Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts

Thursday, April 26, 2012

Is Everything Going to be Open Source One Day?

When I first started working with technology and computers it seemed that the operating systems and circuitry of the electronics were somewhat mysterious and the keys were held by arcane programmers and wizards at very closed-door corporate engineering departments.

In recent times I can think of more than a couple of instances where there were issues with the software or hardware of a manufacturer and the explanations or decoding of the problem and even suggestions as to how to remedy the problems came from the user base. I suppose this used to happen with letters to engineers that likely went unanswered and one never knew if anything came of them but the times are changing.

For example, it made national news on New Year's Eve 2008 when Microsoft's Zune (30 GB) suddenly started crashing; not just a handful but nearly every device; it seemed to be the Y2K that those of us in IT planned for but never happened was happening to the Zunes. There's a certain openness now, possibly because of a more sophisticated user base or because companies are more open about disclosing issues. David Murphy of PC World went over the root of the issue with the Zune recently and it's explained in such a way that non-programmers can readily understand it.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

10 ways to use social networking tools to promote your business

10 ways to use social networking tools to promote your business: "

Social networking sites provide unprecedented opportunities to get the word out about yourself and your business. Unfortunately, many people don’t have a clue how to use these tools effectively. Deb Shinder offers 10 practical suggestions.


Social networking tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live, and Google Buzz, are great for keeping in touch with friends and family and having fun. Once banned from the business world, they are now being allowed or even embraced on many company networks. Some employees use social networking as a quick break from work. Studies have shown that taking short breaks can make workers more productive, and hopping over to your Facebook page for five minutes to check friends’ activities can be a quick and efficient way to ‘get away’ mentally, even if you need to stay physically in place.

Other people are going further and using social networks to build business relationships with colleagues and potential clients. LinkedIn is specifically targeted to that audience. And some are taking it further still and using social networking sites to actively promote themselves and their businesses. This can be particularly effective for self-employed people, such as consultants, writers, and trainers. Many more would like to utilize these tools to increase their business presence but aren’t sure how to go about it. In this article, we’ll look at ways — beyond the obvious — to enhance your reputation (and your company’s) through social networking. After all, it’s long been recognized that word of mouth is one of the best forms of advertising, and social networking is just an online extension of that.

Note: This article is also available as a PDF download.

1: Just showing up is not enough

There’s a saying that ‘Just showing up is half the battle.’ But it’s important to remember that it’s only half. Too many people get stuck at that point. They show up; they set up accounts on a dozen or more social networks — but then they let them languish and never post. People check those sites, see no new content, and after a while give up. Having a ‘dead’ page is worse than having no page at all.

The primary reason people let their social networking sites die is lack of time. Be sure you have the time to devote before you set up a business-oriented site, and have a posting plan (for example, a reminder to yourself to post something every other day). Stick to the plan! Many people get overwhelmed because they take on too many social networks at once. If your time is limited, choose just a few (for example, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter).

2: Just because you build it, that doesn’t mean they’ll come

Even if you faithfully update your social networking pages every day and blast out clever and useful tweets from morning ’til night, it doesn’t matter much unless you have followers and friends to see those promotional masterpieces. Before you can use your social networking sites to promote yourself and your business, you need to promote those social networking sites themselves.

Privacy is a big issue when you’re sharing personal information on social sites, but for business, the more open your site is, the better. To get maximum exposure, configure your privacy settings to let everyone see what you post, not just the people who are already your followers or friends. But before you do that, be sure to read the next item in this list.

3: Separate your business and personal online lives

If you’re serious about promoting your business self, you need to set up a separate social networking ‘place’ for business-related posts. I have separate Twitter accounts for different purposes and one Facebook account for friends and family with another one for my readers and business colleagues. Another alternative is to use one social network (such as Facebook) for socializing and another (such as LinkedIn) for all your business networking.

The key here is that you want to present yourself as a professional when promoting your business, and it’s hard to do that if your old college buddies are posting things on your wall about all the hard partying you did when you were in school.

4: Use aggregator apps to better manage your social networks

One way to manage your social networking accounts is to visit each site on a daily or other regularly scheduled basis. An easier way is to use tools such as TweetDeck that let you see and manage multiple SN accounts all at once, without going to the Web sites and logging in each time. It’s a great time aver and lets you see all your updates ‘at a glance’ in different columns, as shown in Figure A. When you’re doing it all from one app, it’s much easier to remember to post to all of your social networks on schedule.

