News and Information Blog 09 2009

Search Engine Optimization: SEO Tips for Small Business

Incorporating SEO into your Web site strategy will help potential customers find your business and boost your bottom line. Jim Martin walks you through the basics.

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Disney Debuts Subscription Digital Books

The online publishing arm of the media empire is counting on subscriptions for digital book rather than on downloads and e-reader sales.

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Global Broadband Continues Solid Growth

The number of household broadband connections continues to experience solid growth and one in five households globally will have a fixed broadband connection by the end of 2009, according to a new report from Gartner.
A total of 422 million households will have a fixed broadband connection in 2009, up from 382 million households in 2008, and the market will continue to grow with nearly 580 million connections by 2013.
"Consumers may be watching their household expenditure, but dropping their broadband connections is not on the top of their agendas as a way to reduce outgoings," said Amanda Sabia, principal research analyst at Gartner.

"Multiple motivations are conspiring to keep broadband growth strong, such as PCs being more affordable, migration from dial-up, affordably priced broadband subscriptions, aging populations requiring broadband connectivity, and even as a result of an economic boost from country-specific economic and broadband-specific stimulus plans."
At the end of 2008, 21 countries had broadband connections in at least 50 percent of homes. In many countries the rates are much higher. The highest penetration is in South Korea at 86 percent and lowest is Indonesia at less than 1 percent.
Gartner predicts over the next five years, the emerging markets (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Latin American countries, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa) will combined provide twice as many new consumer broadband connections as mature markets: 135 million vs. 62 million connections respectively.
Currently the U.S. the broadband household penetration rate is 60 percent and Gartner forecasts that to climb to 78 percent in 2013.

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Downtown I-95 North lanes to shift left

PROVIDENCE — The R.I. Department of Transportation is scheduled to put in place a new lane split on Interstate 95 North early Wednesday morning affecting the highway between Exit 19 (I-195 East) and Exit 21 (Broadway).

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E-tailer Newegg Plans $175 Million IPO

Tech IPOs have been few and far between during the past year. With Newegg having so far been a runaway success, will it attract investors when it goes public?

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How to Make Charts in Microsoft Access

Helen Bradley explains how you can chart your data without ever leaving Microsoft Access.

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Sick Facebook Poll Asks "Should Obama Be Killed?"

Someone created a poll on Facebook asking "Should Obama be killed?" using a third-party application. The poll was taken down, but not before 751 people voted on it. The options were:

- yes

- maybe

- if he cuts my health care

- no

In a statement, Facebook said: "The third-party application that enabled an individual user to create the offensive poll was brought to our attention this morning. It was immediately suspended while the inappropriate content could be removed by the developer and until such time as the developer institutes better procedures to monitor their user-generated content. We’re working with the US Secret Service but they’ll need to provide any details of their investigation."

The "Polls" application used to create the poll has been temporarily pulled from Facebook.

According to the Huffington Post, the poll was created on Saturday, and once discovered, the Secret Service got involved. According to the Huffington Post, Darrin Blackford, a Secret Service spokesperson said, "We are aware of it and we will take the appropriate investigative steps," and that they "take these things seriously."

Talking Points Memo managed to get a screenshot of the poll. The results of the poll have not been revealed. Regardless, the story has a lot of bloggers and tweeters angered.

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Lifetime VP: Avoid stereotyping women

PROVIDENCE – Businesses marketing to women should forget about the usual stereotypes of working moms and stay-at-home housewives because, according to a vice president of research for Lifetime Networks, they simply do not apply any longer.

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Norton Goes Viral With Dokken and Kimbo Slice

Norton, the makers of the popular security software, has rolled out their latest advertising campaign, and let's just say it's an interesting one. The commercials feature 80's metal band Dokken and famed street fighter Kimbo Slice.

Be honest, you did a double take with that last sentence didn't you? No you read it correctly.

It's quite clear that Norton is trying to go viral with this campaign. But, who can blame them? With Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube and other various social networks making it so easy to share media, it truly seems like a no-brainer to try and make something viral. Now the question is will it succeed? Tell us what you think.

Sure, the Norton commercials will peak the interest of some, but others will just see pointless advertisements that make no effort to show the product. There is fine line when it comes to viral marketing, you want to make it memorable... but you don't want to take it too far. How do you feel about the ads below, are these ads a little too silly, even for viral marketing? Let us know.

Dokken vs. Chicken 1

Dokken vs. Chicken 2

Dokken vs. Chicken 3

Kimbo Slice vs. Caterpillar 1

Kimbo Slice vs. Caterpillar 2

It's unclear if this campaign will be successful for Norton, but I can tell you first hand that it worked on me. I saw one of the "Dokken vs. Chicken" commercials last week... since then I've talked about it to a few people, tweeted about it and now written an article about it. What have you done to me Norton?

Which commerical is your favorite? Let us know what you think.

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Content Scrapers Not a Big Deal?

If you write for the web, whether that be on a blog or any other content site, there is a good chance your content has been scraped at some point, if not on a continuous basis. The good news is that it's probably not that big of a deal. At least that is what Google's Matt Cutts imples.

Answering user questions as he so often does, Cutts took on the question, "Is there a way to benefit from content scraped from your site?"

The simple answer to this is yes. You actually may be able to slightly benefit from having your content scraped. According to Cutts, if you make sure the pages on your site have links to you in them, the scrapers may leave the links in and end up linking to you. He says these links can "help you along."

"There are some people who really hate scrapers and try to crack down on them and try to get every single one deleted or kicked off their web host," says Cutts. "I tend to be the sort of person who doesn't really worry about it, because the vast, vast, vast majority of the time, it's going to be you that comes up, not the scraper. If the guy is scraping and scrapes the content that has a link to you, he's linking to you, so worst case, it won't hurt, but in some weird cases, it might actually help a little bit."

It's the same principle that Cutts talked about when talking about having links in low-quality directories. He says Google tries not to score the low-quality directories too high, but it doesn't hurt your site at all for being listed there.

He says that most of the time, you don't really need to worry about scrapers, because they don’t have a large effect in terms of the actual impact on users very often. He does add that if you see a scraper ranking higher than you, you can consider doing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request (DMCA), or if it's a true spammer (gibberish, etc.) you can go ahead and do a spam report on them.

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Clunkers sequel: Funds for fridges?

Rhode Island is set to offer $1 million in federal rebates to consumers who turn in their old home appliances for new, energy-efficient ones. The owners of Gil’s Television and Appliances in Bristol, though, say the scheme is too small to have …

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Marketing Tips: More Customers with Less Advertising

Our resident marketing guru, Andrew Lock, offers up a rant about poor customer service, along with handy tips and more advice on how to make your company stand out from the competition.

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Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

Google has started adding links to specific parts of webpages in the snippets on search results pages.

