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Apparently, some Democratic members of the chamber learned of the Republican-leaning posts. After a meeting on the matter last night, Shumate resigned, according to the Times.
In the last six months, LinkedIn has become the de rigueur Web 2.0 site for IT professionals. LinkedIn has 30 million members, almost double what it had a year ago. And it raised more than $75 million in venture capital during 2008, so it has staying power. It has a host of new features that make it the most productive networking site on the Web. Spend some time updating your LinkedIn profile and reaching out to current and former colleagues. You can show your boss that you’re well connected, and you’ll be ready in case you’re on the next layoff list. In 2008, LinkedIn made our list of the 20 most useful social networking sites on the Web.
Als, check out Yammer, which is Twitter for business. More here.
Last week, I appeared on "First News with Bob Steel" to talk about tips for résumés. You can listen to that segment and see my notes here. This morning, I was on "Today's THV This Morning" to talk about job hunting using the Internet.
Here's video of the segment, and below are my notes, including links I cited in the report, along with some other stuff I didn't have time to go into.
1) In what ways can you use the Internet to find your next job?
First, there's lots of job search sites, free places where you can search for job openings or post your résumé for employers to find you. Good examples of those are sites like Careerbuilder.com and even ArkansasBusiness.com/jobs.
You can also use the Internet to conduct research. Whether you've already gotten an interview with an employer or are just starting out, the Internet is a great place to learn about a particular job field or a possible employer. When you do get an interview, you want to be prepared and know as much about the employer or the job is possible, and the Internet lets you do that homework.
2) What about sites like Facebook? What's the value of social networking sites when on the job hunt?
Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn are great for online networking, which leads to connections that can eventually lead to jobs. This is because you're keeping in touch with friends who might easily pass on job leads and news that can be helpful down the line.
LinkedIn is particularly interesting because it's geared toward more professional uses. There you can form and join groups of professionals in similar careers, and you can see how your friends are connected to other people who might help you find a job. You can also take part in virtual introductions to get to know possible job contacts. And you can easily post your résumé and job information so that it's always in circulation.
3) What other job tools are available online?
There are several sites online that help you in all aspects of the job hunt.
CareerPath is part of Careerbuilder, and it offers free career assessment tests to help you learn what careers might be best for you.
Emurse.com and VisualCV.com are sites that help you write and share your résumé easily, which has grown in importance as more people use the Web. Not only to they help you write a résumé, they also allow you to create your own résumé Web site to which you can refer employers and contacts.
And there lots of jobs and career advice blogs. One I like is Brazeen Careerist by Penelope Trunk. She offers all kinds of tips and hints on all aspects of careers.
4) Well, what tips would you offer to people job hunting in the Internet age?
First, change your e-mail address. Having an address like suprkutechik@hotmail.com or imsmarterthanyou@aol.com makes you look immature and cocky. Use your full name to look distinguished and professional.
And in this day and age of e-mail, it's important to create a résumé file that e-mails well. Write it and save it in a format that works across all platforms (Mac vs. PC, Word vs. whatever). A simple, text file, or a simple Word doc, is best.
And keep it clean on the Internet. Employers will Google you, so manage your online reputation carefully.
As Black Friday looms, a lot of good deals can be found now online. The Blueprint for Financial Prosperity blog shares some ways you can save even more when it comes to shipping from online retailers.
Of course, it never hurts to simply start early:
1. Ship as soon as possible so you can use the lowest shipping speed. Christmas is December 25th, it’s always December 25th, and it will never change from December 25th. Everyone knows it’s December 25th… so why, inevitably, will there be tons of people shipping packages via Next Day or Overnight on the 24th? A 2 lb. package from New York to California costs $8.25 via Priority Mail (est. 2 day shipment time) and a whopping $25.65 via Express Mail (next day by 12 p.m.). Ship early, ship for less. (I understand that sometimes circumstances beyond your control necessitate shipping at the last minute, but for every other situation… you’re literally paying out the nose for your forgetfulness/laziness/whatever).
The idea, which would levy sales tax on most goods bought online, has been tossed around for nearly a decade. A perfect storm of factors, including record state budget deficits, a new Congress and continued e-commerce growth, appear likely to rekindle the issue. Experts say that cash-strapped states view this revenue, estimated to be several billions of dollars, as money left on the table.