Figure A

Aggregator apps let you manage multiple social networks at once.

5: Don’t flood the market

Posting regularly is important, but it’s just as important not to over-post. If you use an aggregator app that makes posting easy, you might be especially tempted to fire it up in the morning and send out five or 10 posts all at once on all your networks. It’s much better to space them out throughout the day, so that your followers and friends don’t get overwhelmed or lose interest in what you have to say after seeing several posts in a row from you. Facebook, for example, will hide some of the posts in your friends’ feed if there are many in a row from the same person, so they might not even see them all if they don’t explicitly click the link to see more.

A nice feature in TweetDeck (the PC version, not the more limited iPhone/iPad version) is that you can enter a post and then schedule it to be posted later, as shown in Figure B.

Figure B

Some clients, such as TweetDeck, allow you to schedule updates to be posted later.

6: It’s not all about you

Maybe you think that since you’re promoting yourself (or your business), all you need to do is post about what you’re doing. I see people who put out post after post about themselves but never seem to participate in the discussions or otherwise indicate that they’re also reading their friends’ posts.

Social networking is designed to be interactive — it’s most effective when you don’t just use it as a broadcast medium for one-to-many messages, but also truly interact with your contacts. That means letting them know that you’re reading their posts, whether by posting comments, hitting the Like link, retweeting their relevant posts, or sending direct messages. This is the way you really connect — and it’s those two-way connections that are most likely to benefit your career or business.

7: Strike a balance

The content of your posts counts. While you shouldn’t get too personal, you shouldn’t be too business-like, either. That is, your contacts don’t want to just see post after post about the product or service you provide, until it seems that it’s just spam. They’ll unfollow or ‘hide’ you pretty quickly if that happens.

Let your business associates get to know you a little — the professional you, that is. Post occasionally about your activities that are relevant to your business. For instance, you can post the funny story about what happened to you on the plane on the way to a business conference. Or you can post about the great book you just read about your area of expertise. Even though these don’t directly promote your business, they provide a glimpse of you as a person, without getting overly personal. People like to do business with people they know.

8: Don’t just link

Some people use their social networking sites to post links — lots and lots of links. When those links are relevant to your business, that’s great, but it’s not enough. Think of how you feel when you go to a Web site that’s nothing but links to other Web sites. Do you see that site as a real resource or just as a way station for getting to the real resources?

Use the link as a way to highlight your own expertise and opinions and to (subtly) help promote yourself. If you find a great article about a topic in your field of interest/work, instead of just tweeting the URL, post the URL in your blog along with a one- or two-paragraph summary of your thoughts about the article. What parts are best? Are there statements made with which you disagree? Can you give a real-world example of some concept the article discusses? Then your tweets and FB posts can point to your blog post instead of the original article, which gets you more hits on your blog and more important, makes the readers think of you more as a collaborator/content provider/expert commentator rather than just someone who posted a URL.

9: Dress it up with multimedia

Sometimes, words just aren’t enough — and often they don’t stick in a person’s mind nearly as long, nor as positively, as visual images do. Today’s social networking services make it easy to dress up your posts with more than just text, and those features aren’t just for sharing pictures of your pets and your family vacation.

Are you a consultant, posting about a recent high-profile project? Add a few photos taken onsite (with the permission of the client, of course — who’s likely to be happy to get the free advertising). If a picture is worth a thousand words, what’s a video worth? Want to promote your reputation as a freelance software developer? How about a video tutorial showing what your latest app can do?

10: Use paid advertising wisely

Many of the social networking sites, such as Facebook, support themselves by taking paid advertising. You can buy an ad; the advantage of this is that it will appear on the pages of people you don’t know. It’s a way to introduce yourself and your business to strangers without sending them friend requests (which many will ignore and consider rude coming from people they don’t know). The key here is to make the ad interesting and intriguing enough to draw them to your own site. Otherwise, it will be ignored, as most online advertising is.


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"

(Via 10 Things.)

Sunday, August 15, 2010

In Depth: Why you must keep track of your online profile

Very good article here....

