Islamic financial products soak up growing share of Gulf money
Lebanon Daily Star - DUBAI: The market for Islamic finance and banking is growing rapidly in the oil-rich Gulf thanks to burgeoning wealth and attractive financial instruments. Studies have put the total value of Islamic equity funds in the Gulf at around $30 billion

Credicorp shares dip on Citi downgrade
MSN MoneyCentral - The biggest finance company in Peru, Credicorp lends money to companies, sells insurance, runs a brokerage and manages investments. Abut said Credicorp “remains a compelling growth story.

Wage increases falling further behind soaring cost of living
Times Online - Alec Chrystal, head of the finance faculty at Cass Business School, said: “Rising costs paired with the impact of slow wage increases will certainly lead to less disposeable income for many consumers and this will make them feel worse off.

Mayor’s pal got inside scoop on contracts
Detroit Free Press - Those kinds of details are not handled by the mayor’s chief of staff, but by someone in finance, someone in another administrative role. “I would be concerned about any kind of involvement that the chief of staff would have related to contracts

South Korean government targets 6 percent economic growth for 2008
PR Inside - SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - South Korea plans to reach economic growth of about 6 percent this year through measures including corporate tax cuts, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance stated Monday. The country’s economy grew 4.9 percent last year

Schweitzer, Brown must give back cash if no challengers file
Montana Standard - However, those totals likely will rise; new campaign finance reports are due Monday. The law setting up the campaign finance limit was part of a voter initiative passed by Montanans in 1994.

Next challenge: second season syndrome
Guardian Unlimited - It was quite a stressful time for me as I had borrowed a big sum of money, £30,000, in order to finance my drive with March the previous year,” he said.

Babcock works to clear margin loans
News.com.au - The company has received commitments for new term finance to replace the remaining outstanding margin loans. “Today’s announcement removes all short term debt secured against marketable securities in Babcock & Brown managed funds and reconfirms our

List of judicial candidates who filed for office through Friday
Pine Bluff Commercial - HASKELL, Ark. - Officials in the Harmony Grove School District are asking voters to raise their property taxes to finance a new football program. The measure, which would raise about $1 million, will be on Tuesday’s ballot. Voters in the district in

Sarkozy suffers backlash in France’s local elections
Guardian Unlimited - Some were elected straight away last night, but others, such as the finance minister Christine Lagarde, face tough battles. Early results showed the right trailing the Socialists in her Paris district.

TriCo Bancshares to Present at the Sandler O’Neill 2008 West Coast
Forbes - Tri Counties Bank offers financial services and provides a diversified line of products and services to consumers and businesses, which include demand, savings and time deposits, consumer finance, on the web banking, mortgage lending, and commercial

On the fast track to citizenship
Minneapolis Star Tribune - Pfc. Moses Nyumah, a member of the 247th Finance Detachment, walked with his mom, Louise Tamba, after a welcome home ceremony at the Roseville Armory following the unit’s return from a 12-month tour near Tikrit. Nyumah, originally from Liberia

Overtime is hurting quality of life: Trades Hall
Australian Broadcasting Corp. - Tags: business-economics-and-finance , industrial-relations , vic , ballarat-3350 , bendigo-3550 , horsham-3400 , mildura-3500 , sale-3850 , wodonga-3690

RMB exchange rates at 0100 GMT
Quamnet - The above information is supplied by our data providers (SHK Financial Data, Xinhua Finance and Infocast among others) and is for reference purposes only.

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Filed under: World wide web, Features, Blogging, Social Software, web 2.0

One of the more difficult aspects of reading websites with an active reader or user community is separating the useful comments from, well, the cruft. Oftentimes the really interesting an useful content can get buried or lost under than a ton of “me too” replies. This is where the new comment plugin system, SezWho comes into play.

SezWho, as their site states, “is a distributed context, rating and reputation service for blogs, forums, wikis and other social sites.” Essentially it’s plugin that grants both visitors and web site owners to rate the content and value of comments. If a website uses SezWho, it becomes much, much easier to parse content based on its rating and overall usefulness. Download Squad is having a BLAST at SXSWi 2008 and this day we had a chance to sit down with SezWho’s founder and CEO Jitendra Gupta. Jitendra showed us the various features of SezWho, and we have to state, we’re impressed.

The most interesting aspect of SezWho, to us, is that user comments can be linked across blogs. So if you leave a comment at one site with SezWho, other readers can view your other comments to other SezWho sites. This makes it simple to find out how helpful/informative/useful a comment actually is and to build your own reputation and rating system across a number of blogs. Ratings are based not just on user votes, but also how often you contribute and the context of the comment itself. So if you post a comment on a political website, that is not going to adversely (or positively, for that matter) affect your overall user rating if you comment on a sports website. For commenters, people can view your profile, find out other sites you’ve contributed to and find your own website.

SezWho’s comment display

For website owners, you can use SezWho not only to engage your community and to build interaction, but if you want, you can even highlight your most popular and highest rated commenters. You can also track how many referral links various comments or commenters bring in.

SezWho is currently available as a plugin for both Movable Type (versions 3.3 and 4.0) and WordPress. In the next week, Blogger, phpBB, Drupal will be added to that list. OpenID support is also on the way, making it even easier for people to leave a comment without having to sign-up for yet another service. The overall look of the

plugin on your comment page will soon be fully customizable via CSS and various themes and styles are coming in the future.

If you’ve your own blog and are looking for a good way to interact with your readers, consider giving SezWho a try. For readers and commenters, its a great way to build reputation across various sites and also view the ideal content immediately.

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