Update 3/7: Neither Twitter or FB can be accessed from my hotel. Not sure if it’s just a local issue or nationwide.

Last week Fortune posted 10 tips for career success from Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, a former Googler, and now CEO at Polyvore. I worked in Sukhinder’s group for about 6 months before she took on Asia-Pac/LatAm responsibilities, and while I agree with most of the advice in her post, I would change #9 from “Go in with a vision of your 100-day plan and see if it resonates” to “Go in with a 7-day, 30-day, and 100-day gameplan to see if it resonates”.

When I visited Zynga in January, Bing Gordon introduced me to this idea of having a  7-day plan when you start a new job. He’s found that the best indicator of success for someone within a company is what they accomplish in their first week. While initially I thought it was a stretch for a new employee to have a major contribution in 7 days, the more you think about it, crushing your first week (and first month) is hugely important if you want to succeed and advance quickly within any organization.

I hope all the social gaming sites are using these accounting principles for virtual goods:

1. When a company sells virtual currency, this is not a revenue event (even though it may clearly be a cash event). When purchased but not yet used,  virtual currency sits on the balance sheet as a customer deposit or deferred revenue (i.e. a liability).
2. Revenue recognition commences when virtual goods are bought with virtual currency by the consumer. Exactly how it “commences” depends on the following.
3. There are two categories of virtual goods – (1) consumable items that are used once and gone, and (2) durable items that “work” over an extended period of time.
4. For “consumable items” you can recognize revenue when it is consumed.
5. For durable items (which many are), things are much trickier. You need to amortize the revenue (linearly) over the useful life of the good, or the average life of the actual user.

Bill Gurley also points out that renting virtual goods (as opposed to selling them) gets around the “durable” goods requirement (#5 above), which simplifies the accounting.

[ From Abovethecrowd.com ]

Last week when the NBCU/Comcast duo testified in Washington on their proposed merger, one of the questions that came up was about Hulu blocking access of its content to Boxee. Shortly after the hearing ended, Boxee’s CEO posted his response, basically claiming that Boxee is just displaying the video as it would be displayed on Hulu, with streaming ads and all. That however, isn’t actually accurate. I left a long-winded response on Avner’s post, explaining why so.

Today the Crunchgear blog played devil’s advocate, trying to see things from Hulu’s persepctive, and basically came up with the same outcome as me. Here’s my argument for Hulu blocking Boxee’s access in simple terms:

• Boxee is intended to replace tv viewing, whereas Hulu is intended to compliment it
• Fragmenting Hulu’s distribution weakens their competitive position (at least for now)
• On Boxee, Hulu loses the ability to advertise around the content (note the occasional small banner on Hulu above the video)
• Hulu’s partners lose attribution (eg. “SNL, Saturday’s at 11:30pm, Presented by NBC”)
• Hulu loses cross-promotion opportunities after an episode ends

I’m a huge Boxee fan and would love to see both companies work this out. The only solution I see is Hulu developing a paid app in Boxee and charging for their content. I would pay a few bucks a month (maybe even more if they increased the content available and included HD streams) — and they can even keep the ads in it…

1. Competition Demystified
2. Getting To YES (for negotiations class)
3. The Evolution of Cooperation (from game theory class)
4. The Chinese Economy (prep for my trip to Shanghai)
5. The Innovators Dilemma (i’m just re-reading this)

This list feels too heavy on the business side. Any new novels or less serious books you’d recommend?

W.S. Hein, a publisher of law reviews and other legal content, has seen a big spike in visitors since November, as indicated by the charts below.

Compete’s data on heinonline.org:

…and Quantcast…

…but ComScore didn’t have any data available for heinonline.org. It’s frustrating because Compete and Quantcast are free to use, but ComScore obviously isn’t. I’m sure there’s a valid reason for this, such as ComScore not having access to panel information from universities (I’d guess the majority of legal search traffic comes from schools), but it still doesn’t explain why ComScore can’t improve their data sources to be at least as good as the free options.