See article in Gazeta Prawna. Provident, provider of home-delivered and rather pricey cash loans, accuses Monetto, a social lending startup, of unfair comparison of interest rates on its loans.

If Provident’s goal was to give social lending additional publicity, then it greatly succeeded. Average reader will remember from the article that you can get cheap loans on the Internet and that Provident is expensive and therefore afraid of social lending sites.

Fortunately for Provident, Gazeta Prawna is probably read by a tiny percentage of their target customer base.

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Hey, I didn’t even advertise it, but I made some long overdue changes to the blog. First of all, I changed, at last, categories that I use for posts, so now they make more sense:

It required a manual re-class of some 300 posts. Ugh.

But there is more – in addition to categories, I now also use tags:

This allows to navigate to post related to Poland, for example, or social lending. I’m usually quite skeptical about usability of tags, but in context of my blog I like them a lot.

Unfortunately, the upgrade to wordpress 2.5.1, that I had done before all these improvements, broke the gallery section. And apparently also google ads. For photos, I’m seriously considering outsourcing all this stuff to Flickr, so I don’t have to bother with endless tweaking of spgm script. Or continue waiting for someone to make gallery that integrates with wordpress and just works. As for ads, I have no idea why they are broken.

More importantly, in short term I expect to finish an intensive Kiev project, close social lending research that I did, and have more time for blogging. And a better position to blog in general. I might even post more often than once in a month. Stay tuned.

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I came upon this, in an article by Andrew Sullivan:

The playwright Richard Foreman, cited by Carr, eulogised a culture he once felt at home in thus: “I come from a tradition of western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.

“[Now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.”

The article adds to the discussion about how the web is changing the way we think. With ever shorter attention spans, are we losing the ability to think deeply?

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Kokos, one of the social lending sites in Poland, announced that it started cooperation with Allegro, the dominant online auction player (through antyweb).

According to the research that we did (Accenture and Gemius), this is a rather promising idea for Kokos – Allegro is the top site that potential borrowers actively use (i.e. visit at least once a week):

(there is similar data for potential investors, among which Nasza Klasa has better penetration)

The full report will be public shortly, also in an English version.

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