Google gives the example of the result for the Wikipedia entry for "Trans Fat." The snippet provides links to History, Chemistry, Presence in food, and Nutritional guidelines. These are all sections of one page that the user can go straight to from the results page.

Obviously, if you want to increase the amount of calls to action for your webpages from Google results, you will want to do what you can to cater to this new feature. Luckily, this isn't a completely mysterious part of the algorithm (though the links are generated algorithmically) that Google is leaving you to figure out for yourself. A post on Google's Webmaster Central blog essentially tells you what you have to do to get these links in snippets.

"We generate these deep links completely algorithmically, based on page structure, so they could be displayed for any site (and of course money isn't involved in any way, so you can't pay to get these links)," says Raj Krishnan of Google's Snippets team. "There are a few things you can do to increase the chances that they might appear on your pages."

To increase said chances, you should make sure any multi-topic pages are "well-structured" and broken into distinct sections. You should also make sure each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name. Pages like this should have a table of contents which link to the individual anchors.

One thing to keep in mind is that these new links won't appear for results in every search. Google says whether they show up or not depends on the specific query used to get to it. Ok, there is a bit of mystery there after all.

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In reversal, R.I. union to vote on pact

PROVIDENCE – The leaders of the state’s largest public employees union reversed course late Friday and agreed to schedule a vote by rank-and-file members on a deal with the Carcieri administration that would avoid worker layoffs or a shutdown of …

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Social Network Ad Spend Surging

Nielsen analysis finds advertisers are warming up to Facebook, MySpace and other social sites.

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What are Managed Services, and Why Should You Care?

Do you spend more time dealing with your technology than running your company? Laurie McCabe explains managed services and how they can free you from IT drudgery and get you back to building your business.

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Email Marketing Most Popular Channel For Consumers

The majority of marketers are using multichannel campaigns, but less than half know what channels their customers prefer, according to a new study by Forrester Consulting, sponsored by ExactTarget.
The study found the key to selecting the best channels for customer communication is to know something about customer preference and behaviors. Only 32 percent of marketers know how customers behave across channels and only 37 percent know what channels their customers prefer to use.

The majority (92%) of online consumers have opted-in for email marketing, making it the most popular channel for permission-based promotional messages across every age group, according to ExactTarget's "2009 Channel Preference Study."
Half of consumers consider unsolicited messages from companies whom they regularly do business with unacceptable, up from 26 percent in 2008.
When it comes to social media, seventy percent of consumers who visit Facebook at least once a month are a "fan" of at least one company/brand and they also say they have never given a company permission to send them information through a social network.

Marketers should use social media to listen and engage with customers, not to market to them.
"The bottom line is that in an industry where new digital communications make it easier to send a variety of messages, it's imperative that marketers not only send the right message, to the right person, at the right time, but that they use the right channel as well," said Morgan Stewart, ExactTarget's director of research and strategy.

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Landmark, Caritas to negotiate merger

WOONSOCKET – Landmark Medical Center, the financially troubled hospital that put itself into receivership last year to get time to find a buyer or merge with another entity, received court approval Thursday to negotiate a merger with Caritas …

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ASCII Encryption

A very simple encryption method that uses random values for each character. Interestingly, you can encrypt the same string as many times as you want and the result will always be different. Best used with short strings.

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How to Synchronize Your Data

Ron Pacchiano shows how you can synchronize files stored in multiple locations so you always have up-to-date data no matter where you go.

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Social Media Influencing High Income Consumers

Nearly 30 percent of higher-income consumers said social media influenced their decision making when it came to home repair services, a higher percentage than other income groups, according to a new study by Ad-ology.

The study found this group had significantly high reports of recent maintenance services performed.
For all demographics, positive and negative comments were the most influential types of social media.
For other social media, ratings websites were the most influential, followed by contractors' websites. The top three influential traditional media types were newspaper, Yellow Pages, and direct mail.
"Some companies may be quick to dismiss social media as something that's only used by young people, and not worth their effort," said C. Lee Smith, president and CEO of Ad-ology Research.
"In reality, social media usage is growing across all demographics and can clearly be a way to reach some very lucrative audiences," Smith said.
Other key findings:

Licensing/bonding was the most important factor in the choice of a service provider in the Northeast

Nearly 7% of respondents had home maintenance done because of the need for emergency repair

Of traditional media types, Yellow Pages had the most influence on 65 to 74 year olds

Unions reject budget deal with Carcieri

PROVIDENCE – The leaders of the state’s largest public employees union Wednesday rejected a tentative agreement that would have avoided worker layoffs or a shutdown of statement government in exchange for lower pay and greater flexibility for …

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Review: SimpleTough USB 2.0 Portable Drive

SimpleTough lets you take your data to go without worrying about the bumps and dings of a mobile work style.

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Google Launches Climate Change Platform With Denmark

Google has announced it has partnered with the Danish government to launch an online platform focused on climate change.
The move comes ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference 2009 (COP15) in December hosted by the Danish government.
The goal of the platform is to increase global engagement in climate change. Users will be able to upload videos to YouTube's "Raise your voice" COP15 channel sharing their thoughts and opinions on climate change.
The channel will also allow users to watch videos that go behind the scenes of the conference. During COP15, videos will be shown to the leaders at the conference who will be able to record their opinions from the venue.

The most popular video submissions will be aired globally during the COP15 CNN YouTube debate on December 15, and the top two submissions will win a trip to Copenhagen.
Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Google has created climate change scenarios on Google Maps and Google Earth. Users will be able to view visualizations of greenhouse gas emissions by region, the likely consequences of climate change, as well as narrated virtual tours.

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WJAR chief nervous about Leno ratings

PROVIDENCE – The general manager of WJAR-TV (NBC 10) says she continues to be optimistic about the outlook for Jay Leno’s new nightly prime-time talk show, although she is somewhat nervous about a drop in viewers during the show’s closing …

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NiftyClicks: Backpage, IM NewsWatch, Yotify, BackPackIt

This week, Andrew Lock’s batch of Web tools and resources includes a free online classified site, a source for Internet Marketing, a cool service that finds anything and an affordable Intranet for your business.

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Group Announces Support Of FCC Open Internet

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) said today that it is critical for U.S. policy makers to combine the important goals of Internet openness with the need to encourage investment in building a 21st century broadband system.

The CWA says it supports the plan announced by Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski to develop rules to protect an open Internet. It looks to the FCC to set rules in polices that will encourage investment, reasonable network management, maintain transparency, promote media diversity and lead to the growth of good jobs in the telecommunications industry.

Julius Genachowski

FCC Chairman

In the past, the U.S. has missed a number of opportunities to set an effective, national policy that would promote the deployment of broadband networks. The CWA maintains that such a policy is critical to economic growth and boosting the economy.
Currently the U.S. ranks 15th in broadband penetration globally and 26th in broadband speeds.
"The Internet is an extraordinary platform for innovation, job creation, investment, and opportunity. It has unleashed the potential of entrepreneurs and enabled the launch and growth of small businesses across America," said Chairman Genachowski.
"It is vital that we safeguard the free and open Internet."