In Depth: Why you must keep track of your online profile: "

You might not realise it yet, but you're a brand. All this time you've been walking and talking and posting on the internet, thinking you were a person, when you've been a brand all along. Who'd have thought it?

All of your activities have been contributing to the brand, building a profile for it and even advertising it.

Why is it important to think of yourself as a brand? Because as information about individuals becomes increasingly available online, you want to make sure that information is not only accurate but also positive and succinct.

For example, this weekend I arrived early to meet a friend at his friend's house. I didn't know this friend of a friend, so on my way there I Googled him. I found that I was already following him on Twitter and discovered his blog, the company he worked for, his Facebook page, his Flickr account and so on. In 10 minutes, I thought I had a pretty good profile of his interests (cats, anime, politics) and personality (funny, busybody).

However, if I'd been really committed, I could have found all sorts of information. Deep Googling of my own name threw up fan-fiction from a magazine forum I used to work on, as well as some gadget fanboys threatening violence against my person for underscoring one of their preferred devices five years ago.

It wouldn't be good for a future employer to see that as one of my main hits, but thanks to good profile management and search engine optimisation, it's buried deep in Google's archive.

What differentiates your brand from you, the person? Well, everything you do as a person can contribute to the brand, but it shouldn't necessarily. Many other people can contribute to the brand, too – sometimes unconsciously, sometimes negatively.

All the data and media that we're generating and adding to the internet and social networks is part of this database, and additions are increasingly automated (location tracking on Latitude or Gowalla, media tracking on LibraryThing, LoveFilm or Raptr) so there's a need for effective filters to reveal where important events have occurred and manage their impact.

Media and social monitoring is about tracking any brand across all media. Simply put, it's about making sure you hear everything important that people are saying about your brand, and filtering out the noise, the incorrect results and the homonyms so you can reach out to the positive and negative people out there – to reward the friendly and correct the unfriendly.

Radian 2

It can vary from simple, free tools such as Google Alerts to complicated expensive tools such as Radian6.

Egosurfing – the act of searching for your own name – is therefore little different to standard media monitoring. The only real difference is your lack of resources – most of us aren't going to spend our entire salary on a Nielsen BuzzMetrics subscription. Nor are we going to have the time or the staff to set up and maintain a complicated monitoring tool. We just need something quick and dirty to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Taking this into consideration, we've picked four products that enable you to track your online profile. We've had Radian6 recommended to us by no less than Microsoft's Internet Marketing department, so we've included it here even though it's high-end stuff.

Google Alerts is a no-brainer because it's free and simple. Finally, Social Mention and Trackur offer easy social media monitoring. There are several tools we would have liked to examine, but which were too niche for our deliberately wide-ranging test.

Technorati is an older tool that only rates blogs and uses a fairly arbitrary metric. Blog Pulse is similarly blog-focused, but more up-to-date. Board Reader, as you might guess, tracks message boards and forums. Scoutlabs and SM2 are similar to Radian6, but Scoutlabs is cheaper and lighter on features, whereas SM2 is more useful for PR and marketing. AlertRank sorts your Google Alerts for you and is also free, so we've included it under Google Alerts.

Google alerts 2

Almost all of these, and the products on test, output RSS feeds. Put these into a feed reader and you've got a bespoke social media tracker – if you're willing to take the time to configure it.

Finding your brand online is only the first step. Next you need to ensure that the results that come top are positive, that your own content comes first and that you have procedures in place to deal with crises or negative feedback. Profile management is just starting to grow in importance. It can't be long before a standardised metric is accepted by social media experts and, more importantly, HR departments, meaning that personal profile monitoring will be key to job applications.

Now is a good time to start shaping your profile so you can become the brand you want to be.

Radian6
Price: $500 (10,000 results), $1,000 (25,000 results), $1,500 (50,000 results) + $100 per user, per month.
Supplier:www.radian6.com

Two separate 'social media gurus' have recommended Radian6 to us. Getting hands-on with it is initially daunting; the highly polished interface makes it seem more complicated than it is.

Radian 1

Thankfully, no-one's allowed to even use it without a thorough demo, and there are video tutorials to further explain it all.

The heart of the tool is in its configurability. It allows you to set up keyword profiles, choosing languages, media types, regions and sources, and output the resulting data in a variety of colourful and useful ways. It also includes team management tools, so someone like Stephen Fry can identify problem content and assign it to someone else.

