Munoz in Freehold, N.J., said that the firm's insurer - The Chubb Corp. - said several weeks ago that it would not add the blog to the existing policy. "We were in the process of beginning to set up a blog, having internal discussions about what areas of law would be the subjects," he said. "We wanted to cover the first base, which is [Chubb's] coverage. Our insurance carrier said [a blog] is not a risk they were interested in insuring. The entire discussion stopped."

Paone said his firm contacted Chubb to ask about insurance coverage in case someone tried to sue it over content in the blog. Now, the law firm is in the process of setting up a meeting with Chubb "so we can understand what their rationale is for saying they weren't interested in covering that kind of risk," Paone said.

The new blog will be led by Mergers&Acquisitions reporter Dennis Berman and former Bloomberg reporter Dana Cimilluca. It will also incorporate reporting from Wall Street journal correspondents in New York, London and Hong Kong, as well as WSJ.com editors and Dow Jones Newswires private equity reporters.

The site is free for both journal subscribers and non-subscribers. In a press release, the paper billed the blog as "the centerpiece to an expanded arena of deals coverage by the Journal, with additional community tools, graphics and video to launch in coming months."

"Deal news itself is quickly commoditized on the Web," said Berman in a statement. "Where the Journal provides value is our insight, experience and intellect. Our collective observations on a given situation are what make all the difference -- and we hope to deliver a bit of humor and entertainment, too."

The Rugs Done Right Blog focuses on area rugs, highlighting new styles and trends, care and cleaning tips, purchasing advice and decorating ideas. Blog posts are written by Jamie Carney, an area rug proprietor and the BuyRugsDirect.com site owner. The move to RugsDoneRight.com offers Carney the opportunity to provide additional services to her Buy Rugs Direct customers, and the blog is the first of these new features.

Blog topics vary, but the central theme is always area rugs. Posts are short and succinct, quickly making a point or offering advice before directing readers to a link with more information. Recent posts have discussed: what to look for when choosing an area rug for your home; the proper care and cleaning of rugs; the pros and cons of different materials; and how to install and protect area rugs throughout your home.

We were not surprised, then, when many Slashdot users either derided or hammered our idea collection effort after a news item about it was posted on the site's homepage on Sunday morning. Some suggested we'd be better off drinking lots of Jamaican beer. Another commenter wrote: "This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard out of [The Economist]. They actually will compensate you, with a rocking 6-mo web-subscription to economist.com (street value: roughly $50)... Perhaps the Economist should actually talk to their economists, and ask them what 'Incentive Compatibility' means. If I were the Economist, I'd be terribly embarrassed about this."

As often with such debates on Slashdot, however, they raise an important point, which is then only superficially discussed before moving on to other more fundamental things (the debate quickly digressed to talking about democracy, Hitler, the Soviet Union and, of course, Ayn Rand). Yet the underlying issue is indeed a crucial one – and one we probably need to resolve somehow if we want to make this project a success: How can we cleverly combine – to mutual benefit - ultimately for-profit efforts such as Project Red Stripe and "commons-based peer production", in the words of Yochai Benkler, a professor at Yale Law School.

And if our terms and conditions really keep you from submitting your great idea, you can always do what Jeff Jarvis, the creator of the popular blog BuzzMachine, has suggested - and some have already done: post them on you own blog. But don't forget to send us a link.

It is a curious pairing. Cisco, with 55,000 employees, makes networking equipment for telecommunications providers and other big companies. Tribe.net, run by a company with eight employees, has been trampled by newer social sites like MySpace and Facebook.

But along with the recent purchase of a social network design firm, Five Across, the deal will give Cisco the technology to help large corporate clients create services resembling MySpace or YouTube to bring their customers together online. And that ambition highlights a significant shift in the way companies and entrepreneurs are thinking about social networks.

They look at MySpace and Facebook, with their tens of millions of users, as walled-off destinations, similar to first-generation online services like America Online, CompuServe and Prodigy. These big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common.

Utah Street Networks was founded in 2003 and has seven employees based in San Francisco, Calif. The Utah Street Networks technology and certain members of team will join CMSG led by Dan Scheinman, Senior Vice President and General Manager. The deal does not include the Tribe.net site, which will remain completely independent of Cisco.

While chief executives of many US giants - such as GM and Sun - blog regularly, it remains unusual for a British company to have a blog. Recent research found only two FTSE 100 companies running blogs. This reluctance is backed-up by a survey published in September 2006 by web hosting company Fasthosts, which found only 3 per cent of UK SMEs intending to start blogs. This is despite there being 54 million blogs on the web, with another 75,000 created daily.