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Mass. leaders unite to support casinos

BOSTON – Massachusetts appears poised to approve the building of resort-style casinos now that all three of the Bay State’s top politicians have expressed support for expanded gaming. At left, the Foxwoods Resort Casino in Mashantucket, Conn.

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Conversions 11% Higher When Customers See Security

McAfee released results from a study of 163 million online shoppers, and found that the majority of them are "digital window shoppers." In other words, they start shopping on a site, leave for a period of time, then return later to complete the sale.

According to McAfee's findings, conversions were 11% higher for digital window shoppers who were shown a security cue, and the longer it took a customer to complete a sale, the more responsive they were to security cues.

"Online retailers who ignore the role security plays in converting digital window shoppers to customers are missing out on billions of dollars they can’t afford to lose in this economy," said Shane Keats, senior research analyst for McAfee. “Many will take traditional measures to get customers to return, like reducing shipping costs or offering coupons, but more can and should be done.”

A couple more noteworthy findings:

- 65% of all shoppers will wait a day or more to complete a purchase

- The average delay is 33 hours and 54 minutes

Naturally, whether they come back or not, this indicates that shopping cart abandonment is at play. A few months ago, PayPal released results from a survey on shopping cart abandonment, and here are the reasons that were cited:

- High shipping charges: 46 percent

- Wanted to comparison shop: 37 percent

- Lack of money: 36 percent

- Wanted to look for a coupon: 27 percent

- Wanted to shop offline: 26 percent

- Couldn't find preferred pay option: 24 percent

- Item was unavailable at checkout: 23 percent

- Couldn't find customer support: 22 percent

- Concerned about security of credit card data: 21 percent

WebProNews/SmallBusinessNewz writer Doug Caverly recently reported, "One cause of abandonment is 'couldn't find preferred pay option.' Another's 'item unavailable at checkout.' Then 'couldn't find customer support' and 'security concerns' kick in."

Sidenote: Here are some other good tips for optimizing your e-commerce conversions:

More WebProNews Videos

McAfee suggests that the abaondoned carts don't necessarily mean the customers won't still buy though. "Retailers shouldn’t misinterpret abandoned shopping carts – many of these potential sales return later to finalize the sale," said Keats. "Understanding this delay is critical for merchant analytics."

That's not to say that that if you are selling things online, there isn't a good chance you are missing out on a substantial amount of money you easily could be making, if you only examined why people are leaving the shopping cart. Just focus on the ones who aren't coming back.

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Latest hot home lender: the USDA

The U.S. Department of Agriculture, normally associated with farmers and tractors, also administers loan programs for people with low incomes who are looking to buy homes in rural areas. Pam Miller, left, is a loan specialist in the USDA’s Rhode …

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Microsoft Takes 'Malvertisers' to Court

In a first, the software giant sues companies that try to trick users into clicking on malicious ads.

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Marketing Tips: PPC Spy, Domain Name Typos and Dell

Andrew Lock’s marketing tips, insight and resources will help you climb out of the box and stand out from the crowd.

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Skype Founders Sue eBay for $75 Million Per Day

Update: The Skype founders filed another lawsuit today, complicating matters even more. Reuters reports:

The founders of Skype on Friday filed a new lawsuit against Index Ventures and one of its partners, Michelangelo Volpi, accusing him of misappropriating trade secrets to help broker the sale of the Internet phone service owned by eBay Inc.

Original Article: eBay is being sued by the founders of Skype for no less than $75 million per day. Skype founders Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom now own a company called Joltid. They have asked for an injunction to stop Skype from using a piece of software it owns in a filing in a US district court in San Francisco, according to Bloomberg.

Joltid alleges that eBay has been showing the source code for the software to third-party developers without their permission. Joltid claims that peer-to-peer technology of the software is being used in Skype, although they demanded to retain the rights to it back when eBay purchased Skype in 2005. Now, they want $75 million for every day the source code continues to be shown.

eBay says the Skype founders' claims are "without merit," but according to Bloomberg, eBay says it may shut down Skype if the dispute is not resolved, although they claim to be developing an "alternative technology."

The companies that are planning to buy Skype have also been named in the lawsuit.

eBay recently signed a deal to sell most of Skype, while retaining a 35% stake. The deal valued Skype at $2.75 billion. According to the deal, an investor group led by Silver Lake, which also includes Index Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investment Board would control about a 65% stake. eBay is supposed to receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash upon the completion of the sale.

You have to wonder if the acquisition will go through at all after this mess. This was probably a little more than these investors bargained for.

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R.I. jobless rate now third-worst in U.S.

PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island’s 12.8 percent unemployment rate was the nation’s third-worst in August, one notch lower than its second-worst ranking in July, the U.S. Labor Department said Friday. At left, the state-by-state jobless picture in …

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Facebook, Twitter and Social Media Marketing

A significant number of brands have amped up their social media marketing, but it's not just all about tapping Facebook and Twitter, says a new study.

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The Small Business Case for CRM

CRM software used to be expensive and complex, but now even the smallest companies can easily and affordably monitor, track and analyze every aspect of their business.

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Google And Yahoo Offer Best Mobile Experience

With 2 million mobile Web domains, 31 percent of consumers now browse the mobile Web at lest once a month, with news, search and weather being the most popular destinations, according to a new report by the Yankee Group.
The report found that most mobile sites still fail to offer satisfactory experiences, earning an average score of 52 on a scale of 1 to 100.

Carl Howe

Director

Yankee Group

"Unlike last year, most of the sites we reviewed adapt their content to many differing feature phones and smartphones," said Carl Howe, director at Yankee Group and author of the report.
"And some companies are also starting to incorporate location-awareness, something other sites should strive to emulate."
For news, Google and Yahoo performed the best. Both companies earned a score of 73, with a solid balance in offering enough information to mobile users without overwhelming them. Other sites are still struggling with leveraging mobile context and site discoverability.
For sports, MLB.com came out on top. Major League Baseball scored a 71 for its device detection and ability to tailor content to fit mobile screens. Yahoo's Rivals.com (58) and ESPN (57) were a close second and third.
For search, Google led, edging out Yahoo. Google's mobile search site, with its basic interface, format specific device detection and location-awareness, scored an 81, the highest number given to any mobile Web site so far. Yahoo scored a 76, hindered by irrelevant content and HTML validation errors.
The report found all mobile carriers need to improve. Sprint's site was found to be slightly out of date, but it does help mobile users find Sprint stores and the carrier, it received a score of 53. Other national carrier sites still ignore mobile web users who are not their customers, forcing consumers to view information on their desktops.