Next time you're in one of those awkward moments where your boss as walked you to your desk to see you busily checking Facebook or MySpace, be sure to show him this from Reuters:
Good news for workers addicted to Facebook, Bebo and MySpace -- a British think-tank says bosses should not stop their staff using social networking sites because they could actually benefit their firms.
The report by Demos said encouraging employees to use networking technologies to build relationships and closer links with colleagues and customers could help businesses rather than damage them.
Author Peter Bradwell said that while companies were using specific systems to share information, online social networking sites could also play a role, helping with productivity, innovation and democratic working.
The study said networking can be valuable to business, and since so much networking is done online, with professional and personal connections mingling freely, it would be a mistake to try and restrict that networking at the office.
But don't go crazy. Authors of the study said there should still be practical guidelines to limit non-work usage.
Twitter is an addictive little service that allows you to post "tweets," or short, 140-character updates in a blog-like format. You can see my Twitter page here at http://Twitter.com/LT.
Twitter asks you to answer the question, "What are you doing now?" Some people take this literally, providing short updates on every aspect of their day ("Washing clothes," "Watching 'Mad Men,'" "Going through e-mails").
But others have adapted the service to their own needs. Many news services have Twitter streams. The New York Times, CNN, Marketwatch and many others (including local news outlets like KTHV, KATV, KLRT and the Log Cabin Democrat) provide news headlines and links to fresh stories. Others use Twitter to live blog events, including the presidential debates, public meetings, whatever.
To me, this is where Twitter really sings. It allows me to post quick links to breaking news stories, new blog postings/news articles on ABPG Web sites, and off-site stories I find interesting. And that's how I've been using it the last several months. Live Twittering On Your Desktop
Count me as a Twitter devotee - after a long period of testing. I initially abandoned the curious microblogging service for months after signing in March 2007. I just didn't get what the site offered.
It wasn't until I downloaded and started using a free third-party desktop app for Twitter, called Twhirl, that I really got some use out of it. Twhirl opens up Twitter as a real-time chat -- except it's with a lot more people. Tweets pop up on your desktop in real time, so you don't have to go to your Twitter page to see the latest updates.
(You can more Twitter desktop apps here.) Breaking News Text Messages
Twitter also has the power to reach folks beyond the Web browser. When you set up an account and begin "following" others, you'll get their tweets delivered straight to your Twitter homepage and live to your desktop app. If you give Twitter your cell phone number, you'll also be able to get people's tweets delivered to your cell phone as a text message.
That means that if you follow my Twitter stream, and I post a link to breaking news on ArkansasBusiness.com, you'll get that message and link sent directly to your cell phone the instant I post it. Often, I post these links several minutes before a full story is posted. With Twitter, you can be on the cutting edge of breaking news.
I'll continue doing a lot with Twitter, particularly during our election coverage over the next week. So sign up and follow me. You might be surprised at how addictive -- and informative -- this curious little Web service is.
Others on Twitter in Arkansas
The list of Twitter users in Arkansas is growing quickly. Here's a very short list, including some people following me on Twitter. Some are companies, some are news organizations, some are people who just like to share their lives on Twitter. Still others augment their blogs with these brief updates.
Want me to add you to the list? E-mail me or message me on Twitter here.
You know how ugly it could get, give all the online, out-in-the-open social networking going on these days. You write something on a blog or social network, someone comments, maybe takes the discussion to an ugly place, and you feel compelled to respond.
So what can you do? Shifting Careers shares a case study on how one woman used her blog and blog comments to set the record straight and help her online reputation.
It all started with a post that Eve wrote for MSNBC.com about social networking overload (something I’ve been experiencing and meaning to write about for some time myself). Shortly after she wrote her post, another blogger, Mark Story, wrote a post calling Eve’s reporting “sloppy journalism,” arguing with her premise (”There is no such thing as ‘information overload’ if you do not allow it to exist.”), and throwing in a remark about the difficulty of pronouncing her surname.
Eve was furious and wanted to make sure that her online reputation wasn’t harmed by this post.
Here's a neat little tool the Shifting Careers blog talks about here: VisualCV, an online resume system with social networking components:
It takes only a few moments to set up a résumé, and making alternate versions with variations is a snap. It even makes the process kind of fun. Plus, it’s free. (The site promises no advertising and says it will generate income by offering services to individual and corporate users.) And for the naysayers who don’t want photos and images on their CV, one click allows you to generate an all-text pdf version of your résumé.
