The first time I heard of the concept of micro-lending was last year when Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, won the Nobel Peace prize for pioneering micro-credit. Yunus and his Grameen Bank granted small loans to those who had no collateral and who did not qualify for conventional bank loans. The program enabled millions to start and run their own businesses, and promoted independence, rather than dependence, among the poorest in Bangladesh. Micro-lending isn’t charity. It’s a way of encouraging entrepreneurship and business activity.
I’ve become aware of many similar micro-credit projects that have helped millions around the world lift themselves out of poverty. One that has leveraged the power of the Internet to connect the haves with the have-nots is Kiva.org, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that has helped put more than $6 million into the hands of small business owners in the last year and a half. Read the rest of this entry »
For the first time since 1995 The Tonight Show and Jay Leno will feature an in-programming commercial. Yes, I said commercial and not endorsement, product placement or even promotion but an actual advertisement. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “NBC’s decision to try the live Garmin spot comes as networks are casting about for ways to keep viewers watching commercials, in a time when digital video recorders such as TiVo allow viewers to speed through ads while watching a program they’ve recorded earlier.” Ted Garner, the media relations manager at Garmin International said they’re simply looking for “a way to Tivo-proof” their television marketing efforts. Read the rest of this entry »
One common problem with dynamic sites are the need to use URL based session IDs. What do you do about people who don’t have cookies turned on.
There are two main options:
Give them a nice message that they must have cookies turned on to view the site
Use URL embedded session IDs.
Fortunately PHP has a cool feature that allows it to detect if cookies are enabled and will automatically embed the session ID in links if not. The problem is though that with that feature enabled, now search engine spiders will be feed session IDs which essentially renders the site un-spiderable.
So our work around is to check a browser’s useragent against a list of know spiders to see if the page requestor is in fact from a search engine. After all that work the question then becomes, how do you know if it works? E.g. how do we mascarade as a search engine spider to test we are not getting session IDs? Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook and MySpace addicts are now taken seriously by the academic community! The University of Michigan’s School of Information recently launched the first Masters Degree program with a specialization in Social Computing. It’s exciting to see this kind of coursework at a traditional Library and Information Studies School.
According to the UMSI website: “Students pursuing a specialization in Social Computing learn to analyze online social interactions, both in online communities and in more diffuse social networks. They learn about features of social computing technologies so they can recognize opportunities to put them to use in new settings and make good choices about alternative implementations.”
Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, & Friendster provide virtual communities where like-minded individuals can meet new friends with similar interests. Now, more and more charitable and non-profit organizations are tapping into the power of the Internet to provide caring and supportive networks for their members and constituents.
Like the big players in online social networking, these cause-centered communities allow users to create their own website, create a profile, upload photos, and collect friends within the network. They give users a place to meet others facing similar issues and provide various forms of interaction, such as chat, email, blogging, forums, and discussion groups. These communities bring people together at a difficult time and use technology to facilitate support for all involved, wherever they may be. Read the rest of this entry »
The multi-touch frenzy started with 600,000 YouTube visitors watching Jeff Y Han’s multi-touch demo he gave at the TED conference in February 2006. The technology stemmed from a project at NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences directed by Jeff Y Han.
Multi-touch hype increased tenfold last month as “Surface,” the new “interactive coffee table” by Microsoft, was introduced. The behind-the-scenes first look with Popular Mechanics shows the true power of the technology. According to Yahoo News, prices will range from $5,000-10,000 per unit. Consumer-priced versions are expected to be possible in 3-5 years. Read the rest of this entry »
For years traditional advertising has been viewed by most businesses as a necessary evil. Necessary, because all businesses need some form of exposure in their marketplace to survive. Evil, because there really hasn’t been a good way to determine the effectiveness of advertising campaign dollars. Now in the online world, advertising and evaluating those dollars spent towards marketing is becoming more like a science.
Google has offered a FREE Analytics program for years but, in the past setting up the software services and making since from the data retrieved was a bit confusing for even the savviest technologists. With the NEW Google Analytics you can setup, implement and analyze advertising campaigns along with evaluating the return on those advertising/marketing dollars spent with relative ease. The best part is, it doesn’t leave you feeling like you just spent your time trying to push a wet rope in a straight line! Read the rest of this entry »
As the world becomes a mobile friendly environment, more and more common applications are making the move from your desktop to the Internet. It first began with accessible email from any computer in the world, but now, even important work documents and spreadsheets are available on the web thanks to one of Google’s many handy applications, appropriately named GoogleDocs.
So what exactly does this mean for the future of desktop applications? Well, as you can easily guess, they are quickly becoming a thing of the past. The move to web based applications means a great deal to the business world. In other words, access to your office anywhere, anytime and with the increased functionality similar to that of your desktop. And behind it all are the Internet users who are the ones demanding applications that work for them and that meet their specific needs.
Originally coined by SEO superstar Aaron of SEObook.com, but popularized by SEOMoz CEO Rand Fishkin, the concept of linkbait has worked its way into the Internet Marketer’s vocabulary of commonly used industry terms. Although not quite a mainstream marketing term yet, in the past six months to a year, professional and psudo-professional bloggers as well as SEO/SEM professionals have used, and overused this term. Below are a few opinions from credible sources answering the question “what is linkbait?”
“Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Attempts to create link bait are frequently employed in the overall task of search engine optimization.” - Wikipedia
“Something interesting enough to catch people’s attention [online].” - Matt Cutts