GRS Sign Company - which produces commercial signs - is therefore unusual. It started its blog in June. "It allows us to talk among ourselves, about our business," says Richard Dows, a signwriter at GRS with responsibility for its web, having previously been a web designer. The target audience is "anyone who reads blogs," he says.

As a new blog, it is still building its hits and responses from customers, suppliers and the public. But - unlike some blogs - it seeks comments. Recent blogs have included a discussion on alcohol-related accidents at work, the challenge of disposing of old computers, conducting fire risk assessments, the design of braille signs and, of course, the growing demand for no smoking signs.

A major advance came Jan. 22 with IBM's announcement of a new product called Lotus Connections. It wraps five social networking technologies up into one integrated package—similar to what Microsoft's Office does for traditional desktop productivity software such as Word and Excel. And, if IBM handles this right, its package could rapidly spread the use of so-called Web 2.0 applications in the business world. "While social computing software is perceived as being at the fringe of most large businesses, it's actually moving to the center fast—because it's about how the next generation of employees communicate, and create and share ideas," says Franks Gens, senior vice-president for research at tech market research IDC.

The IBM package includes five applications: profiles, where employees post information about their expertise and interests; communities, which are formed and managed by people with common interests; activities, which are used to manage group projects; bookmarks, where people share documents and Web sites with others; and blogs, where people post ongoing commentaries. "The business market is showing a lot of interest in using social networking tools to improve productivity. It's about helping people find experts and the information they need to get their jobs done," says Steve Mills, the general manager of the software group at IBM (IBM). The commercial version of the package is to be delivered in the second quarter.

Is it any coincidence that IBM announced new social networking software and Getafirstlife, a Second Life parody, debuted within a few hours of each other?

Of course not, IBM getting into social networking is the equivalent of the cab driver touting stocks and the dunce down the street trying to flip real estate. The appropriate response to those aforementioned signals: Sell! The top of the market is here.

IBM launching social networking software (just for those corporate types that just can't wait to produce MySpace-ish pages) is the same as the cabby and the real estate flipper down the street. Translation: The social networking run is over. Goodbye. It's kaput.

I'm venturing into uncharted territory as I launch this blog. A year ago, I didn't even know what a blog was -- until my Communications team began telling me about all the blog traffic on travel and tourism. Now I know this is where the action is if you want to talk to your customers directly -- and hear back from them. Soon we'll add an audio version of the blog. That's how I'm most comfortable: telling stories and listening.

I've checked out Jonathan Schwartz's blog at Sun Microsystems and "Randy's Journal" at Boeing. I've listened to Senator Barack Obama's blog podcasts. I know blogs will be a hot communications tool in the 2008 Presidential campaign.

Truth be told, I'm not very good with computers, although I couldn't do business in today's fast-paced economy without my cell phone, and my grandchildren have gotten me hooked on my iPod. I know our guests expect the very latest technology when they check-in to our hotel rooms and we're moving quickly to provide that. I've also hired the most talented and innovative team of leaders in the lodging business, and they're helping me move into this brave new world of communications technology. Ten years ago when my people first started talking about selling room reservations over the internet, I was a skeptic. Today Marriott.com is not only the biggest website in the hotel industry, it's also our fastest growing reservations channel. I'm a convert!

Defamation Claims. Defamation claims represent a growing threat to employers as a result of the increased popularity of employee maintained blogs. To the same extent that an employer may be liable for defamatory publications of its employees, an employer may also be liable for an employee's defamatory private blog on topics that fall within the scope of the employee's employment or within the employee's actual or apparent authority. Even if an employee's statements are outside the scope of employment, an employer may find itself named as a defendant in a defamation suit if the blogging employee is the supervisor of the defamed individual or the employee's blog references the employer. The chance that an innocent employer may be a defendant in the latter situation is increased because bloggers often blog anonymously, leaving the employer as the only readily identifiable potential source of the defamatory blog.

Harassment Claims. An employer may also be subject to liability for sexual harassment and hostile work environment claims based on an employee's private blogging activities, if a supervisor authors inappropriate comments about an employee or if the employer had knowledge that an employee authored harassing blogs about a co-employee. For example, in Blakey v. Continental Airlines, a pilot filed a hostile work environment claim against Continental Airlines arising out of derogatory comments posted about her on a pilots' electronic bulletin board operated by a third-party service provider. The court held that Continental Airlines has a duty to take effective measures to stop co-employee harassment when it knows or has reason to know that such harassment is part of a pattern of harassment taking place in settings related to the workplace. The Blakey decision confirms that employer liability may extend beyond mere employer-provided blogs.