If you’re not sold yet, here’s more of why I’m so keen on this site. Your résumé lives on a URL that you can easily link to, share with others and even hide completely if you are not ready to be open about a job search. But I predict that lots of career-minded people will use VisualCV.com the way they use LinkedIn — not only when they are actively looking for a job, but also when they want to scout opportunities for their current employer or their own company.
What else is cool about VisualCV? You can embed photos and video. Nice.
While his friends scramble for jobs flipping burgers or bagging groceries this summer, 18-year-old Mike Everest will be working as a trader in the fantasy Web world of Entropia Universe, buying and selling virtual animal skins and weapons. His goods exist only online, but his earnings are real. In the past four years, he's made $35,000.
Mr. Everest, of Durango, Colo., is among a new breed of young entrepreneurs seeking their fortune online in imaginary worlds. As the pool of traditional summer jobs shrinks, tech-savvy young gamers are honing their computer skills to capitalize on growing demand for virtual goods and services. Some work as fashion designers, architects and real-estate developers in Second Life, a fantasy world populated by digital representations of real people. These so-called avatars shop in malls, buy property, hang out with friends or sit "home" watching TV, all manipulated by their real-life counterparts with computer key strokes and a mouse.
As comfortable as I might be putting some limited personal info on the Web, that's nothing compared to what others do. People younger than me seem especially willing to overshare big-time on the Web. A quick trip around MySpace and other spots tells you all you need to know about that.
KTHV's Alyson Courtney will examines this phenomenon with a special report Monday during the CBS affiliate's 10 p.m. newscast. You can see a video preview here. She'll talk about how your online reputation can hurt your offline life, and ways to take control of it.
We've shared similar tips on this topic on The Ladder. You can learn more at the links below:
Those involved in startups can click here to find a handful of great sites with plenty of advice, tips and ideas on all manner of entrepreneurial endeavors, including finding venture capital, sharing ideas and accessing key documents.
With all that content out there, it can difficult to keep up. Web Worker Daily even wonders whether we've already outgrown the RSS reader.
So how do we efficiently and productivity keep up with all the information flowing online? Two new products pose a solution.
First, there's Friendfeed, which aims to aggregate all your pals' various Internet content across various platforms. In one place, you can see your buddy's latest Flickr photos, videos, Twitter tweets, Del.icio.us links, Wordpress blog entries and more.
Next is Alltop, which Shifting Careers is trying out as a way to stay on top of various blogs in specific categories. Blogs on Alltop are organized by categories, so you can theoretically scan the "journalism" page and get all the latest news and notes on the field from the various blog feeds that include on that page.
How Alltop selects what blogs go in what category is an interesting question. To me, it smacks of Yahoo!'s early attempt at search, by manually categorizing thousands of Web sites one at a time. How scalable will Alltop be?
Want to do a better job of managing your online reputation and improve the search results you (or potential employers) get when running your name through Google?
Lifehacker has a feature here on things you can do.
Our sister publication, the Northwest Arkansas Business Journal, looks at tourism this week, and among its stories is this piece on how travel agencies are battling the Internet for travel bookings.
According to an industry analysis firm, Connecticut-based PhoCusWright Inc., 51 percent of U.S. travelers used online travel agencies last year. That is estimated to increase to 56 percent this year.
Online travel agency industry experts predict the online sector to only gain steam and customers in the coming years. But brick-and-mortar travel agents aren't worried about the trends. Most in Northwest Arkansas are confident they'll continue to hold market share by offering travelers something they covet and Web sites just can't offer: personalized customer service.
"It's all about service," said Paula Ryan, owner of The Travel Connection Ltd. in Rogers, who saw her revenue increase 4.2 percent from 2006 to 2007. "It's always been all about service. We offer customer service before the sale, during the sale and after the sale. In this day and age if something can go wrong on a trip it usually does. We are always there to help, even if the client is halfway across the world."
Customer service is certainly a big advantage to using travel agencies. My question is: what do young professionals prefer to use?
My guess is that the emerging generation still prefers to do most of its bookings online, and once those habits are in place, they're hard to break. Of course, the article also refers to the "boomerang" effect -- clients now returning to personal agents because they need and want someone to rely on if a trip goes bad. In that case, you definitely want a real person to deal with, instead of just a Web site.
Instapaper is personal bookmarking evolved. You sign up with your email (or anything else you want to use, no password necessary), get a bookmarklet you stick in your toolbar and you’re good to go. Then when you hit a page you need to read later, you click the Instapaper bookmarklet, a window briefly pops up saying “Saved!” then goes away and you’re done. No time wasted going off to some other page; no breaking your train of thought to fill in a form.
