September 2008

When Blogging Kills

There is no limit to just how much the internet has revolutionized our world. Not only has information become an immediately accessible commodity, but it has also changed the way people all around the world are working. Especially in the world of blogging, people are able to transform their homes into offices and effectively become their own bosses. While this sounds like every worker’s dream, for many people, home offices quickly become little else than digital sweatshops.

The internet never sleeps, and that means blog workers can’t either. Working in an entity that has no regard for time zones or exhaustion, bloggers constantly feel the pressure to report on the latest and greatest. That means even at the expense of personal health.
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Facebook Better than Porn?

In the world of internet searches and usage, there has officially been a changing of the guard. While pornography and adult sites used to reign supreme as the number one reason people flocked to the web, it seems people are now more concerned with updating their MySpace and Facebook pages.

That’s right. Social networking sites are officially more popular with the 18 to 24 year old demographic than porn. Bill Tancer, the author of Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters, also found that celebrities and politics were hot search topics.

While most people would think trading porn for politics is a step in the right direction, they might be disappointed to find that there is little searching being done for actual political policies or information. Searches are geared instead towards images—especially for vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin.
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Viral Marketing

One of the fundamental components in advertising is utilizing effective word of mouth. People telling other people about your products or services is an excellent way to build a base and introduce new customers to your business. Many industries rely on word of mouth to support their business model, like real estate, where your success can sometimes depend solely on who you know. Of course the quality of your product or service has something to do with the success of this word of mouth, but not always. I’ve known some really successful people in business who were much better at socializing than the actual work. The bottom line is word of mouth advertising is an important practice to understand, especially for the business owner looking to market for minimal dollars.
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Google’s New Browser – Google Chrome

It wasn’t a quiet Labor Day over at Microsoft, that’s for sure. Online sources began reporting early today that Google would be releasing a new browser, dubbed Google Chrome to directly compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The download will be available tomorrow in as many as 100 countries worldwide. The Google Blog officially announced the launch today at 2:10pm PST.

Chrome is an open-source browser running on WebKit, the same engine that powers Apple’s Safari and Google’s own Android mobile platform. WebKit is known for its speed, reliability and smart memory usage. Because many online applications are being run in browsers, Google is tailoring Chrome to that market specifically. Obviously, this is a direct attempt to garner some of Microsoft’s share of the browser market, of which they currently have a 74% hold, with second-place Firefox at 18% and Apple’s Safari at 6%.
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