Economic Damages to Employers. An employer's business itself may be harmed by defamatory comments on employee blogs. Employees may use blogs as a means to anonymously defame employers, supervisors, or other employees which may harm employee morale, result in a loss of good will with patrons, or damage the employer's public image. In the late 1990s, for example, Southern Pacific Funding Corporation filed for bankruptcy after its stock prices fell from a high of $17 to $1 - a spiral triggered by blog postings claiming that company executives were covering up multi-million dollar embezzlement, exaggerating economic forecasts and putting the company up for sale.

Disclosure of Confidential Information. Blogging activities may also result in the unauthorized release of company information and data into the public domain. Whether published by a disgruntled employee or a loyal yet naive worker, a blog that discusses an employer's confidential, business or financial information may have far-reaching and harmful consequences for the employer, such as the dissemination of trade secrets. Similarly, the unwanted release of business or financial information may result in securities law violations, such as unlawful release of inappropriate information in advance of an initial public offering.

Every Wal-Mart employee that Laura and Jim run into, from store clerks to photogenic executives, absolutely loves to work at the store. Sound like a great Wal-Mart publicity campaign? Anyone familiar with Wal-Mart and its reputation for being quite stingy with wages and benefits will roll their eyes at such a rosy picture. In fact, some critics are so skeptical that they wonder whether Jim and Laura are real or whether they were concocted at the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

"Wal-Mart has hired fake people," says Jonathan Rees, a labor historian and associate professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has also worked as a staff researcher at the AFL-CIO. In a blog posting for the Web site The Writing On the Wal, Reese published an open letter to Laura and Jim challenging them to reveal themselves and asking who paid for their RV and gas.

In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there's a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What's wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart.

Even these personal attacks won't sour my feelings about Wal-Mart. I've met too many great people in Wal-Marts across the county. I've met too many people - real people, not imaginary Internet people - who've told me about all the good Wal-Mart has done. I've camped in Wal-Mart parking lots. I've met these people and heard their stories firsthand. Which is something the people who attacked Jim and me haven't done and don't care to do.

So I've made the trip. I had a great time. I loved meeting the people we met, listening to the stories we heard. After everything that's happened, I even loved blogging about it all. And if I had the chance, I'd do it again.

In the end, that's all that really matters.

With a growing number of major companies now publishing corporate blogs, or online diaries, and an SEC chairman with a penchant for technological innovation, Schwartz is making the case for blogs - including his on the Sun Miscrosystems Web site - as a way to expand investors' access to information.

The SEC position is that current regulations do allow for blogs, such as news releases, regulatory filings, Web sites and Webcasts, to be used to disseminate companies' financial information, provided a particular blog reaches a broad audience.

A 2000 rule known as Regulation FD, or Fair Disclosure, ended a long-standing practice by forbidding companies from providing significant information to stock analysts and other Wall Street insiders ahead of the public.

The rule requires the method or methods used to be "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution of the information to the public."

No stain or spill is too challenging for Dr. Laundry to tackle; he's claimed victory over numerous stain challenges. Baker is even a hero to little ballerinas in Berkeley, Calif. Leveraging his expertise, a costume designer with the Berkeley Ballet Theater was able to remove red lipstick from a handmade costume the night before a big Nutcracker performance.

From his base at Clorox's technical lab in Pleasanton, Calif., Baker frequently conducts Bleach 101 orientation sessions and demos on stain removal for new Clorox employees, presents scientific study results to outside industry groups and educates key Clorox customers on new Clorox products.

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin found itself the subject of a video on YouTube, a site that lets users post amateur videos. One of its engineers, Michael De Kort, posted a video in which he claimed some patrol boats the company had delivered were defective.

He says he posted the video after getting no response to his concerns from the company. After the video went up, De Kort, of Monument, Colo., says, he was let go. He is now seeking to create a new online website where employee whistle-blowers can post similar videos.

"Now, today, everyone can have a James Bond camera. Like blogging before it, online photo and video sites beg for corporations to produce new standards and rules that are clearly communicated to all employees," says David Carpe, founder of Boston-based consulting firm Clew. "It's a risk."

Employees also run a personal risk if they post untrue information that could leave them vulnerable to defamation lawsuits. Videos can also give information to competitors or create a public relations crisis.

