07/30/2005
This site has a cool geocoding map comparison of Virtual Earth and Google Maps. Simply enter the address and compare the views. Centralized zooming allows you control over both maps.

Map Comparison

07/29/2005
Well, you've joined the others and have created a blog. It is time to tell the world about your online journal. Most blog services generate an RSS feed. If your blogging software does not create an RSS feed, consider using software like FeedForAll to create an RSS feed. Like blogs, RSS is growing in popularity and is a great way to spread the word about a new blog.

Tell The World About Your Blog

07/28/2005
Forbes.com has announced their blog picks in various categories.

This summer Forbes has trained their sights on the rapidly growing world of blogs, also known as the "blogosphere". They identify the best blogs in categories ranging from Art and Literary Blogs, to Small Business, Marketing, Shopping and Music Blogs.

Best of Web According to Forbes

07/26/2005
Google has launched a beta version of Google Scholar

What is Google Scholar?
Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

How does Google Scholar work?
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other off line publications.

More on Google Scholar

07/25/2005
Robin Good had a really great article for entrepreneurs interested in achieving success. The article essentially summarizes a series of articles that he has written and shows the opportunities available for a motivated individual. Its a really great read. Hats off to you Robin!

07/22/2005
PlanWare Business Plan Tip: How NOT to Write a Business Plan
Here are some suggestions to follow if you want to write a truly dreadful business plan, or to avoid if you wish to write a sound business plan:

- Don't include a contents list, don't number any pages and don't follow any consistent approach for section heading etc.
- Do write the plan's summary before you write the plan, or, better still, don't include any summary.
- Do start the plan with a series of tables showing your projections - the more detail and tables the better.
- Don't summarize the projections - let the reader figure out the full year totals and so on.
- If you include projected balance sheets, make sure that they don't balance.
- Don't produce any separate cash flow forecasts, just rename the P&L or income projections.

Planware's "Don't Plan"

07/20/2005
A downward turn in overall cyber crime has hit its fourth year, said the 10th-annual survey on computer crime released Thursday, and average financial losses have tumbled by more than half.

The yearly survey, which is conducted by the Computer Security Institute (CSI) in coordination with the FBI, found that the average dollar amount pegged to a security breach fell by a whopping 61 percent compared to 2004, when the loss per polled company or government agency was estimated at $526,000. In 2005, the amount per respondent was only $203,000.

Complete Article

07/19/2005
Zazzle.com a site for personalizing gifts or creating small run personalized promotional items, Zazzle is poised to give Cafe Press a run for its money. The sites appear very similar while Zazzle has negotiated an interesting relationships with Disney that could push them ahead of the well entrenched Cafe Press.

Of course the money from Google's backers won't hurt their marketing either ;-)

07/19/2005
Small businesses remain optimistic about the near-term outlook for the economy, and this is translating into solid expectations for IT spending over the next few months.
Small-business owners’ expectations for the economy bumped up in May compared with April, according to the Small Business Optimism Index. Expectations are slightly lower than they were a year ago, but on average, small-business owners expect GDP growth over the next year to be in the 3.5 percent range, about where it is now and above the long-term trend growth rate of 3.0 percent. The Small Business Optimism Index is published monthly by the National Federation of Independent Business, a 600,000-member small-business advocacy group based in Washington.

07/18/2005
Google is at once a powerful search engine and a growing e-mail provider. It runs a blogging service, makes software to speed Web traffic and has ambitions to become a digital library. And it is developing a payments service.

Although many Internet users eagerly await each new technology from Google Inc., its rapid expansion is also prompting concerns that the company may know too much: what you read, where you surf and travel, whom you write.

Complete Article

07/14/2005
Blogging is growing so fast it's hard to get a handle on the numbers. Recently, BusinessWeek estimated that there were nearly 9 million blogs out there, a number that is growing at the rate of a whopping 40,000 per day. Of course, the majority of these are personal, not business-related, but blogging is beginning to catch on in businesses large and small as well. A survey of small business owners by HP earlier this year found that 10 percent have included blogs as part of their marketing plans, with an additional 16 percent planning to invest in blogs over the next three years. Those are interesting stats.

Complete Article

07/13/2005
Online search terms across a broad array of categories rose an average of 3 percent last month to $1.72--from $1.67 in May, according to the Fathom Online Keyword Price Index. Overall, keyword prices were up approximately 25 percent since last September, when Fathom began publishing the index, which tracks average cost-per-click rates in eight categories--cars, consumer retail, consumer services, travel/hospitality, investing, mortgages, broadband, and wireless. Keywords related to wireless services jumped by 19 percent to $1.19--the highest rate for such terms since the index started.

07/12/2005
Dealing With Copyright or Trademark Violations:

Who, What and Where
Before reacting, it is important to do homework and research the alleged content violator. Arm yourself with information. Determining the who, what and where will guide you in taking the appropriate steps.

Copyright Infringements

07/12/2005
Momentum is building for level sales taxes on Internet retail purchases, as 18 states prepare to nudge online retailers to collect taxes on items purchased over the Web.
In the wake of a meeting of the Streamlined Sales Tax Project (SSTP) in Chicago last week, tax representatives from states participating in the effort have been encouraging retailers to collect sales taxes.

:-((((

07/11/2005
I've always been of the opinion that competition is a good thing. It encourages all of us to be better and make better products. While it might be true that imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery, copying someone else's work is simply wrong.

Copyright Infringements Article

07/11/2005
An Internet arbitrator has awarded Google Inc. the rights to several Web site addresses that relied on typographical errors to exploit the online search engine's popularity so computer viruses and other malicious software could be unleashed on unsuspecting visitors.

Complete Article

07/07/2005
Why not to implement VOIP
Think VoIP is for everybody? Think again. There are plenty of reasons why VoIP might not be right for your network -- yet. Here are five reasons to wait or hold off completely.
Complete Article

07/06/2005
Really, really interesting article by InternetWeek about how technology and privacy are on a collision course.

Lots of readers had opinions on Microsoft and Google licensing satellite pictures of Earth and using them as part of their local-search services. Both currently provide pictures that show buildings and streets, but no ground-level detail. However, Orbimage, which is supplying pictures to Microsoft, says it plans to offer high-resolution pictures in 2007 that would let you count the manholes in Manhattan.

With that kind of detail, and the expectation that many other Internet companies would start using satellite-generated pictures, the idea of having all those cameras pointed at us made me feel uneasy. Some readers agreed, while others didn't think it was a big deal. A few, however, were even more paranoid.

Complete Article - Being Watched

07/05/2005
Google is testing a premium service that will open up mainstream access to the "Deep Web," allowing webmasters with restricted or subscription content to let in Google and provide the masses with free previews.

The service is being tested server-side with a small number of sites that are under strict confidentiality agreements. Premium content will be indexed and tagged as paid, and will be displayed in a special content area on the right side of Google's search results underneath the AdSense advertising links.

Some paid articles are "first click free" and will appear within Google's "natural" aggregated search results - if the participating publication decides that the content should be accessible when Google is the referrer.

Complete Article

07/04/2005
Pay-Per-Click marketing has become an online phenomenon, with marketers only paying for traffic they receive. As Internet marketing has evolved, pay-per-click is seen by many as the middle ground between paying per impression and paying per sale. Advertisers only pay when they receive traffic that may or may not be targeted.

Pay Per Click Definitions Complete Article