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Report: ProvEquity in Travel Channel bid

PROVIDENCE – Providence Equity Partners Inc. is reportedly one of three private equity firms that have placed bids for Travel Channel Media. The station, which has nearly 100 million subscribers, is expected to sell for between $600 million and …

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How to Manage Your Business's Online Reputation

Small business owners explain how to create a positive impression – or counter a negative one – using Facebook, Twitter and social media.

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File Open

This script allows someone to choose a file on their hard drive and open it. Now cross-browser compatible.

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Google Busts the Duplicate Content Myth

While Google's Matt Cutts has certainly provided a wealth of helpful tips via the company's Webmaster Central YouTube channel, he is not the only one to do so. Greg Grothaus of the Search Quality Team has posted a video (along with a presentation on the Webmaster Central Blog) covering duplicate content and multiple site issues that webmasters continue to face when trying to rank well in Google.

Greg begins by clearing up a popular myth about duplicate content, and that is that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. This is not the case. That's not to say that duplicate content can't have a negative impact on your rankings, but Google itself is not penalizing you for it.

Have you believed that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content? Comment here.

Greg says people see messages like the one below and think their content is getting omitted from Google's results, when in fact it really may just be being omitted for that particular query. Greg stresses that duplicate content is simply a factor on a "by query" basis.

"What's actually happening, is that we're looking at the query that the user's doing, and we're saying that we want diversity in the results we're going to show a user," says Grothaus. He says those who think their content is being omitted because it is duplicate, will likely find that if they adjust their query to more specifically reflect the missing piece, they may just find that it shows up in results after all.

Google recognizes that most duplicate content is not created to be deceptive. There are of course exceptions, which are considered spam. Grothaus says even spam sites aren't being penalized for having duplicate content though. They're being penalized for being spam. Just like some spammers use bold tags, he says. They don't penalize people just for using them. And they don't penalize people just for having duplicate content.

Duplicate Content:

example.com/

example.com/?

example.com/index.html

example.com/Home.aspx

www.example.com/

www.example.com/?

www.example.com/index.html

www.example.com/Home.aspx

The above list from Grothaus's presentation shows examples of URLs that are different, but show the same content. Google will recognize that they're the same, and will try to pick the right one, (although sometimes they pick the wrong one). Greg says Webmasters are the best people to know which one is best, so it helps to only use one.

You will not be penalized for using more than one, but there are some issues that can arise that may negatively affect your rankings. For one, your link popularity will be diluted. Backlinks pointing to several different URL versions of the same content, will make it harder to accumulate link juice for one URL. Greg says that user-unfriendly URLs in search results may offset branding efforts and decrease usability as well. Plus, with multiple versions of the same thing, Google will spend more time crawling the same content, meaning it will have less time to go deeper into your site, and you run the risk of having content not get indexed.

Fixing the Issues

To avoid such issues, Grothaus suggests using a "canonical" version of the URL, meaning the simplest, most significant form. He says to pick one for each page and link consistently within your site. You can also use the rel="canonical" link element as explained by Matt Cutts in the following clip:

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Rules for rel="canonical"

There are rules for the rel="canonical" link element to consider. For one, it should be used between pages that are on the same domain. It works across different hosts. For example, blog.webpronews.com could suggest www.webpronews.com as a canonical URL, but it doesn't work across domains. So www.webpronews.com couldn't suggest www.smallbusinessnewz.com.

You can use he element for protocols, such as http:// vs. https://, and you can use it for ports. Pages don't have to be identical, but they should be similar. Slight differences are ok. You don't have to use the rel="canonical" link element. It is just another option, or "another tool in your arsenal," as Grothaus says.

Another option is to make all non-canonical URLs do a permanent (301) redirect to the canonical (or preferred) URL. In addition, in Google's Webmaster Tools, you can specify www. vs. non-www. 301 redirects are commonly used when moving sites.

Multiple Domains

Lastly, Grothaus discusses multiple domains. This is in reference to when you have content for different audiences, such as by country, language, etc.

There are concerns here. You have to consider your reputation being distributed across multiple domains, and Google will only show what it perceives to be the best page for a particular query.

One interesting factor of this to also consider, that may often go overlooked, is that with multiple domains, you're potentially losing the advantage Google's tabbed user interface. You know how sometimes search results are expandable and point you to different links within the site? If your content is spread out across multiple domains, you may be missing extra clicks, because Google can't link to another domain here.

Grothaus explains all of the above and elaborates on each point in the following fifteen -minute video. The information is based on his presentation from the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

‘Reform health delivery’ to control costs

The effort to reform health care must reduce waste in the medical delivery system, Dr. Peter Hollmann, left, associate chief medical officer for Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, told a meeting of the Smaller Business Association of New …

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Users Prefer Device Fingerprinting to Passwords

Study finds 70 percent of respondents say they'd be willing to have their PCs and mobile devices authenticated by an online merchant before completing a transaction.

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Lenovo Adds Touch Capability, Outdoor LCD to ThinkPads

An outdoor-friendly display and advanced multi-touch screen technology will debut on select ThinkPad models, while the company’s exclusive SimpleTap utility takes full advantage of Windows 7’s touch-screen capabilities.

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Facebook Has Nearly Same Amount of People as US

Update: Ok, they've officially announced the testing of the prototypes directory now. From the company blog:

Facebook Prototypes let us share the experimentation going on inside the walls of Facebook with the rest of the world. You'll be able to test any of the products and features we launch as Facebook Prototypes and then provide feedback directly to those of us who built them. To access Prototypes, visit the Application Directory and filter by "Prototypes." From there, you can activate or download any of the Prototypes listed.

Original Article: Facebook announced today that not only has it surpassed the 300 million-user mark, but the company is now making money. It was bound to happen sooner or later, and the company said earlier this year that it would happen next year.

Apparently they're ahead of schedule, because according to Founder Mark Zuckerberg, they became cash flow positive last quarter. "This is important to us because it sets Facebook up to be a strong independent service for the long term," he said.

"Over time, Facebook will continue to be as strong as all of the connections you make," Zuckerberg added. "We'll continue building new and better things to make connecting with the people you care about as easy and rewarding as possible."

Back to that 300 million number. To put this into perspective, the official 2008 population for the entire United States of America was just over 304 million. That's a lot of people on one social network.

Now look at some of the things that have been going on with Facebook just in the last month or so:

- They acquired FriendFeed

- They Launched their real-time search

- They began letting people sell physical goods with their payments platform

- They expanded their staff by 50%

- They've been testing a new ads manager and made ads a little more advertiser-friendly

- They've been testing a new kind of engagement ad

- They've taken steps to increase users' sharing

- They announced a milestone of 65 million active mobile users

- They've hinted at click through rate metrics for Pages

- They have a Google labs-like prototype directory in the works

- They've added tagging to the status update

- They're said to be creeping in on LinkedIn's territory in the recruiting department

- They launched Facebook Lite

- They open sourced the FriendFeed web server

And that's just some of the things the company has been up to in the last little while. Suffice it to say, there's a lot going on with Facebook, and this social network has nearly the same amount of people using it as there are registered citizens in the US...and now they're making money.

