Who Does Google Think You Are?

Google have stalked your every move online, checkout the demographics they have placed you under. Visit www.google.com/ads/preferences. This is what they use to target your advertising.  It is think link you can follow to opt Google out of using their cookie to target you with specific adverts.

It should be a animalistic marketing tool that targets convertable customers and drives sales, but your website could be making your business look as old as your image or copycat unprofessional. So what tell tale signs demonstrate your website upgrade is overdue?

1. Your business website isn’t generating leads or sales. If so, you have a major problem. Business websites shouldn’t be a vanity exercise. They should bring sales or at the very least generate leads.

After such a great following of our post on Link Building Methods and Techniques for 2010, we decided to compliment it with the best link building tools for 2011.  For a great Google position, link building serves an essential component in the algorithm which determines your rank.  Its good to know that you're not alone and there's a few good tools out there to provide link building help.  Some are free and some are premium services, but its worth taking a look because knowledge is king.  I have listed and reviewed some of the link building tools i use on a regular basis and some i have determined as not so useful.

Mac users have long languished with a neglected and out of date Skype application, while the Windows version forged ahead update after update. It seemed that Skype may have forgotten about Mac completely, when finally after a long wait, Skype released the all new Skype 5 beta for Mac.

E-Mail and Collaboration

Thunderbird - application that carries a similar interface to MS Outlook and that is easy to use. Additionally, you can use Lightning to integrate Mozilla’s Sunbird calendar application with Thunderbird and even lnk to your Google Calendar.

Zimbra - use at home as an alternative to Outlook or even as a corporate replacement for Microsoft Exchange Server. Mail-for-Exchange will connect on most phones to sync with the mail, calendar and contacts on your phone. Has instant chat as well as integrated Twitter and Facebook. The State IT Agency (SITA) in South Africa has adopted Zimbra as their standard e-mail collaboration tool. Note if using the desktop client, go for the latest version 2.0 Beta client.

Creating an online store has just got easier.  Just choose a design, add your products and start selling!                    

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Open Source Software

Wordprocessing / Documents Management / Reading

Open Office - the leading open-source office software suite for word-processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more now owned by Oracle. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open document format standard (ISO approved ODF) and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Replacement for Microsoft Office (looks similar to Office 2003) and will read / write MS Office 2007 documents. Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

Google Documents - now has a distinct MS Office 2003 look to it and the latest update has added very powerful real-time collaboration features. It's free to use and just needs a browser to access it. Note this is not secure enough for governments as was seen recently when Google launched a separate Google Apps for Government in the US where special agreements include keeping the data within the geographic boundaries of the USA.

Zoho Office Suite Online - Zoho offers a suite of online web applications geared towards increasing your productivity and offering easy collaboration. Zoho's online office tools include a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation tool, hosted wiki, notebook, CRM, chat, projects, etc. Far more features than Google and it will be integrated into the mobile version of Ubuntu 10.04.

AjaxLaunch - site for free online Ajax based software applications (runs within browser). AjaxWrite - The look, feel, and functionality of Microsoft Word, in a completely free web-based AJAX platform. AjaxTunes player, AjaxXLS spreadsheet (XLS format), AjaxSketch (SVG open standards format drawing, flow charting, etc).

IBM Lotus Symphony - also a free office suite.

AbiWord - a free word processing program similar to Microsoft Word. Much simpler and quicker though than OpenOffice or MS Office.

PDFCreator - an application for converting documents into Portable Document Format (PDF) format on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It works by creating a virtual printer that prints to PDF files, and thereby allows practically any application to create PDF files by choosing to print from within the application and then printing to the PDFCreator printer.

Stickies - free sticky notes software that even works on Vista. Has features such as alarms, send to friends via e-mail or network, etc.

Evernote - easily capture, store and quickly access typed and handwritten memos, webpage excerpts, emails, phone messages, addresses, passwords, brainstorms, sketches, documents and more! It will install with Wine and run on Linux as well.

Zotero - is reference management software. Zotero is used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. On many major research websites such as digital libraries, PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Books, Amazon.com, and even Wikipedia, Zotero detects when a book, article, or other resource is being viewed and with a mouse click finds and saves the full reference information to a local file. If the source is an online article or web page, Zotero can optionally store a local copy of the source. Users can then add notes, tags, and their own meta data through the in-browser interface.

Libra - organise all your DVD's, books, movies, games - also uses your webcam to scan barcodes.

Evergreen - an open source Integrated Library System (ILS), initially developed by the Georgia Public Library Service for Public Information Network for Electronic Services (PINES), a statewide resource-sharing consortium with over 270 member libraries.

Evince - a Linux document viewer for multiple document formats. It currently supports pdf, postscript, djvu, tiff and dvi. The goal of evince is to replace the multiple document viewers that exist on the GNOME Desktop with a single simple application.

Calibre - a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. It has a cornucopia of features divided into the following main categories: Library Management, E-book conversion, Syncing to e-book reader devices (such as the Kindle), Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form, Comprehensive e-book viewer, and Content server for online access to your book collection. See how to Download Entire Newspapers or Blogs To Your eBook Reader With Calibre.

Liferea (Linux Feed Reader) - an aggregator for online news feeds. There are many other news readers available, but these others are not available for Linux or require many extra libraries to be installed. Liferea tries to fill this gap by creating a fast, easy to use, easy to install news aggregator for Gtk/Gnome. It can also sync with a Google Reader account.

Web Development / Computer Programming / Blogging

KompoZer - a complete Web Authoring System that combines web file management and easy-to-use WYSIWYG web page editing capabilities found in Microsoft FrontPage, Adobe DreamWeaver and other high end programs. KompoZer is designed to be extremely easy to use, making it ideal for non-technical computer users who want to create an attractive professional-looking web site without needing to know HTML or web coding.

It seems Cloud-Scanning is becoming much more a buzzword. But it doesn't mean there is not benefit behind it. Many different products (not only security-related) are migrating their "intelligence" to the cloud and leaving behind those old, overloaded, slow applications in exchange of faster, always up-to-date clients. There is a clear benefit not only from the perspective of developers who are much less constrained by the limitations of a single PC, but also from the point of view of the user who gets an improved computing experience without all the negative aspects of resource consumption of his/her PC.  Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware and can project the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit will double every 18 months.  This exponential theory breaks down when we reach nano scales but provides relative evidence that moving to cloud base technologies is the next logical transition.

Beware of fraudulent domain renewal requests. There is a scam currently going on regarding renewals of domains. Disregard any e-mails received from "Domain Registry of America" or other bogus companies e.g. "Domain Renewal Group" prompting you to renew your domain and/or provide information. Many fraudulent organisations will use your information to transfer the domain away from Bramble (incurring a substantially higher yearly charge just to keep the domain). Your domain will automatically be renewed through Bramble (cheap-domains.IT) until you chose to let your domain renewals stop.