The concern is mounting with the growing popularity of image-ready phones, Web cameras and online sites that allow users to post video.

We want to share insights into our company, our people, our culture, and the things that occupy our cluttered minds. We’ll cover emerging trends, provide some behind-the-scenes commentary, profile interesting Yahoos, spotlight our beloved users, reveal some of our quirks, tap into guest bloggers, sprinkle in some videos and photo essays, and generally think out loud (lucky you… you get to listen). You’ll hear from interns to executives. Some days we’ll be light and airy, others we’ll get serious.

Sure, we’ll touch on some Yahoo! news now and again, but we’ll try to put a new twist on things and make every visit worth the mouse-clicks. And of course the whole point of a blog is the conversation loop. So comment away — this place is an echo chamber without you.

The bloggerati just need to get over every blog coming out the gate reading like a conversation at the local pub and not rehashing the past trials and tribulations of bloggers. It takes time for a corporate blog to find its collective voice.

By the way, I agree with Andy Lark that we should be nicer to new companies that try the bloggy Web. At least give them a couple of weeks to get settled into their new homes before we start lobbing rocks through their front windows. Of course, I doubt anyone will listen to me because these companies came into the bloggy Web so late that the mob isn't gonna automatically be nice the way they were to me three years ago.

Give Dell some breathing room, let them find their voice, offer them advice. If they still suck in a couple of months, then have at them. In the meantime, think back to when you first started blogging and how nice it felt when people cut you some slack.

Yup, there are more corporate blogs on the way. I'm sure there are more personal ones on the way too. Wasn't there a statistic that said a new blog is born something like every minute? At any rate, JupiterResearch finds that 35 percent of large companies plan to start corporate blogs this year. When combined with the existing deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all site operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006. That's according to a new Jup report, "Corporate Weblogs: Deployment, Promotion, and Measurement," that also finds 64 percent of executives spend less than $500,000 to deploy and manage corporate Weblogs.

Rumors have been flying lately about the demise of PubSub.com. While I've seen quite a bit of exaggeration in various forums, I can't deny that things are not going well for us. Our days are numbered. A recent attempt to execute a merger has been blocked and we've been blocked from raising equity financing that would allow us to continue to pay salaries and pay off our $3 million in debt. Thus, our "doors" will close soon if we can't find someone to pull us out of the current situation. Persons with fast access to cash and a desire for some of the industry's best technology are advised to contact us rapidly...

For Mr. McDonald, the Web log he created, "I'm a Comedy Central Intern," was merely a way to keep his friends apprised of his activities and to practice his humor writing. For Comedy Central, it was a corporate no-no — especially after it was mentioned on Gawker.com, the gossip Web site, attracting thousands of new readers.

"Not even a newborn puppy on a pink cloud is as cute as a secret work blog!" chirped Gawker, giddily providing the link to its audience.

But Comedy Central disagreed, asking him to change the name (He did, to "I'm an Intern in New York") and to stop revealing how its brand of comedic sausage is stuffed.

"They said they figured something like this would happen eventually because blogs had become so popular," said Mr. McDonald, now 23, who kept his internship. "It caught them off guard. They didn't really like that."

This is a new blog dedicated to all things energy. I am just getting started and this is my first post so be patient with me. My goal is to create a place where people interested in energy can go for information, news and fun. I plan to link to interesting tidbits about energy and help find answers to questions about how we can all save energy. For example, here is a link to something about saving energy in the Summer. This post may be a humble beginning but at least it gets my energy blog launched. There is more news coming later this week but I can't tell you about it now so stay tuned. If you have questions, please let me know. Otherwise, enjoy and keep coming back!

Oddly, Owen Corning chose the very unfreindly URL saveenergy.owenscorningblog.com for the blog when, it seems, the more appropriate thepinkpantherblog.com and pinkpantherblog.com appear to be readily available. The Pink One will take on the persona of Chief Energy Officer on the blog and spout snarky witticisms about how to save energy....by using Owen Corning products, of course.

This number includes blog readers who applied through JobsBlog and were later hired ... Their JobsBlog application is not necessarily the reason they were hired. (The successful attempt could have been, again, a Monster.com posting, a friend who is an employee, a cold call from a recruiter, etc.) It also only includes people who applied through the blog, so if you read and loved the blog and got hired - but didn't apply through us, you wouldn't be included in this total.

What I do know is this ... Each of these 137 did, at some point in their candidate lifecycle, apply through the blog, and therefore, we can assume they also read our posts and utilized our tips!