Facebook's future is looking pretty bright right now. It will be interesting to see what they accomplish in another month's time. A year's...

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R.I. union cancels vote on shutdown deal

PROVIDENCE – Leaders of the state’s largest public employees union cancelled a planned vote this afternoon on a tentative agreement with the Carcieri administration that would avoid layoffs or a shutdown of state government in exchange for lower …

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NiftyClicks: Complaints, Web Calculator, Ping.fm, Coupons

From protecting consumers and figuring out how much your Web site is worth, to posting on social media sites and finding rock bottom prices online, Andrew Lock delivers the best Web tools and resources.

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Google on Notification of Webmaster Guideline Violations

One thing that Google is pretty good at is providing resources for webmasters to learn from. The regular videos from Matt Cutts in which he answers user-submitted questions are no different. It just happens to be this very topic that is addressed in the latest upload.

Question: Whenever Google detects a violation of its Webmaster Guidelines, can we expect a feature to be added in Google Webmaster Central where it could help the webmasters learn what the issue was?

In his response, Cutts talks about Google providing advice in a scaleable way. As he says, the web has tens of millions of domains and billions of pages. "Even if we put everybody in the entire company on customer support, trying to talk one on one, we wouldn't have the resources where we could talk to every single webmaster, and have a prolonged dialogue," says Cutts.

So Google's strategy is to try to communicate to webmasters on a large scale, and let one person say something that a lot of people can learn from. They do that with these videos. They do it with their many blogs, their forums, etc.

So when it comes to things like violations of webmaster guidelines, they try to be scaleable in that as well. He says the company continues to look for ways where they can do that, but while they want to let people know about things, they don’t want to let the "bad guys" know they know about them, and have them start over and try to find new ways to cheat and be sneaky.

Cutts says Google gives more attention to mom & pop-type sites, and sites they think have good intentions, but may not realize some of the things they are doing are not good. An example he gives is letting webmasters know if their site has been hacked, or even if it's hackable. "Perhaps you're using an old version of Wordpress or some other piece of software..." he says.

So they send messages to a lot of webmasters. And they try to alert what they perceive to be the good guys. In other words, don't expect new features in Webmaster Central every time Google learns of a new issue.

Cutts does note that Google is always open to other ways to try and improve communication, and encourages suggestions in the forums and blog comments.

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Carcieri warns of layoffs after union delay

PROVIDENCE – The Carcieri administration is telling its department directors to proceed with plans to lay off up to 1,000 state workers in case contract negotiations with the public employees unions don’t lead to an agreement. The news came …

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Bonanzle Standing Out Among eBay Competitors

Bonanzle has been around for a year now (out of beta). We've been watching it grow for the better part of this year at least.

Now the company says it is quickly approaching several milestones. Co-founder Mark Dorsey tell WebProNews that Bonanzle is just days away from welcoming its 100,000th registered user, for one.

According to the site Power Sellers Unite, Bonanzle is a little over 100,000 listings away from becoming the top alternative to eBay. Right now, it is only behind eBid, and of course eBay itself.

eBay appears to even be recognizing Bonanzle as legitimate competition. A new survey from the company asked participants which other websites they use to sell items, and it listed Amazon Marketplace, Overstock, Craigslist, personal website/online store, and Bonanzle.

Bonanzle is currently developing an API that will allow third party developers to develop tools to enhance users' Bonanzle experience. This is expected to launch by the end of September. Bonanzle also recently launched an affiliate program called the Syndicated Seller" program.

Bonanzle previously told WebProNews that it doesn't really focus on competing with eBay. They said this competition was something that was probably paid more attention to by users than themselves.

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Who Really Owns Your Tweets?

Twitter has made some revisions to its terms of service, to address issues like advertising, tweet ownership, APIs, and spam. There's not as much news in this as one might expect, but there are some things worth noting, namely, Twitter's stance on who owns tweets. Are your past tweets important to you? Tell us.

"The revisions more appropriately reflect the nature of Twitter and convey key issues such as ownership. For example, your tweets belong to you, not to Twitter," says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone.

With regards to advertising, they're leaving "the door wide open." Stone says they want to "keep their options open." So nothing concrete there.

As far as APIs, Stone says developers using Twitter APIs authorize Twitter to make content available. There is a separate set of guidelines for APIs that can be found here. It is still a work in progress. Current guidelines are as follows:

- Identify the user that authored or provided the Tweet, unless you are providing Tweets in an aggregate form or in anonymous form in those exceptional cases where concerns over user security and anonymity are involved.

- Maintain the integrity of Tweets and not edit or revise them. Tweets may be abbreviated for display purposes and as necessary due to technical limitations or requirements of any networks, devices, services or media.

- Get each user's consent before sending Tweets or other messages on their behalf. A user authenticating with your application does not constitute consent to send a message.

- Get permission from the user that created the Tweet if you want to make their Tweet into a commercial good or product, like using a Tweet on a t-shirt or a poster or making a book based on someone’s Tweets.

Spam guidelines are the same and can be found here.

The Tweet ownership stuff has already received some criticism for further clouding an already unclear subject. "If Twitter can do what they want with ‘our’ tweets, including reproduction for their own (financial) gain, what do we actually 'own'?" asks Shéa Bennett at Twittercism. "If Twitter loses our data, closes our accounts or goes out of business, do we still own those tweets? Or are they retrievable in any way?"

Twitter's terms of service are not necessarily finalized though. Stone made it quite clear that they are still open to feedback, and will make adjustments if they deem them necessary. There is even a feedback link right on the terms page. So if you have concerns about anything within, don't hesitate to let Twitter know.

Would you miss your past tweets if you no longer had access to them one day? Tell us why.

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Industry seeing red in Grid plan

A hike in electricity distribution costs proposed by National Grid has commercial customers like Polytop Corp. concerned about the impact on their bottom line. At left, Polytop processor Ricky Ogunwomoju at work in the company’s North Smithfield …

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Google Talks Up Micropayments for Web Content

Often at odds with news publishers, the search giant pitches them a variety of options for generating revenue from their online content.

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Marketing Tips: GotBiz.tv, Nervous Customers & TextBoom

More marketing insight, strategy and fun with Andrew Lock, the host of Help, My Business Sucks!