While this power is wonderful, it's not so necessary for smaller users, especially as the base price is so high and it takes so much time to configure and maintain. If you're a media personality, the power and flexibility of this are great – but it's not really useful for most individuals' purposes.

Verdict: 4/5

Google Alerts
Price: Free
Supplier:www.google.com/alerts

Google Alerts Egosurfing starts when you first type your name into a Google box and hit [Enter]. Google Alerts is just an automated version of that, and deceptively simple with it. You put your keyword in, and hit [Enter].

Google alerts 1

It then starts delivering digests of all the mentions of your keyword across the web. If you want to configure it further, you can specify the type of content you're tracking (blogs, video, groups and so on), the frequency of the emails you receive and how many results you get (a measly maximum of 50).

It's hard to detect a difference between the results this finds and those of Radian6, but it's the output tools that Radian6 throws up and the way it rates content for you that give it such a large edge (forgetting, for the moment, its huge cost).

Alerts has been mashed up to create AlertRank, a separate rating tool that sorts alerts before they hit your inbox, but it doesn't match the flexibility of the bigger products.

Google Alerts is free and comprehensive, but if you want more results or filtered results, look elsewhere.

Verdict: 3/5

Trackur Free
Price: Free (one search), $18 (five searches), $88 (25 searches), $197 (250 searches), $297 (unlimited searches).
Supplier:www.trackur.com

Claiming a 60-second set-up time, Trackur performs a similar search to Google Alerts from a keyword or search string. However, it's slightly more powerful, allowing non-exact matches, mandatory includes and excludes, domain exceptions and unlimited results (which can be seen as a graph).

Trackur 1

Once you've run a search, you can export it to CSV, grab it as an RSS feed or get it through email. It also includes sentiment tracking, colour-coding the results by traffic lights so you can easily see which are positive and negative.

Sadly though, despite several searches for very famous names, we never saw any sentiment other than neutral. Trakur also limits you to one saved search per account.

If you want more, you must subscribe (or create duplicate accounts) which isn't particularly desirable, but not initially expensive either at $18 for five – though the costs can rise quickly if you get into setting up corporate accounts.

Verdict: 3/5

Social Mention
Price: Free
Supplier:www.socialmention.com

Like Trackur, Social Mention aggregates user-generated content. It also has the same ability to customise your search: you can select the type of content, the date and so on. It does everything Trackur does, and it's free for any number of searches.

Social mention 1

Its sentiment tracking actually works and is useful, though you can't click through to see it. Social Mention breaks down the top keywords, users, hashtags, postrank and sources for each search and provides you with CSV data for all of them, as well as letting you sign up to alerts that are at least as good as Google Alerts. It even gives you some handy stats about how you're reaching out to your audience.

Finally, Social Mention produces more results than Trackur does (though not as many as Google or Radian6), can be integrated with your search bar and, though it doesn't let you save searches, allows you to export as many RSS feeds or email alerts as you like.

Combined with the fact that it's free, Social Mention is an easy winner here.

Verdict: 5/5



"

 

(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

Monday, May 24, 2010

Facebook Privacy Settings

For those of you who could use a little overview of how exactly to adjust the now infamous Facebook privacy settings, Macworld/Computerworld have produced a nice guide.

Saturday, February 13, 2010

How to use Facebook Chat with iChat

Very cool tip!

How to use Facebook Chat with iChat: "First, find your Facebook username by going to http://www.facebook.com/your_user/. Next, Open iChat, then select iChat » Preferences and click on the Accounts tab.



Click on the + (plus) sign to add a new account, with these settings:


  • Account Type is Jabber Account

  • Account name is your_user@chat.facebook.com, and enter your password

  • Click the drop-down arrow to reveal Server options. Enter chat.facebook.com as the server name.

  • Enter 5222 as the port and click Done.


Click Done again, and you are good to go.



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(Via MacOSXHints.com.)

Thursday, February 4, 2010

Gary Marshall: Facebook: it's the budget airline of tech

Fun to read, can't say I disagree much....

Gary Marshall: Facebook: it's the budget airline of tech: "

When Facebook turned five, we - OK, I - said its success wouldn't last.

