It's that time once again boys and girls and the office is all a buzz in anticipation; no, I'm not talking about Christmas, my kids are a buzz about that, I'm talking about DrupalCon Chicago Session Voting!

After writing recently about the Brick Wall of Learning Drupal, I got a lot of responses from people frustrated with trying to learn Drupal. Clearly this a big issue. Some of the big challenges are discovering "best practices" and finding the "good modules." While there is no quick and easy answer to learning Drupal, there are 5 ways to find the information you are looking for.

1. Websites

Whether you like them or not, QR codes are slowly being embedded into the digital marketplace. I am always on the lookout for a random QR code experience. Below are recent findings and ideas for my fellow codies!

Retail

One of the best ways to take advantage of social media is to use it for increasing your brand awareness. Companies have found many creative ways to use social media and increase their reputation through leveraging the following five tools:

1. Facebook
   

Want to increase site traffic and page views? Try adding Social Sharing and Bookmarking Widgets to your website. These widgets let visitors share your content with their friends through email, recommend it on Facebook, tweet it with Twitter, bookmark it on Del.icio.us and much more. It's a fast and easy way to tap into the ever growing Social Media Network and use it to your advantage.

Why use Social Sharing and Bookmarking Widgets?

Yesterday, Klout updated their popular influence tracking application to include daily score updates and a refreshed algorithm. For many, this meant sizeable bumps in their own personal scores (mine jumped from the low 40s to the low 60s).

After celebratory virtual high fives on Twitter, I got to thinking.

Have you ever found yourself staring at your computer, completely lost and utterly drained? Some call it writers block. Whatever it is, it is not helping your productivity. Actually, it seems to only occur on the day or week you must be the most productive. I seem to be having one of those weeks.

If you have ever been involved in an organic search optimization (SEO) and a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you have probably noticed how markedly different they are. If you don't do this everyday this is probably quite confusing.

Both, after all, are just driving traffic from the search engines. A person searches on a keyword phrase at a site like Google, your listing pops up and they click over to your site. SEO and PPC should be the same, right?

Not exactly.

The book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is about the importance of intrinsic motivation. The foundation of the book is that there are three levels of human motivation:

1. Basic needs – survival, food, sex, etc.
2. External rewards and punishment
3. Internal interest and purpose