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Report: Google China Prepared For Big Push

It may be that the exit of Kai-Fu Lee won't act so much as a stumbling block as a catalyst for Google China. A new report indicates that, following his departure, Google China will double its sales staff and offer cash incentives to 1,000 would-be advertisers.
Figures related to the employees remain unknown. Otherwise, Zhu Shenshen wrote in a Shanghai Daily article, "Under the 50 million yuan incentive program, Google will provide 500 yuan to every new registered customer of Adwards [sic], its popular online search advertising tool."
Those amounts convert to about $7.3 million and $73, respectively, in case you were wondering.
Google seems to be quite serious about getting Chinese advertisers to embrace its AdWords program, then. While the company's not giving away tons of cash in the grand scheme of things (Google's current market cap: $149.5 billion), the fact that it would offer so much money to so many advertisers is undeniably significant.
Looking ahead, it's easy to guess that Google feels the 1,000 advertisers might represent a sort of tipping point, too, after which others will glob on in an attempt to catch up.
We (along, no doubt, with many analysts and Baidu executives) will keep an eye on the initiative to see how things progress.

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Bristol County lifts boil water advisory

BRISTOL – The Bristol County Water Authority has lifted its boil water advisory as of 1 p.m. this afternoon.

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Review: Toshiba Mini NB205-N210

What's the difference between Toshiba's Mini NB205 and the longer-named NB205-N210 netbooks? The N210 comes only in black, and it doesn't have Bluetooth. If you can live with that, you may find it your best netbook buy.

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Plugin Page

If you maintain separate pages, one plugin enhanced, the other not, here's a simple way to send your visitors to the right page automatically. Besides being a very short script (it loads fast) you can modify the code to look for any plugin you want. Give it a try!

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Online Tool Rates Cell Phone Radiation

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has put together an online consumer guide that rates more than 1,000 cell phones based on the levels of radiation they emit.
The EWG says the list is aimed at helping consumers make better decisions about which cell phones to buy. The free online tool offers information on each phone's radiofrequency emissions, allowing users to compare different models.

Olga Naidenko Ph.D.,

EWG Senior Scientist

"We would like to be able to say that cell phones are safe," said Olga Naidenko, Ph.D., EWG Senior Scientist and lead author of the study.
"But we can't. The most recent science, while not conclusive, raises serious issues about the cancer risk of cell phone use that must be addressed through further research. In the meantime, consumers can take steps to reduce exposure."
According to the CTIA Wireless Association, there were 270.3 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. as of December 2008, a 30 percent increase in three years. Worldwide 60 percent of the population or 4 billion people subscribe to wireless services.
Health agencies in six nations have issued warnings to limit cell phone use, including Switzerland, Germany, Israel, France, the U.K. and Finland. The warnings said children were particularly at risk because their skulls are thinner and less able to shield the brain from radiation.
EWG says the current cell phone radiation standards, set by the FCC and based mainly on 1992 cell phone industry recommendations, are outdated and allow 20 times more radiation to penetrate the head than the rest of the body.
EWG is asking the FCC to upgrade its standards and examine the newest scientific evidence and to consider the increasing cell phone use by children.
"The first cell phones were marketed to adults," Naidenko said. "But today, children are just as likely to own a cell phone as a video game, baseball or bicycle."

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City named one of 25 best places to retire

PROVIDENCE – Money magazine has declared Providence to be one of the 25 best places to retire in the United States, particularly because of its “thriving restaurant scene,” in a new set of rankings released this week.

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Dell Debuts Servers, Storage, Security and Services

Whether you’re looking for your first server or you need scalable storage to manage a mountain of growing data, Dell promises reliable performance with its latest portfolio of servers and services.

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Mobile Banking Set To Take Off

Mobile banking is increasingly becoming more mainstream, changing the way consumers mange their finances, according to a new report from Javelin Strategy & Research.
"Mobile banking is quickly moving from infancy to commonplace, which will help separate the winners from losers in banks' ability to attract and keep technology-loving consumers," said Mary Monahan, Research Director and Managing Partner.
"Consumers are hungry for the 'always-on' and 'real time' ability to monitor and manage their money, and mobile banking serves that need better than any other."
Nearly half of mobile phone users have access to mobile banking and by 2014, 45 percent will use mobile banking.

By 2014, 99 million Americans will conduct mobile banking transactions at least once per year with 52 percent using smartphones to do so.
AT&T has the highest number of mobile bankers due to the iPhone, while Verizon has the lowest number of mobile bankers among the major wireless carriers.

"Mobile banking is quickly becoming an essential consumer capability," said Mark Schwanhausser, Financial Services Channels Analyst.
"Just as the iPod changed the music industry and their business models, our data shows that iPhone users are changing the banking industry by leading the way in monitoring and managing finances through mobile devices."

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R.I. advised to emphasize advantages

PROVIDENCE – Location. Location. Location. That was the message delivered by a relocation expert to the R.I. Economic Policy Council as he previewed his recommendations on how to attract businesses to downtown Providence, left, and other parts of …

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Google to Add Android Payment Options

As analysts hail the arrival of the HTC Hero, Google planning to revamp the Android mobile app store to appease developers and make it more user-friendly.

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NiftyClicks: Printing, Finance, Slides & Free Video

No one collects better online tools and resources than our favorite online marketing expert, Andrew Lock. Add four more NiftyClicks to your online arsenal.

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Blogs Can Still Drive Big Traffic

You would almost think blogging was dead, the way headlines are dominated by Twitter, Facebook, and social media in general. I've always considered blogging to be a part of social media anyway, as the commenting factor lends to engagement between author and user.

But blogging is so five years ago right? It's all about microblogging and status updates now isn't it? If you think that's the case, think again, because blogs can still drive big-time traffic to websites. An example of this has been illustrated by the launch of e-commerce site Alice.com.

How much traffic are you getting from blogs? Let us know.

If you are not familiar with Alice.com, it is a site where consumers can buy everyday household items like toothpaste, toilet paper, laundry detergent, diapers, etc., right from the manufacturers, rather than through middleman retailers. It launched in June, and by July it had doubled its traffic to 387,000 unique visitors, according to Compete.

Guess where the majority of that traffic came from. According to Compete, it came from word-of-mouth from blogs. In fact, its number one traffic source was Blogger.com. Not Twitter. Not Facebook. Not search. Although each of these no doubt played valuable roles as well., Blogger.com has been the biggest factor in driving traffic for this site, and from the looks of things, that traffic is showing no signs of slowing down.

Blogger accounted for 18% of Alice.com's referral traffic in July, and obviously there are plenty of blogs out there that aren't hosted at Blogger.com. On top of that, Compete says Alice's conversion rate jumped to 3.5% in July as well.

Of course, you have to give bloggers something to talk about to get valuable blog traffic. It's no different than getting people to talk about you on social networks or through any other form of word-of-mouth marketing. It starts with your product. Clearly Alice.com, has something that many people find worth talking about.

"Anyone who has previously shopped online for household products knows that prices are generally higher (sometimes considerably) than those found in stores," Compete's Matt Pace says of Alice.com. "By selling directly to consumers, manufacturers are able to price their products below those found on most online retailers and more competitively to those found in stores."

Clearly this is a void in the lives of consumers that Alice is attempting to fill. It's still early to tell if this site will remain a success. As long as it keeps the bloggers (consumers) happy, it could enjoy a long life. Because one thing to remember about word-of-mouth is that it works both ways. Reputations can quickly move in different directions online. So can traffic.