...
While you can add a note to a URL, why bother? Instapaper has reduced bookmarking to its absolute minimum, and that means bookmarking can finally scale.
Lifehacker rounds up an excellent guide to some of the Web's best free applications and software. Included are bittorrents, back-up utilities, calendars, image editors, instant messengers, media players and much more.
Slaving all day blogging and posting Web videos to pursue your dream of becoming "Internet famous"? The Wall Street Journal asked many of your favorite Internet stars about their secrets of success.
The most important thing is to understand the dynamics of the medium and the nature of your audience. "The Internet moves very fast," says Gary "Numa Numa" Brolsma. "Your video has to be funny, or get to the point, very quickly. People are clicking all the time. If you don't hook people in the first 15 seconds, they'll move on."
Mr. Brolsma certainly knows what he's talking about. He was voted "Greatest Internet Superstar" by VH1. You may not have heard of him, or for that matter, any of the other megasuperstars mentioned in this column. Well, you can read about them on Wikipedia. Or, ask the guy in your office who seems always glued to his computer, "working on PowerPoint."
Also: valuable tips from the "Evolution of Dance" guy and the Mentos-Diet Coke dudes. Seriously.
A new poll out yesterday by Harris Interactive says 80 percent of U.S. adults go online. That's up from 9 percent in 1995:
The survey, which polled 2,062 adults in July and October, found that 79 percent of adults -- about 178 million -- go online, spending an average 11 hours a week on the Internet.
"We're up to almost 80 of adults who now are online, or are somehow gaining access to the Internet. That's a pretty impressive figure," said Regina Corso, director of the Harris Poll.
The results reflect a steady rise since 2000, when 57 percent of adults polled said they went online. In 2006, the number was 77 percent.
When Harris Interactive, a market research firm, first began tracking online use among adults in 1995, the group found that only nine percent of the population -- or 17.5 million -- said they went online.
A Zoby poll today says one in four Americans believe the Internet could be a suitable substitute for a significant other:
A survey on the role the Internet plays in people's lives by Zogby International and communications consultancy, 463 Communications, found that 24 percent of Americans said the Internet could replace a partner for some period of time.
The percentage was highest among singles of whom 31 percent said the Internet could be a substitute -- with no difference among males and females.
The researchers said the online survey of 9,743 adults conducted between October 4-8 showed that some younger people viewed the Internet as their new best friend.
Tired of those awful Evites? Sick of those grainy YouTube videos? Done with spam-ridden Blogger? ValleyWag today shares five Web sites that are markedly better than their better-known competitors. Don't be sheep! Try these and other alternatives.
Instead, there's some good general tips on how you can use the site to help you build a personal online brand. Basically, don't be shy, complete your entire profile and try to make friends. More detail here.
Just because blogging allows you to be more personal, more informal with readers, doesn't mean should be so self-effacing when it comes to your business. Honesty is one thing; but slamming your own enterprise is something else entirely.
That's according to the Your Biz blog, which this week shares some pointers on what small business bloggers should not do when writing their business blog:
* Don’t Dangerfield: It’s a bad idea to put yourself or your business down in your blog. I don’t care what people say, they don’t want to spend their hard-earned dollars on a product or service that may seem subpar in any way.
* Skip the Freudian slip: Be personal and funny. That’s a great thing. But don’t go overboard with your life’s saga. We don’t want to know if you just got divorced, or the details of your experiences on a singles’ cruise, or that your kid’s first tooth came in.
* No bore zone: I’d rather hear about your sexual escapades than be bored to tears by a list of the new customers you signed or dry financials. That’s not a blog. That’s a newsletter. Understand the difference once and for all.
* Missing in blog-tion: If you decide to take the blog plunge you actually have to write posts more often than once a month. Just having a blog Web site does not a blog make. People will know you’re a blog fraud, and it’s better to go blog-less than pretend.
More on top blog blunders and how to avoid them here.
Employees may seem busy, but many are wasting time on the Internet, or "cyberslacking."
Studies worldwide suggest employees spend about a fifth of their work shifts engaging in personal activities. Their favourite time waster? The Internet.
Patricia Wallace, author of the 2004 book "The Internet in the Workplace: How New Technology Is Transforming Work," said employees have always found ways to avoid working too hard.
