how to encourage your staff
yesterday i visited Lukasz at the spreadshirt / lafraise Office and my first eye-catcher was a nice flat screen hanging on the wall.

this shows logins / sales etc. to the spreadshirt system and is a great instrument to show your staff that “something is moving” and you all doing a great job.
we do something similar at beschenkmich.de (but far more simple). We use a google analytics chart and our internal admin interface:

XING is down
Europes leading business network, XING, is currently not available. No information found on the XING Blog so far but other blogger have noticed the downtime also within the last two hours. Even the Blog is very slow.
if anyone has futher information, please let us know.