11.30.05
Posted in News at 12:20 am by Paloma Cruz
New Orleans’ new connection
City-owned WiFi system to be announced Tuesday
– reported by MSNBC
Hurricane-ravaged New Orleans will deploy the nation’s first municipally owned wireless Internet system that will be free for all users, part of an effort to jump-start recovery by making living and doing business in the city as attractive as possible.
The system, which Mayor C. Ray Nagin is scheduled to announce at a news conference today, also will be used by law enforcement and for an array of city government functions, such as speeding approval of building permits.
Much of the equipment to run the network was donated by companies, but New Orleans will own it and operate all its components at the outset. The system, which uses devices mounted on streetlights to beam out fast Internet connections for wireless-enabled computers, is scheduled to be operational today in the central business district and the French Quarter and to be expanded over time.
[snip]
Special thanks to Gizmodo for pointing me to this story.
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Posted in News at 12:19 am by Paloma Cruz
Internet agency considers freeing up single-letter domains
– reported by KTRK ABC Channel 13
Although Internet domain names may be getting longer or more complex as Web sites creatively squeeze into the crowded “.com” address space, most single-letter names like “a.com” and “b.com” remain unused.
That may soon change as the Internet’s key oversight agency considers lifting restrictions on the simplest of names.
In response to requests by companies seeking to extend their brands, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will chart a course for single-letter Web addresses as early as this weekend, when the ICANN board meets in Vancouver, British Columbia. Those names could start to appear next year.
So far I’ve seen this headline appear on more than a few blogs. Personally, I know there’s no way I could pick up one of these while they were still available at regular price. Of course, some really enterprising person or company out there is going to make a killing on this. You just know it.
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Posted in General at 12:19 am by Paloma Cruz
Trying to make your Web site accessible? Start at this handy little checklist provided by TechSoup.
Web Site Accessibility Checklist
Find out if your site meets W3C accessibility guidelines
Editor’s Note: Web Site Accessibility Checklist created by Susan Grossman, owner of Finishing First, using materials from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
You gotta start somewhere.
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11.29.05
Posted in News at 10:49 pm by Paloma Cruz
How do people use the Web? I visit the Pew Internet site regularly because this is one of the questions they tackle frequently. Here are some recent reports that had some interesting facts:
- About 25 million people have used the internet to sell something. “Some 17% of online American adults have used the internet to sell things. That amounts to approximately 25 million Americans. In addition, internet traffic data show that visits to classified ad web sites has grown 80% in the past year. Almost everything imaginable is currently for sale or has been for sale by individuals on various auction or classified ad sites. Tangible items like pink plastic Christmas trees, collectible coins, wedding dresses, automobiles, books, or CDs share web space with a myriad of intangibles including virtual weaponry and characters from online games (sold for real money) and services including everything from finding a French tutor, a personal trainer or someone to clean your aquarium.”
- 13 million Americans made donations online after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. “In the aftermath of the Gulf Coast Hurricanes, 13 million Americans made donations to relief efforts online and 7 million set up their own hurricane relief efforts using the internet. In addition to using the internet to respond directly to the crisis, 50% of online users sought out news and information online.”
How do you use the internet? Do you donate? Do you shop? Do you blog?
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Posted in General at 10:46 pm by Paloma Cruz
Some suggested reading for those of you who, like me, have some business/activities/pursuits online:
SitePoint and WebProNews are both on my daily must-reads. SitePoint doesn’t update daily, but their articles are very useful. WebProNews does update every day, and has a lot of articles, but they aren’t as insightful or in-depth. Both are worth adding to your favorites.
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11.26.05
Posted in News at 12:08 am by Paloma Cruz
That’s what the Austin Business Journal asserts about the prevalence of wireless internet access in that city.
Free Wi-Fi boosts Austin’s economy, feeds business patrons’ appetites
– reported by the Austin Business Journal
Wireless Internet is seemingly everywhere in Austin — homes, restaurants, coffee shops, hotels, movie theaters, libraries, the capitol, the airport. And it looks as though Wi-Fi, as it’s commonly known, will continue to grow in prevalence.
[snip]
Offering Wi-Fi not only benefits consumers, but also boosts business.
Richard MacKinnon, president of the Austin Wireless City Project, says Wi-Fi users pumped $500,000 more into participating Austin wireless businesses last year. He says patrons are demanding free Wi-Fi from businesses across the city.
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Posted in General at 12:06 am by Paloma Cruz
If you don’t know what it is, then this post isn’t for you. If you do know what blog comment spam is, then read Blog Business World’s “Blog comment spam: How to fight it.”
Here are some actions savvy bloggers do to combat comment spam:
- They insert code to prevent spammers.
- They place first time posters on comment moderation.
- Sometimes posts remain moderated permanently, prior to being published.
- They require a randomly generated alpha-numeric code be entered, in order to submit the comment, thus preventing automated comments.