"The issue is now you have something that seems to be genuinely irresistible because it's such a gateway to the whole planet that's right there on your desk and easily concealed to people passing by," said Wallace, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The study says employees spend most of their time e-mailing, with a third of e-mails not related to work. Others manage finances or shop online.
Why the slacking? Employees said "they were bored, worked too many hours, were underpaid or were unchallenged at work."
We were pretty upbeat yesterday on news of Wal-Mart's new DRM-free music downloads that undercut Apple's iTunes in cost. Anything to contribute to the demise of DRM is good move, in our book.
But Idolator notes that there's some bad news we missed. With Wal-Mart, there's always a catch:
Edelman analyst Steve Rubel looks at the growing cut-and-paste nature of the Web -- widgets, RSS, mobile Web and pages like Netvibes and Pageflakes -- and it what it means for online content. Includes tips on how to optimize yourself for the Web.
The Wall Street Journal looks at blogging and small businesses. Some are actually turning blog traffic into sales, almost justifying the time and expense it all takes.
It's time for another list of handy links mined from the Interwebs. This week, managing e-mail stress, copying music from your iPod to you computer and fitness myths debunked. Happy surfing!
Wal-Mart has a series of relatively small changes in 2005 that that burnish the company's image on its own entry while often leaving criticism in, changing a line that its wages are less than other retail stores to a note that it pays nearly double the minimum wage, for example. Another leaves activist criticism on community impact intact, while citing a "definitive" study showing Wal-Mart raised the total number of jobs in a community.
Wal-Mart's edits don't appear as blatant as, say, Diebold's, whose employees edited the company's entry to omit entire paragraphs on the security industry's concerns about the integrity of Diebold voting machines, as well as information about the company's CEO's fund-raising for President George Bush.
All this comes from a Wired report on a new piece of software that tracks who edits what on Wikipedia, the "edited-by-community" online encyclopedia:
Wikipedia Scanner -- the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith -- offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing the edits with data on who owns the associated block of internet IP addresses.
Companies better watch what and how they edit now, it seems.
This might give new meaning to the word "linkbait."
The above video is right now the hottest thing on YouTube. It's been viewed more than 12 million times. The 8-minute video shot by a U.S. tourist, Dave Budzinski, at South Africa's Kruger National Park shows a battle between a lion pride, a herd of buffalo, and two crocodiles at a watering hole. It has to be seen to be believed.
The BBC has more on the video and its popularity here.
It's time for another list of handy links mined from the Interwebs. This week, a nifty app to help design your home, a StumbleUpon tutorial, more Facebook apps, online travel resources, advice on getting feedback, how to use niche marketing, home business advice and much much more. Happy surfing!
A new study confirms what many might have expected:
U.S. consumers this year will spend more of their day surfing the Internet than reading newspapers or going to the movies or listening to recorded music, according a study released on Tuesday.
The findings are part of a new report from private equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson that shows advertisers are paying close attention to the shift in consumer behavior and putting more money into areas like digital marketing.
Last year, the top two advertising mediums were newspapers, at $55.7 billion, and broadcast television, at $48.7 billion, according to VSS.
But it estimates that by 2011, overall Internet advertising will become the largest advertising medium, at nearly $63 billion, describing the shift as "a watershed moment" in the media business.
Our obsession with Facebook continues. Boost your productivity on the site with these free applications, which help you read RSS, edit word docs, store files, edit and share photos and much more.
ArkansasSports360.com, our new daily sports Web site, is up and running today, after a long weekend of last-minute tweaks, programming and development.
Our work on this project is largely to blame for the dearth of blog entries around here lately. We've simply been swamped. There aren't enough hours in the day, it seems.
We're proud of our new product, and hope you will be too. As good as it might look now, we plan for it to be even better, as we continue to add new functionality and features during this week and the weeks to come.
And of course, as with any new site launch, there will be bugs. Oh yes, there will be bugs. So if you have any trouble getting things to work, please let me know here. And feel free leave your first impressions in comments. We'd love to hear what you think!
Tired of Evite? A challenger has emerged. Is it worth the hype? Some say yes:
Crusher's design is super-clean and simple, and it doesn't have the over-the-top feature set of MyPunchBowl. We like MyPunchBowl. But we also like Crusher.
The site does the things you would expect from an invitation service: You can invite friends and track responses. You can use the service to find a good date for an event, too, if you've got some flexibility. It's clean and light and very Web 2.0.
