Reading Between the Lines

We all know Barack Obama was the candidate of hope and despite the Presdential honeymoon he is enjoying with the American public (as well as the trucking industry if not all industries), he has been criticized of late– even by members of his own party– for not dishing up much in the way of optimistic statements on the economy.

The President may endeavor to inject a message of hope into his speech tonight before a joint session of Congress. But, lo and behold, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke apparently decided to raise his own banner of hope today.

As reported by ABCnews.com, Bernanke said today in testimony prepared for the Senate Banking Committee that the economy is likely to keep shrinking in the first six months of this year, but he is hopeful the recession will end this year.



Fed Chief Bernanke contends there is reason to be hopeful.

According to the news report, Bernanke admitted there were “significant risks to that forecast and any economic turnaround would hinge on the success of the Fed and the Obama administration in getting credit and financial markets to operate more normally again.” Bernnake said, “Only if that is the case, in my view there is a reasonable prospect that the current recession will end in 2009 and that 2010 will be a year of recovery.”

Now, let’s be honest. Even a transformational politician like President Obama is still a politician and it may just be that the persons who still control the levers of our financial system (how much longer they will have that control remains to be seen) will react more positively to what the Fed Chief has to say.

And as capitalism is as much about perception and emotion as it is dollars and cents, we can only hope they will.

FleetOwner The Website has gone-all-social-media on you and me both.

In our never-ending campaign to inform and advance the American truck fleet manager, we long ago realized the World Wide Web is the new high ground of the Information Age, and seize on it we sure have. Indeed, when it comes to engineering an effective and compelling web platform to enhance our editorial mission as an information source serving the trucking industry alone, I daresay Fleet Owner stands second to none.

But far from rest on our laurels, or pixels and bytes for that matter, all of us at FleetOwner– including our highly talented new-media support staff– are constantly scratching our heads and travelling the vast reaches of the Internet so we can bring you, dear reader/visitor, all the tools that can drive your success and present them all in one place- on our nifty home page.

And that brings me back to social media. Before I go any further, please take another look-see at our FleetOwner home page and locate the “Find us on Facebook” blue-logo button on the left side just above “Executive Reports.” Click on it and you get sent right to our new Social Media Newsroom page, which provides visitors who might not be familiar with social networking sites with an introduction to these services– along with how and why they might be interested in using each one of them.



Our Social Media Newsroom makes this scene truly a virtual reality…

“Online readers, especially those of business publications like FleetOwner, are an increasingly web-savvy group who are demanding more and more information from a variety of channels,” points out our own Master of the Web Universe, Ben McClanahan, digital content strategy manager for our mother ship, Penton Media. “They also want to interact more with others within their industry. That’s what sites like Facebook and Twitter allow us to do.

“Another exciting social media feature on FleetOwner is the addition of Facebook Connect to our commenting section,” Ben adds. “When readers leave comments below an article, they now have the option to log in using Facebook Connect, which allows readers to broadcast their comments to their Facebook friends, including fans of FleetOwner.”

It works for me and hopefully will for you, too!