Recently we've been working on packaging up a lot of our terrific Web Services and Widgets into a complete contesting solution.  Although the ONEsite platform is a great social networking system, all of the individual components can be used for oh so much more.  ONEsite isn't just a social networking company--we're really about customer engagement and providing our clients with rich services so that they may achieve their unique community and engagement goals.

Soon you'll see a lot more contest offerings from us.  We have solutions for photo contests, video contests, rating contests, mobile contests, etc.  We're quite proud of all of our services and offerings and look forward to powering more unique websites and projects.

CNN reported to me today that the DoJ has approved the merger of XM Radio and Sirius Radio.  I must say that I love the XM Radio in my Acura.  I've had my car for three months now and my radio time has been perfectly split between the XM radio and my local NPR station.

Last week my XM trial subscription ran out.  I had absolutely 0 qualms about renewing it and paying for a year of membership.  It is worth the 50cents per day (or whatever it ends up being) to me to have a little extra selection on my radio dial.

Don't get me wrong--I love local radio.  But I despise jocktacular morning shows and my commute is typically when I listen to the radio.  Competition is good and satellite radio is forcing an entrenched industry to reinvent itself in the digital age.  The iPhone and 3G connections and streaming Internet radio will further shake up the industry.  In my opinion there's room for a lot of innovations and significant amount of new programming.  In the end the viewers will always follow the content.

I took a day off from work yesterday to have LASIK done on both my eyes.  I've been thinking about getting LASIK done for several years now, and finally decided to spring for it after I scratched my latest pair of glasses a couple weeks ago.

The procedure itself was pretty much a breeze.  Some patients were nervous because the "foot pedal" on the LASIK machine had broken that morning, and they had a technician come and replace it.  But I figured that the foot pedal couldn't be that important :)

The worst part of the procedure for me was them actually putting the eyelid speculum on my eyes (the device that prevents you from blinking).  i'm a notorious flincher.  But once that was done everything went really quickly.  There's only actually about 10 seconds of laser work done per eye.  The coolest part of the whole procedure was when they hook up a suction ring to your eye and lift it up a bit while they create the flap.  You lose vision for a couple seconds in that eye, but it is more of an interesting experience than it is a scary one.

I took a nap after the procedure and then listened to some podcasts for a few hours.  I did actually watch American Idol last night (I couldn't stop myself).  This morning my right eye is terrific and my left eye is a bit blurry...  but I had a followu visit to the doc today and he said the left eye will clear up pretty soon.

All in all I would recommend the procedure to anyone.  I was really amazed that immediately after the procedure I could see right away, and several hours later I could see nearly just as well as if I had been wearing my glasses.

Some of my favorite days at my job are the days when we deploy changes to our Production code which enable a compelling feature set.  These are features such as our Interactive Media Player, our REST/SOAP architecture, our major updates to our Templating language.  On these days all the hard work really pays off and everyone who uses the ONEsite platform (users and developers) are in for a better experience.

Because ONEsite runs as a Software as a Service platform all of these new features can be leveraged across all of our partner sites.  Some networks may never utilize the advanced web services or the template customization, but they're there when needed.  We have more customization options, more integration options, and more resources on hand to assist partners in creating their custom communities than any other company.

We're in a great position to not only remain the leading white label social networking provider in 2008, but to actually have comparable (and often better) featuresets as the large destination sites.  It's going to be a great year.