Do you see more traffic from blogs or from social networks? Comment here.

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New Bedford post office wins a reprieve

NEW BEDFORD – The United States Postal Service has decided that it will not close the Mount Pleasant Station post office in New Bedford because doing so is “not feasible at this time,” according to the cash-strapped agency’s latest list of …

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Google News SEO Tips - Ranking in News Search

I thought that one of the more interesting topics addressed at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a while back was that of SEO and the publishing industry. This is an industry seemingly at war with entities like Google (at least partially), even though there are clearly measures publishers could take, which would make Google and Google News in particular work to their advantage.

Have you had success ranking in Google News? Comment.

Google News is a very useful resource to online news seekers. It seems to get more and more useful as time goes on. For example, they just started incorporating real-time search suggestions into news queries. Publishers should embrace such a tool (Google News) that users themselves embrace, and can ultimately gain them more traffic.

This week, Google has shared some insight into search engine optimization practices for news search. Publishers could learn a lot from the following video.

In addition to the video, Google's Maile Ohye answered a couple of questions about Google News SEO on the Google News blog. For one, she says that adding a city to the title of the publication will not help publishers target their local audience, because Google extracts geography and location information from the articles themselves.

"Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings," she says.

She also says that Google only wants recently added URLs in publishers' News Sitemaps, because they direct Googlebot to the publishers' breaking information. "If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl," says Ohye.

A few weeks ago, a patent was granted to Google for "systems and method for improving the ranking of news articles." The patent was originally filed way back in 2003, so there is no question that some of the details have changed, but within it there are a number of factors highlighted, some of which may be ranking factors Google News considers.

In one "implementation consistent with the principles of the invention," here are some factors that are mentioned:

    - a number of articles produced by the news source during a first time period

    - an average length of an article produced by the news source

    - an amount of important coverage that the news source produces in a second time period

    - a breaking news score

    - an amount of network traffic to the news source

    - a human opinion of the news source

    - circulation statistics of the news source

    - a size of a staff associated with the news source

    - a number of bureaus associated with the news source

    - a number of original named entities in a group of articles associated with the news source

    - a breadth of coverage by the news source

    - a number of different countries from which network traffic to the news source originates

    - the writing style used by the news source

A couple months ago, Google posted a Google News publisher FAQ page. That answers questions like:

- Can I suggest my personal website for inclusion in Google News?

- What requirements do I have to meet in order to be included in Google News?

- My website was accepted in Google News a few days ago, but I still can't find my articles. Is something wrong?

- Why aren't my images showing up in Google News?

- Why do all my articles have a strange title in Google News, like "Share this" or "By Jane Q. Journalist"?

- What is the "unique number" or "3 digit" rule?

- Should I submit a News sitemap?

- Why can't I see the option to submit a News sitemap in Webmaster Tools?

- Once I've submitted a News sitemap, do I have to resubmit it each time I publish a new article?

- If I submit a News sitemap, will Google News stop crawling my regular section pages?

- How often does Google News crawl my News sitemap? In Webmaster Tools, it appears to be crawled only once per day.

- Why have my articles stopped appearing in Google News, even though they've been showing up previously?

The moral of the story is that there are a lot of things you can look at if you are serious about getting traffic from Google News, whether you are already being picked up or not. The best part is that most of it is straight from Google itself.

More tips from Search Engine Strategies can be found here.

Have tips of your own? Share them here.

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Expanded NICU at W&I seen as model

On Sept. 14, Women & Infants Hospital will open its new South Pavillion, an addition that cost $76.8 million and includes a 50,000-square-foot NICU, the only one in Southern New England.

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Marketing Tips: Bad Service, Printable Coupons, Jet Blue

Andrew Lock offers up fresh tips on how to make your business can stand out from the crowd because “marketing is everything, and everything is marketing.”

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E-Commerce Service Lets Users Pay in Person

Alternatives to using credit cards for e-commerce aren't new, but a walk-in option aims to capitalize on untapped markets.

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Tips for Getting Found in Real-Time Searches

Real-time search is still an emerging concept. At this point, using a real-time search engine will bring you results by time/date. This doesn't always cater to relevancy, which is why there is still a lot of work to be done in this field.

Do you see traffic coming from real-time searches? Comment here.

So, if real-time results are based upon time/date, and the user's query, it stands to reason that time and those queries are the most important components in getting your content found in these types of searches.

1. Use Keywords

This seems obvious, but use keywords in not only your content, but in your titles, and your updates. If you're writing an article, you have to consider what people are going to include in their updates if they share it on a social network, whether this be Facebook, Twitter, or anything else.

More often than not, they are going to include the title. If the right keywords are in the title, then those keywords are also more likely to appear in any ensuing tweets, Facebook updates, etc. If someone searches for those keywords, they will be more likely to find your content in a real-time search.

The same goes for your own Tweets/status updates. Even if you are not sharing an article, if you want your update to be found, use relevant keywords. Again, obvious, but true.

2. Talk About Timely Events

Simply mentioning events that are current will put you directly into the results for any searches having to do with that topic, provided the right keywords are in play. This is a method that could and (surely is) being exploited by spammers, but that doesn't mean you can't provide legitimate conversation and simply put yourself on more people's radars, without throwing links at them every time.

3. Have a Lot of Followers

If you have a lot of followers or friends on social networks, or even just readers of your blog, you are going to get more people sharing your content. The more people sharing your content, the more impressions of your content will be making their way into real time searches.

There is no easy way to instantly get a bunch of legitimate readers/followers. It will take some promotion. Provide useful content that people will link to and it will spread virally. Provide clear ways for them to follow you (like links to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts on your blog).

4. Promote Conversation

Whether on your blog or on a social network, spark conversations. Talk about topics that people are interested in. This is tied to number 2. The more conversations you are involved with, the more retweets (and equivalents on other networks) you are likely to get. And again, this means more impressions in real times searches.

5. Include Calls to Engagement

I recently talked about why there is more to retweeting than meets the eye for businesses. I mentioned the use of buttons like Tweetmeme's and Digg's. These are buttons you can put on articles that show the amount of retweets/diggs that article has. They kind of act as a meter for engagement.

These buttons are certainly not all-encompassing. They only represent the conversation on 2 channels, and not the web in general. I'm sure there are other buttons that can be used in addition.

More importantly though, they provide a "call to action" to share the content. People can digg or retweet a story with a simple click, and you're one step closer to being found in somebody's real-time search.

Wrapping Up

Real-time search is much more basic (at least so far) than say, Google Search. You're not ranking for relevancy. Really, you could hardly call it ranking it all. It's about visibility. That means, you have to get people talking about your content/updates.

Social media by nature is viral. Real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order. You have to keep people talking to stay relevant to "right now."

Do you have additional tips for increasing visibility in real-time searches? Share with WebProNews readers.