We're back with another round of tips and resources from the Web. This week: check out more than 70 tools for online job hunting, learn to save more money, put government Web sites to good use and reclaim your good name online.
Anyone in the news business (or anyone who loves democracy) should find this troubling.
A report released last week by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard says most teenagers and adults 30 and younger are not following the news. They don't have an ingrained news habit, they don't watch TV, they certainly don't read newspapers and, somewhat surprisingly, don't even check out news on the Internet.
On the newspaper front, the numbers aren't good:
Only 16 percent of the young adults surveyed aged 18 to 30 said that they read a newspaper every day and 9 percent of teenagers said that they did. That compared with 35 percent of adults over 30. Furthermore, despite the popular belief that young people are flocking to the Internet, the survey found that teenagers and young adults were twice as likely to get daily news from television than from the Web.
What's more, if survey respondents said they were interested in the news, it was only on a very superficial level. "Young people seemed to think that just listening to the radio in the background was listening to the news,"Alex S. Jones, the director of the Shorenstein Center, told the Times.
The story points out that newspapers are working to retain young readers by creating publications targeted specifically at younger readers, such as RedEye in Chicago and, to some extent, Sync, the new weekly from the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette here in Little Rock.
But the bottom line, researchers say, the future of news is on the electronic front, and newspapers will have a hard time getting back that young audience on paper:
“My sense is that newspapers in their traditional form are not going to be able to recapture this audience,” said Professor Patterson. “What’s happened over time is that we have become more of a viewing nation than a reading nation, and the Internet is a little of both. My sense is that, like it or not, the future of news is going to be in the electronic media, but we don’t really know what that form is going to look like.”
This latest round-up of Web resources and articles will help you build your business by using interns, prepared for vacation, write a better news release and win at office politics.
We've warned in several posts about how you should be careful with the stuff you post online. Embarrassing photos, blog posts, etc., can always come back to haunt you.
The new Miss New Jersey is the latest example of this. While the Facebook photos an unnamed blackmailer attempted to bribe her with are hardly worse than 90 percent of what'd you see casually browsing MySpace and Facebooks profiles, it still sucks to have to run through them one-by-one for Matt Lauer on national television in what must be the slideshow from hell and explain why some shady dude is biting your breast at the local frat-boy watering hole. Awkward.
The AP goes through a litany of semi-celebs (many of the "American Idol" variety) whose Internet junk got exposed at inopportune times. But the story also notes the ramifications for us regular folk who, like, have real jobs and stuff:
Embarrassment isn't the only consequence of personal photos surfacing. ...
Steven Jungman, director of recruiting for Houston-based ChaseSource LP, told of a young woman his firm helped land a job with a company working on a sensitive project.
"This was a project that had to be kept secret, that if the competition found out about it or the media wrote about it before it was rolled out, it would be very bad for business," he said. "It even had a secret nickname.
"Every day, twice a day, the company did a ... search for that title, just to make sure nothing was getting out about it," Jungman said. "One morning, an interesting link came up, to someone's My Space page. It went, 'My name is so-and so, I'm working on such-and-such for so-and-so.' And right next to that were photos that would make Anna Nicole Smith blush, and Paris Hilton go, 'Whoa!'"
Two days later, the woman was fired.
So once again, with feeling, watch what you put out there.
Despite a lot of recent buzz and press, social networking site Facebook is still behind MySpace in terms of average daily users, page views and other metrics, according to TechCruncher Michael Arrington.
Facebook has recently made headlines for third-party features and new functionality, prompting some of the technorati to proclaim it better than the jumbled mess that is MySpace. But the Fox-owned property is still a Web juggernaut.
Time magazine has released its annual list of the Web 50 best sites. Alas, The Ladder was nowhere to found.
But there's tons of other worthwhile sites there, organized among several categories, including "news and information," "arts and leisure," "social networks" and, of course, "audio and video." Knock yourself out.
The young professionals who check this blog should take heart. Your generation is doing great things, including providing free WiFi in Little Rock's River Market. Now that's a project we can get behind!
Downtown Little Rock is set to take another step toward big-city progress as Aristotle Inc. picked up a contract to offer wireless Internet access in the River Market district.
According to Elizabeth Bowles, president of Aristotle, it wasn't an official city project despite most of the buildings and spaces in the coverage area being city-owned properties.
She says the project is funded by the Arkansas Young Professionals Network. The mission of AYPN is to encourage development, particularly with technology, in Little Rock and North Little Rock so that the cities are attractive places for businesses and young professionals to relocate.
