Today the Reserve Bank of Australia cut interest rates by 0.75% (0.25% more than the expected 0.5%. That represents a 200 basis point cut over just the last three months.

When reading an article on the cut on news.com.au, I noticed the “Related Coverage” sidebar. Every single piece of news has a different guess; some thought rates would go up, some down and some the same. In short, no-one really has any idea. How can these people be called experts? Is it really that the conflicting factors of inflation, house prices, consumer spending, the global stockmarkets and employment (to name just a few) are too hard to compare and weigh up? Maybe, but these ‘experts’ get paid for what they do! Or perhaps the experts are just journalists looking to create sensational headlines from titbits of superficial knowledge?

I am inclined to think that journalists play a very large role in the economic crisis, and that the severe fluctuations in the market are driven by fear generated by ‘experts’ and delivered to ‘mum and dad’ and ‘out of their depth’ investors.

New Digital Media have today announced a partnership between Ebay and CareerOne. Well I use the word ‘partnership’ loosely, because essentially it is a cross-linking agreement. There is a new sub-domain of CareerOne with an Ebay header, and on the flip side Ebay have added a Jobs tab and CareerOne banners smattered through their website.

I understood the MySpace cross-linking. Like their parents, News is trying to get the lazy kids of today to roll their eyeballs over some job ads. But in this case I think the word ‘integration’ is used a bit freely in both partnerships, tacking the header of one site across the body of another is not integration. I know people are going to think I am sponsored, but LinkedIn and SimplyHired did a much better job of integrating two different partners online. Maybe that is unfair because there were more common interests? I think that is the point. A recruiter wouldn’t partner with an auction house in real life, so what makes anyone think it would work online?

There is however a point that I am much more interested in. Maybe Ebay partnered with the wrong News Digital child. Maybe real estate has more in common? Ebay does after all have a Real Estate category, albeit languishing away the Home category. Ebay don’t have much to lose either; the Home - Kitchen category has 9000+ listings, while the Home - Real Estate category has 167. In fact RealEstate.com.au already has general advertising live on Ebay, they just need to take it that little step further.

It is all happening in the world of Australian Online RealEstate tonight! The Realestate.com.au board have announced the immediate departure of their long serving (since 2001) CEO, Simon Baker. This was a huge surprise, although the fact that he sent out about 50 LinkedIn recommendation requests to people (myself included) late Friday night should have been a bit of a warning. Anyway at least Domain isn’t having the last laugh, their website is currently completely broken, simply stating that “an unexpected error has occurred”. I would say their support team are going to wake up to hundreds of thousands of error emails and a big headache tomorrow.