- They vigilantly watch their comments, as they are good bloggers who read all of their readers’ ideas, and studiously delete the spam posts.
- Many bloggers place the rel=”nofollow” coding in their comments, to prevent any Google PageRank flow to the posted links, or any link popularity value from helping the spammers with search engine rankings. Unfortunately, this technique, recommended by Google themselves, also penalizes legitimate commenting visitors.
- They check their comments regularly by having the comments e-mailed or RSS fed to themselves. By subscribing to their own comments with e-mail or RSS, they can check each comment as it appears. Spam can then be made to disappear with the click of a mouse.
Read the entire post for more info and additional tips.
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11.20.05
Posted in General at 10:22 pm by Paloma Cruz
There’s been very light blogging lately. I’ve been living offline. Here’s a bit of recommended reading and links to visit for your enjoyment:
- Internet Explorer Developer toolbar. “The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar offers handy tools for web publishers working on getting their web pages just right in IE.”
- MultiRSS. “Place the MultiRSS button on your site and when someone wants to subscribe to your feed, it will provide a list of aggregators.”
- Top 20 Ways to Prevent Spam. “Follow these handy steps to a spam-free inbox.”
- Collaborative Document Sharing Tools.
- Removing Windows Startup Items. “At times, I begin to install Windows software before deciding to cancel the installation. Usually this isn’t a problem. Sometimes though, the installer places itself into my startup items and each time I boot my computer it prompts me to finish the installation. What a pain! Fortunately, it’s not hard to fix.”
- Multimedia PCs become center of family attention. “As the PC becomes the center of 21st century digital life, it makes sense that an operating system designed around consuming electronic media would take off.”
- How to make an emergency getaway drive.
- Mashup of your RSS feeds: try Feeddigest. “Basically, it rolls up all your RSS feeds (mixes them), converts them to HTML (or PHP or whatever) and lets you re-syndicate them to your site or blog.”
- Email Newsletters for Bloggers. ” One of his tips is to consider collecting subscribers to your newsletter not only on your site but also from offline sources.”
- 10 ideas for your next blog post. “The Performancing blog has 10 great post ideas to help you get started on your next post.”
- Ad Sizes on Blogs. “Duncan has posted A short guide to ad sizes which really is a must read if you’re looking to use advertising on your blog.”
- Gain more advertisers right from your site. “Many of you have been asking for the ability to sign up advertisers directly from your pages. Starting now, you can do just that with Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up.”
- Making Money From Blogging Takes Time. “I’ve been blogging for almost 3 years (in fact November will see me hit this mark) and in that time I’ve added over 11,000 pages of content. This is 11,000 possible entry points to my blogs in search engines. This quantity of content does not just appear.”
- Open Microsoft Office files without Office. “The Quick Online Tips blog points us to three free Microsoft Viewer programs for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The point here is that if you’re at a computer that doesn’t have Office installed, you can still open, view, and print your files.”
- Discover font types with WhatTheFont. “Web service WhatTheFont analyzes uploaded images and returns the font style matching the font used in the image.”
- Recalibrate your laptop battery. “The Warning9 blog has posted a tutorial designed to step you through the process of recalibrating your laptop battery.”
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation today. “The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation defends your digital rights every day and needs your help to continue.”
- Think Before You Link from your Blog.
- Quotes for Bloggers. “The other day when I was looking for quotes to finish up my Making Money From Blogging Takes Time post I came across a heap of great sayings from famous people that seemed appropriate for bloggers.”
- Value Added Blogging. “Steve Rubel writes about the ’secret sauce‘ for getting corporate blogs noticed in the midst of the millions of other blogs and corporate sites out there.”
- Blogging as a Business - Business Structures are Key. “To keep a long and complicated story short - what we’re doing is transitioning from a hobby business with me as a sole trader we’re moving to a company structure.”
- ProBlogger Comments Policy. “I’m beginning to see that there is a real spectrum of ways in which blog readers view and use the comments sections of blogs.”
- How to recalibrate your laptop battery.
- Budget Help With Budginator.
- Check links with TalkDigger.
- Geek to Live: Write effectively for the Web.
- How to permanently delete data from your hard drive.
- Ten ways to use Technorati.
- How to use RSS feeds.
- Ten blogging tricks.
- Google Referral Program. “It looks like Google are starting a referral program for AdWords.”
- Adsense Referral Program. “Looks like I was wrong with my last post - apologies - but even more exciting than that is that Adsense have just launched a referal program. Now you can refer new publishers to adsense and earn $100 when they get to their first $100 of earnings.”
- Are Adsense Getting into the Affiliate Marketing Game? “I’ve been pondering the Adsense decision to get into the referral business this morning since hearing the news. There are a number of questions and directions that my mind has taken with it.”
- Top Entrepreneurial Blogs. “About.com’s Entrepreneurial page has a list of the Top 10 Most Practical Blogs for Entrepreneurs. It’s a pretty decent list of blogs - most of which are on my daily reads list”
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