That may have been premature. Facebook is six today, and it's still piling on the users: last year it had 150 million active users, and now it's got 350 million - 200 million of whom appear to be spamming us with invites for Mafia Wars.

So were we wrong, or is Facebook just taking longer to jump the shark than we predicted?

It certainly looks like the former. The continuing rise of Facebook demonstrates something pretty amazing: the way in which technology is becoming increasingly available, affordable and egalitarian.

People we'd never have expected to see online in a million years are now online, and more often than not Facebook is the thing that's got their attention.

So, Facebook is brilliant, I'm a great big numpty and everything in social networking land is groovy.

Not so fast.

Facebook isn't popular because it's good. It's popular because it's popular.

Facebook is the budget airline of tech. If Margaret Thatcher were to start a company that ran around giving small children Chinese burns, blasting Jedward through your windows at 3am and interrupting your thoughts every fifteen seconds with the wit and wisdom of Katie Price, it'd still be more popular and more loved than budget airlines. And yet millions of people fly with them every year.

Why do they do it? There are two kinds of passenger: passengers new to the airline, and passengers who've flown with them before. The former are excited, their brains full of the possibilities.

Grin and bear it

The latter grin and bear it in the knowledge that it's the only way to get where they want to go at the price they want to pay. If they don't, no problem: the airline just does a few more rubbish ads to attract some new passengers.

Facebook's rather like that. To its constant stream of new arrivals it's a playground, a world of joy and adventure. They haven't been on long enough to get sick of the oversharers and quiz takers - in fact, the odds are that they'll be the oversharers and quiz takers - and they weren't on Facebook when the various privacy controversies took place.

They're far too busy playing FarmVille to worry about the enormous amounts of information a remote and unaccountable corporation is collating about them.

To the old hands, it's a compromise: they're not keen on the privacy implications, on the way in which the Live Feed/News Feed distinction buries everything important and ensures you see only trivia, and they'd rather not spend half of their time fending off invitations to play stupid games, take part in stupid quizzes, or become fans of stupid products - but that's where everyone else happens to be.

Of course, not everyone grins and bears it. Some commit Facebook suicide; far more simply stop logging in.

But Facebook doesn't care, because every new sign-up invites all their friends, who invite all their friends, who invite… eventually Facebook will do something really, spectacularly stupid, or everybody will hit their 150-friend mental maximum, or The Kids will realise that Facebook's becoming OldPeopleBook and will head for a service their parents can't use to annoy them.

For now, though, Facebook is flying high. See you next year!



"



(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Crowdsourcing Comedy on Amazon Reviews

David Pogue just wrote about this, OMG, it's hysterical if you go to Amazon and read the reviews!

Crowdsourcing Comedy on Amazon Reviews: "Some unexpected humor can be found in the reviews of the world's largest online retailer."



(Via Pogue's Posts.)

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Halloween Horrors: 5 Spooky TV Shows You Can Watch Online

The Adam Curtis videos are quite interesting!

Halloween Horrors: 5 Spooky TV Shows You Can Watch Online: "From suspenseful classics and offal cook-offs to truly terrifying documentaries, the internet has you covered when it comes to scary stuff to assault your eyeballs."



(Via Wired: Top Stories.)

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Opinion: The Ten Commandments of social networking

Opinion: The Ten Commandments of social networking: "

Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Well, perhaps not, but everybody else is busily cataloguing their entire lives on Twitter, Facebook and various other social networks.

So how do you ensure your status updates don't lead to unemployment, homelessness and drinking Special Brew under a bridge?

How can you ensure your tweets aren't a turn-off?

The answer is simple: follow the path of righteousness and stick to our Ten Commandments.

1. Thou shalt not overshare

Some things are best kept between you and your partner, doctor or psychiatrist. For example, if your update contains the words 'pus', 'warts' or 'prolapse', you probably shouldn't post it.

2. Thou shalt not forget who's following you

It's easy to add lots of friends or to attract lots of followers, but it's equally easy to forget that your boss, your mum, your partner or your angry, violent ex is reading the stuff you post online. The golden rule of sharing is never post something you wouldn't want your mum, your employer, a judge or a potential romantic partner to see.