The initial build out is set to be complete at the end of the month, covering the River Market. Later, the service will extend to all of Riverfront Park and part of the Clinton Library area.
It's Friday -- time for another list of handy links mined from the Interwebs. This week, a dash of info for the small business owner, including how to promote your business with online video, how to win government contracts and ways to talk to angel investors. Happy surfing!
And now another round-up of Web gems we've stumbled upon during a wild week in the Internets. This week: avoid getting ripped off by a mechanic; learn to pack efficiently for summer trips; use Picasa to the fullest; gain weight and stay healthy; and learn how to multitask. Plus: a host of digital photography tips and a bank of business guides. Happy surfing!
Making news the world over today. Great PR for Hot Springs. And again it shows the power of YouTube and the Internets. Watch yourself, because someone is likely watching you.
Since we've been traveling, we've missed our Friday Del.icio.us update, so here's a host of belated links to help you with all manner of projects. Enjoy!
Looking for a job and need to research prospective employers? Or maybe you're doing general research that requires you to learn more about certain companies.
You're in luck. This handy tutorial gives you a host of tips on conducting company research online:
Accurate and timely information is essential for any business to remain competitive. With the Internet, you can gather a tremendous amount of business intelligence information on prospects, competitors, vendors, suppliers, customers, or other companies in just a few hours.
Despite our apparently poorly editedpost this morning on what makes a good blog sing, we're still focused on all things bloggy, which includes an interesting address today by a New York City-based media strategist who specializes in this "social media" stuff the kids are crazy about.
Speaking to a group of Little Rock PR pros today, Adam Broitman, who blogs on social media and other issues here, shared his thoughts on social media, the power of blogs, and what it means to American business. (You can see his most recent blog post, live from Little Rock, here. Sadly, he missed the ducks.)
You can read a brief on the speech here by our intrepid editorial intern Ashley Suffle', who also recorded the 35-minute presentation for Internet posterity here.
Download, listen and share. It is social media, after all.
It's time for another round-up of cool tools and tricks from the Web. This week, get tips for balancing work and life, terminate your Sprint phone deal early, learn how to interview a job candidate and -- hey -- learn to dance.
A Ladder reader has asked for some pointers on professional blogging. And while we think he might have been half-way kidding, and we don't claim to be in any way professional, we do have some thoughts to share.
In fact, this week marketing blogger BL Ochman got to thinking along similar lines, asking, "What makes a blog popular?" And several of the attributes she lists are musts for folks who aspire to blog professionally.
Among them:
- are written by a blogger with high credibility in his/her field - are well written - are written for the readers, not just for the digerati - acknowledge that the blogger doesn't have all the answers - asks readers for their opinions and input - reflect the personality and style of the blogger so people know with whom they are having the pleasure - has a sense of humor and doesn't take itself too seriously - has a high level of original content - links to other interesting blogs and websites
Those are all great ideas, and Ochman lists more here.
As for our tips, we'd have to say we've learned a lot from our niche publishing business here at ABPG. That is to say, good, professional blogs aim themselves at a particular niche and cover that niche like no other. They follow the Gawker mantra, "Scarily Obsessed." They deliver detailed information that you can get nowhere else about a specific topic. And they deliver that information in a way that is distinct, entertaining and respectful of the audience.
They also seek ways to interact with the audience by soliciting ideas and comments and engaging readers in some kind of dialog.
Those are some quick thoughts. We hope to share more in future. And of course, if you have some of your own, please let us know in comments.
After a myriad stories (both here and in the national media) about how your online identity -- both in terms of Google search results and embarrassing Myspace pages -- can ruin your reputation in the eyes of employers, a company as emerged to help people change what the Internets have to say about you:
[A firm] called ReputationDefender Inc. ... promises to help individuals "search and destroy" negative information about them on the Internet. Businesses and others have long employed so-called search-engine-optimization techniques to try to make themselves appear higher in Web-search results. Now services like ReputationDefender and DefendMyName are charging fees that can run into hundreds of dollars to help clients remove or downplay unflattering online information.
The firm, founded by a 28-year-old Harvard Law graduate in October, has 10 employees.
For fees starting at $10 a month, the 10-person Louisville, Ky.-based company scours blogs, photo-sharing sites and social networks for information about a client, then charges $30 for each item the user instructs it to try to correct or remove.
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