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Columbus Theatre closed for violations

PROVIDENCE – The Columbus Theatre at 270 Broadway, a venue used by many community groups in the Providence area, will remain closed while the owner “vigorously” pursues repairs to correct alleged code violations that resulted in the city’s …

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YouTube Moving Toward Paid Content

The top online video service is reportedly in talks with movie studios to offer streaming rentals.

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10 Tips to Craft Effective Online Surveys

Want to keep the customers satisfied? Online surveys are a simple way to generate customer feedback. We show you the top 10 survey tips.

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Google Popular In Brazil Too

Online measurement firm Hitwise has launched its service in Brazil.
The company says it will track more than 60,000 websites across more than 160 industry categories based on the Internet activity of 90,000 Brazilian Internet users.
"As online usage grows in Brazil, so too does competition for the Internet consumer," said Juliano Marcillio, president of Serasa Experian Marketing Services.
"By launching with the largest online sample in Brazil, we are able to provide marketers with specific insights into consumer behavior as well as into competitors marketing activities. This data is crucial to improving and measuring online marketing, content development, search and affiliates strategies and tactics."
The Hitwise Brazil service will provide clients with data on website industry and category rankings, Clickstream traffic activity, search behavior and keyword research. Access will also be provided to additional tools to create custom categories, search term portfolios and customized dashboards.

In a trial Hitwise found Google Brasil to be the most visited site last week receiving 11.03 percent of all Brazilian visits. Orkut was the second most popular site receiving 9.91 percent of visits followed by Google which grabbed 8.56 percent of visits. Among the top ten websites, Google properties accounted for 34.09 percent of all visits.

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Supreme Court justice halts shutdown

PROVIDENCE – R.I. Supreme Court Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg sided with the state’s largest public employees union this afternoon, halting Gov. Donald L. Carcieri’s plan to shut down government until the full court can consider the issue.

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Electronic Bill-Payment Service Saves Time and Money

Bill.com’s ePayments service lets small businesses pay any and all vendors — regardless of size — electronically.

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Plugins Alert

JavaScript will count how many plugins are installed then make a remark based on that count to your visitors - totally written in JavaScript!

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Google Celebrates a Year of Chrome

Today Google celebrated the first birthday of Chrome, the company's web browser. Google shares the following stats for what Chrome has seen over the past year:

- 51 developer releases

- 21 beta releases or updates

- 15 stable releases or updates

- Over 20,600 bugs filed (4,367 duplicates, 3,505 fixed)

- 11 external committers and bug editors

- 46 external code contributors

- 50 Chrome Experiments

- 26 posts on the Google Chrome blog

- 12 Chrome short films

- 150% Javascript performance improvement

"A lot has happened for Google Chrome since the day we prematurely shipped our comic book, announced Google Chrome just a day before we initially intended, and pushed our browser out of the nest and into Beta," says Chrome Product Manager Brian Rakowski. There was a Japanese sequel to the comic book as well.

Google has also launched a number of new features for Chrome over the year like side-by-side view, form autofill, and the ability to remove items from the New Tab page. There will of course be a lot more in the future. For a look at WebProNews coverage of Chrome since its launch, browse through our Chrome tag archive.

"There's still plenty for us to do," says Rakowski. "Extensions for Google Chrome are well underway. We're also hard at work on Google Chrome for Mac and Linux, which are making rapid progress on the developer channel."

Let's not forget that the Google Chrome Operating System was also announced this year. There is still a lot of mystery surrounding this product, and it will be interesting to see if it lives up to the anticipation that precedes it.

On a related note, Google also celebrated the tenth birthday of Blogger today, although it was actually released in August of 1999.

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Report: I-195 plans should be mixed

PROVIDENCE – A report commissioned by the state and Providence to explore the potential for land freed up by the relocation of Interstate 195 recommends encouraging a mix of public space, commercial development, residential buildings and an …

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No Check, Please

Whether it is for spring to begin, for Godot or for a commission check, no one likes waiting.
The 30 to 90 days that affiliates – especially those outside the U.S. – must wait for commission checks to arrive can seem like a lifetime, and waiting in line at the bank to cash it is so 20th century. read more

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Consumer Groups Outline Privacy Law Wish List

Privacy advocates pitch policy framework to House leaders drafting bill that could reshape online advertising.

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Text Encryption

This JavaScript library provides encryption using simple, text-oriented method called column transposition. The idea is to write the plain text in block on the row-first bases. The text is then read column-first. The trick is in that the columns are not read from left to right, but in the order specified by the encryption key. Transliteration is also used.

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US Open Doesn't Get Twitter!

It's always humorous when old stodgy sports organizations make a new rule that implicates Twitter as a problem. They usually get it wrong and what happened with the USTA is no exception. The USTA which is the group which runs the US Open Tennis Championship decided that tweets from players during breaks in matches are now banned because they are potentially unfair to gamblers betting on the tennis match!

The USTA posted signs in the players' lounge and locker rooms that states, "Important. Player Notice. Twitter Warning: Many of you will have Twitter accounts in order for your fans to follow you and to become more engaged in you and the sport – and this is great ... However popular it is, it is important to warn you of some of the dangers posed by Twittering as it relates to the Tennis Anti-Corruption Program Rules."
It's certainly nice to see the USTA so concerned about equal information to all gamblers. Gamblers can still get inside information by talking, texting or emailing tennis players or their people, but no tweets. Those tweets are just too dangerous to the integrity of fair betting!
So this brings us to what all of you social media savvy WebProNews readers are likely thinking: Isn't Twitter accessible for all to read? That is the beauty of Twitter, anyone can follow anyone without approval. So if Andy Roddick tweets during a break in a match that his leg is cramping, anyone who so chooses can read it, gamblers included. It is no different than TV interviews with a players' coaches or parentents that happen during matches all the time. It's not inside information if everyone has access.
According to Twellow, the directory of active Twitter users, Andy Roddick has over 112,000 followers. Andy tweeted his gripes about the new rule:

10:28 PM Aug 28th

from web

i definitely respect the rule about inside info and on court, but u would seriously have to be a moron to send "inside info" through a tweet

10:28 PM Aug 28th from web

cant do it on our own time.... we'll see

10:21 PM Aug 28th from web

i think its lame the US Open is trying to regulate our tweeting.. i understand the on-court issue but not sure they can tell us if we can

10:21 PM Aug 28th from web

In my opinion, as long as information is equally available to all the USTA should not be worried. Tweets during matches are good for the game and not bad for those tennis gamblers either.

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Create Custom Functions in Excel 2007

Helen Bradley shows how custom Excel functions save time and effort and how you can use your custom functions in all your workbooks.

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More jobs cut in August than expected

WASHINGTON – Despite the appearance of positive economic news in recent weeks, it appears that businesses are not yet convinced that recovery is here.
According to a report by ADP Employer …

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