3. Thou shalt not post about other people

It's very exciting to know something that lots of other people don't, but if your friend or relative has a new job, has fallen pregnant, has broken up with their long term partner or is going in for gender reassignment surgery - which, let's face it, means they've had a hell of a week - it's not your job to tell the entire planet.

Similarly, if you're angry with a certain person who was supposed to do a certain thing but of course they didn't and you're so angry about it I mean it's not as if it's that hard is it and you've done your share and it's not fair and… maybe you should just tell them directly instead of making 200 people think they're back in primary school.

4. Thou shalt not spam

Spam is, of course, evil - and while it's not pushing herbal Viagra, inviting 25 pals to play a dumb quiz is still spam. So is polluting the Internet with constant updates on whatever game / magic space bear creator / complete and utter waste of time you're currently using, or posting promo codes for unbeatable special offers.

5. Thou shalt not spoil things for everyone

The box at the top of Facebook says 'What's on your mind?' and the one on Twitter, 'What are you doing?' Neither says 'please tell the entire Internet the winner of the X Factor / the twist at the end of the latest blockbuster / the ending of District 9'.

6. Thou shalt not live for today

There's an entire website, Lamebook - some of which isn't safe for work - detailing the stuff people post on Facebook that they're likely to regret in the not too distant future. We particularly like the post by the girl with the bruised scrotum.

7. Thou shalt not ignore the privacy settings

Social networks want you to share everything by default. Of course they do: they want the traffic. Some settings are more sinister than others, so for example Facebook Ads may use your profile picture to flog stuff to your friends. If you don't go digging for these settings you're probably sharing more than you'd like.

8. Thou shalt not post first and think later

If you get drunk and buy a helicopter on eBay you'll regret it in the morning. The same applies to drunken posts, photos of you making a fool of yourself or anything else that seems a good idea in the heat of the moment. The Internet doesn't have a delete button, and even if you remove the photos or posts later you can't be sure that someone hasn't already stored them in their Big Blackmail Folder.

9. Thou shalt not post nonsense

Months or even years of goodwill can be undone with a single stupid post. Angry political rants, controversial viewpoints and tinfoil hat conspiracy woo is best left to blogs.

10. Thou shalt not be boring

'I'm hungry!' 'I'm making dinner!' 'Dinner is nearly ready!' 'I'm eating dinner!' 'I enjoyed my dinner!' 'Why is nobody following me any more?' Just because you can post every single thing you do - or that your kids do - doesn't mean you should. Stick to the edited highlights and think of status updates and tweets as your Greatest Hits.



"



(Via TechRadar: All latest feeds.)

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Got a Burning Question? Ask the Net

Got a Burning Question? Ask the Net: "Until recently, David Pogue has been relying on Twitter for all his obscure-question-answering needs. Last week, he stumbled upon a new, better way to harness the Net for answers."



(Via Pogue's Posts.)

Thursday, July 16, 2009

10 Endearing Habits of a Geeky Spouse

Wow, this is surprisingly accurate. #5 is my favorite, #1 is my area to work on, I wish #3 was me a bit more, I'll have to practice.


10 Endearing Habits of a Geeky Spouse: "Many of our geek attributes are not, to put it mildly, magnets to the prospective spouses. But some of our traits are endearing to 'others.' Hey -- Even Mr. Spock's dad married a human ...



"



(Via Clippings.)

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Monitor (and improve) your car's performance

Monitor (and improve) your car's performance: "If you're looking to monitor your car's performance or simply repair it yourself, you've come to the right place. We've found some apps that will help you do just that."



(Via Clippings.)

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Seven Ways to Improve Your E-mail Messages

Seven Ways to Improve Your E-mail Messages: "You are judged by the writing style, tone, language, and mistakes in your e-mails every single day. We're all so optimistic we believe people will overlook our e-mail typos and mistakes, while at the same time we privately label those who send us sloppy e-mails as careless, confused, or ineffective. A free e-mail service, GMX, did a survey and found the majority of Americans (58 percent) think less of people based on their e-mail content. Let's look at seven ways to help your e-mails label you as smart rather than stoopid."



(Via Computerworld Breaking News.)

Saturday, July 4, 2009

Sites that help you lodge complaints

Sites that help you lodge complaints: "If you've been wronged or you're just not happy with the way you were treated, there are some sites on the Web that will help you get your voice heard."



(Via Clippings.)