February 17th, 2010 by Lyndsay Walker
It’s been speculated for sometime that Google will do SOMETHING to compete with the massive social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. After some attempts like Friend Feed and Wave, Google’s attempting it again with their new product – Buzz.
Buzz is actually pretty invasive and is causing serious concerns about privacy. It is a part of Gmail, a link below your Inbox on the left-hand side. It is updated with status updates (done manually), RSS entries, shared RSS posts, Tweets and more from your friends. Read more... (360 words, 2 images, estimated 1:26 mins reading time)
Posted in Online Marketing | No Comments »
February 11th, 2010 by John McDonald
It really floors me when I hear that certain people from certain industries still think that a website has no affect on their sales process. I was speaking to an accounting firm the other day and he was adamant that companies do not consider a website when they are looking for an accounting firm. He said it is all done by referrals. I agreed with the referral part, there are certain industries like financial planners, lawyers and accountants where there is no doubt that the initial interest comes from a referral. However, prior to 1994 potential customers did not have another means to research further and do some due diligence on the supplier they were considering. Now there is this little online library of information called the Internet where no company can hide and where prospective clients are definitely going to want to research your company. I met with a financial planning company and I explained how I felt the decision process would go: Read more... (484 words, 1 image, estimated 1:56 mins reading time)
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February 8th, 2010 by Adrian Balkwill
A plain desktop can really kill creativity, and there is nothing good about that. This is why I have made this list of 10 websites to search for some killer desktop graphics to get your creative juices flowing! Read more... (385 words, 11 images, estimated 1:32 mins reading time)
Posted in Web Design | No Comments »
February 1st, 2010 by AJ Batac
Quick reminder: Avoid being a victim of an e-mail phishing scam.
A good practice to save you from these e-mail hoaxes and fraudulent links (phising) is to always check (double-check then re-check) the link that you are about to click. It may save you from viruses, malwares, spywares or even save you lots of money. Especially if the link involved grabbing your personal information.
Take this phising email I recently received:
The email looked unsuspecting for a regular user at first. But after I hovered into that link “Click here to verify your account”.
Read more... (220 words, 3 images, estimated 53 secs reading time)
Tags: email scam, lottery, paypal, phising
Posted in Tools, Tips and Tricks | No Comments »
January 31st, 2010 by John McDonald
I had an interesting meeting with a prospect last week and they were describing to me they used to deal with a full service advertising agency but they felt that it was difficult for this agency to satisfy all their needs. The company was going through a re-branding, wanted to move more from traditional advertising to online but understood they still needed to advertise in traditional media and could not abandon this area. It was refreshing to hear an executive from the company mention that he thought it was hard for an advertising firm to be able to offer strategic branding, advertising and online marketing services. Mentioning that he wanted to deal with a local company he certainly hit the mark with that comment. Companies have to understand that the days of being able to offer these 3 expertises is over. I mentioned the only perceived negative is that you have to deal with 3 different contacts and he replied actually in most cases these companies are outsourcing their branding and online marketing implementation so he would rather deal direct with all three companies and have control of the process. I mentioned that the most important factor was for the three companies to work together towards the common marketing goal. I said that we work with branding companies and we work with traditional advertising agencies and I feel the end product is far superior than an agency trying to do all the work themselves. Read more... (405 words, 1 image, estimated 1:37 mins reading time)
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January 29th, 2010 by Chris
I was passed a very loved copy of Rebel Code by Glyn Moody. It’s about the beginnings of GNU, GPL liscensing, Linux, the Free Software Foundation, and the Open Source movement.
I was very interested to see that the two big contributors in making GNU, GPL, and the FSF gain such a big foot hold so early on (were otherwise they would have died) were largely successful because they were both extremely driven. It’s another proof that good large-scale things don’t just happen, it takes hard work and dedication. The two personalities behind GNU, FSF, and Linux in particular were driven by completely different things: Richard Stallman seemed to be almost driven by vengeance, offended about being turned down about various things related to his free OS. Linus Torvalds on the other hand seemed very laid back, but driven to see how things ticked, and from that driven to make the ticking things work like he envisioned. Both didn’t like to be called wrong about their ideas. Read more... (193 words, 1 image, estimated 46 secs reading time)
Posted in Linux System Administration | No Comments »
January 28th, 2010 by John McDonald
It surprises me when I see email addresses that are not domain specific. Personally it makes your business look like you are working in the dinosaur age (exaggeration obviously, no email addresses back then but if there were, those smart dinosaurs would have figured it out faster than some companies). Example of non-domain specific email addresses: john@gmail.com, john@mts.net etc. Domain specific email addresses are extremely easy to setup. Most Internet Service providers (ISPs) offer a certain number of free domain specific email addresses with standard business Internet access. In our province MTS and Shaw are examples of ISPs that offer 10 free domain specific email addresses. Another option is to setup domain specific email with Google email. You can setup up to 50 free domain specific email addresses with Google. Read more... (218 words, 1 image, estimated 52 secs reading time)
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January 28th, 2010 by Lyndsay Walker
When Twitter started, an unofficial trending tagging system started up. Known as “hash-tagging”, Twitter users could tag their tweets by using the hash symbol (#, also known as number sign or pound symbol). This was useful for following events like conferences (eg. #ces09) or for silly use, like a follow up thought (eg. #awesome). Sometime last year, trending (with or without hashtags) became an official feature of Twitter’s home page. Users could see the top ten words/hashtags/phrases being chatted about worldwide. Popular topics that came up over the past year include the Iranian election, the death of Michael Jackson and even new fads like #FollowFriday (suggestions of Twitter users to follow) and #MusicMonday (music suggestions). Read more... (413 words, 4 images, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)
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January 22nd, 2010 by Lyndsay Walker
Ann Smart of Search Engine Journal posted a great article today about how to make sure your URLs are SEO friendly.
Given that all pieces of your URL contribute to your organic ranking, this is something that shouldn’t be overlooked. Most people realize that the domain name is important (www.domainname.tld). Less people realize that the top level domain (www.domainname.tld) has an impact on your geo rankings. Other people realize that directory and page names are important (www.domainname.tld/directory/pagename.html) but don’t take the time to properly plan this. Read more... (120 words, 1 image, estimated 29 secs reading time)
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January 22nd, 2010 by Jonathan Dart
Forms are something a web developer makes and maintains nearly every day. Despite their common occurrence they’re easy to do badly. Luckily they are something of a solved problem. There are many tools out there that help the PHP developer create forms including PEAR’s HTML_QuickForm2, Zend Framework’s Zend_Form, eZ Components’s ezcInputForm, CodeIgniter’s Form Helper, and many others. Having drunk the Symfony Kool-Aid and being pretty impressed with it I thought I would see if I could use their sfForm class in a non Symfony project. Read more... (270 words, 1 image, estimated 1:05 mins reading time)
Posted in Web Development | No Comments »
