French: The Most Productive People In The World

Think about it. Nationmaster ranks France as #18 in terms of GDP per capita, at $36,500 per person, yet France works much less than most developed nations. They achieve their high standard of living while working 16% less hours than the average world citizen, and almost 25% than their Asian peers as per UBS. Plus, if you visit France you’ll also realize that their actual standard of living is probably much higher than GDP numbers would indicate.

Thus, if one were to divide France’s GDP per capita by actual hours worked, you’d probably find that the French are achieving some of the highest returns on work-hours invested.

Twitter’s t.co link shortening service is game changing – here’s why

Yesterday the Distilled site received fewer direct visits than any Wednesday out of the last 6 months. What caused this dramatic drop in direct traffic? Did we screw something up? Was our site down or unavailable?

None of these things happened. What happened was Twitter rolled out their new t.co URL shortener. When I first heard that Twitter was doing this I must admit I didn’t really see what the big deal was and largely ignored the news. But let’s take a quick look at our analytics for the past month…

ee how t.co is showing up as one of our referrers? What this effectively does is provide Twitter as a referral source. Which is huge. This is game changing!

 

My Chief Executive Stephen Murphy sent me a note today predicting a major weakening of the dollar. He may well be right. But will people move their money to the Euro? I wouldn’t bet on the Euro unless Germany/France do the right thing, stop dithering and take decisive action once and for all to secure the long term future of Greece, Ireland and Portugal.

I work on a new SEO improvement for next year, I hope it won’t be a mistake

It represents a yearly growth of 40% (and not 200% as Francesc said ) but “only” +20% between 2009 and 2010. Is it the end of the trend ?

Asaf
I can’t imagine why anyone would ever compare Forex Factory to FXStreet. (…)
Forex Factory is merely an economic calendar and a commercial forum for the brokers to “socialize” their marketing through.

ChaterTe
I totally agree, Forex Factory is run by marketers and brokers 95% of the content/post their is produced by brokers and their army of in-house sales teams and IB’s.

AshFX
Guys, you have to be fair to Forex Factory. 95% of the posts aren’t by brokers/sales teams.

Francesc Riverola
For one time I can not agree with you Asaf.
I agree that FF has been a pioneer in the FX industry along FXS. The site has reached a tipping point that I can not understand the retail Forex industry without it. (…)
I do not know why he rather to be behind the scene…, my policy has always been being in front of the scene and being in contact with our users to listen to them and to help them, but I think his strategy or way of doing things is as good or as bad as mine.

Asaf
(…) if you look at all the senior members in FF you’d see that they have their own site and they either sell signals, have a chatroom, or manage money. FF is a very fertile ground that nurtures fraud in this market not because they are bad people but because of the nature of the market and the lack of transparency (…)
FF was probably a great solution 5 or 10 years ago when the market just started, these days it’s absolutely the wrong solution and a negative force in this market

Francesc Riverola
it is not just a problem for FF but for most of existent Forex site. This even affects us as when you accept articles/research/opinion from 3rd parties and you do not audit their track record, unfortunate from time to time you get very bad surprises.

Asaf
The best we can do is to work together as people who care about this industry and join forces while being considerate to our own businesses because the expansion of this market is largely depends on the ability to weed out some of the scammers that operate in it

This is why Mataf is still a personal website and why I don’t promote the forum and news from third parties. I prefer to work on my own content!