Wise words

Wise words. pic.twitter.com/yU0yW7XdIR

— Ash Ketchum (@AshOfPalletTown) September 29, 2013

Steve Jobs' Advice for Entrepreneurs

Jobs' excellent advice for entrepreneurs.

Google is testing new AdSense ad units

Google testing new AdSense ad units that scrollably expand (like an accordion). also round arrow vs old square one pic.twitter.com/tPDLe5H3ot

— aaron wall (@aaronwall) September 8, 2013

If you can fake it, you can make it

"The only thing stopping you from becoming what you want [to be], is you".

Quick response from Hootsuite

After contacting them, Hootsuite was able to fix the scheduling bug pretty quickly.

@hiperkarma It was a widespread issue but we've just made a small change. Please try again and let us know! ^NW

— HootSuite Helpers (@HootSuite_Help) August 20, 2013

Hootsuite scheduling bug

Turns out I'm not the only one getting frustrated because of Hootsuite's latest bug.

@hootsuite Here's the latest message to get stuck trying to schedule. pic.twitter.com/RqT4LfXjED

— Paul O'Rear (@paulorear) August 19, 2013

Since yesterday, when you try to schedule a message, the Hootsuite send button will sometimes just "hang there". When it happens you aren't able to send any other messages for at least a few hours. Logging out and back in again doesn't help. I hope Hootsuite fixes this quickly.

I am a long time Hootsuite user and I like their product, but I hate how their constant (mostly cosmetic) "upgrades" always end up breaking one or more things.

When Tweets go wrong

When you want to tweet a link to an infographic, don't get so carried away with adding hashtags that you forget to include your link.

Social business news (Infographic). #socbiz #Marketing #jive #adobe #ibm #Oracle #salesforce #hootsuite

— Jim Lundy (@JimLundy) August 3, 2013

When you notice your mistake, delete your old tweet and create a new one instead replying to the botched one with the link. And when you finally include the link, don't forget to add #s in front of your hashtags.

Social business news (Infographic). http://t.co/Rg9b9FzuZ6 #socbiz #Marketing #jive adobe IBM Oracle Salesforce hootsuite

— Jim Lundy (@JimLundy) August 3, 2013

Your Reputation is Priceless, Don't Damage It

"It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."
--Warren Buffett

Over time, your reputation is the most valuable currency you have in business. It's the invisible key that either opens or closes doors of professional opportunity. Especially in an age where everything is forever recorded and accessible, your reputation has to be guarded like the most sacred treasure. It's the one item that, once lost, you can never get back.

Keep your eye on the prize

Connect what you're doing today, with where you want to be tomorrow. That should be all the incentive you need. If you can't map your future success to your current responsibilities, then it's time to find a new opportunity.

Don't Wait to Be Told What to Do

You'll never get ahead by waiting for someone to tell you what to do. Saying "nobody asked me to do this" is a guaranteed recipe for failure. Err on the side of doing too much, not too little. Don't act like a Millennial.

Free Mind Mapper

Mind maps are an excellent way to record brainstorming sessions. MyndBook is a free to use web service that lets its users create mind maps with ease.

You start by creating an account on the website either by providing your email address or by connecting your Facebook account. You can then create a 'book'. This book can have numerous pages on which you can add your mind maps.

Features:

• User-friendly.
• It's a web service. No need to install additional software on your computer, laptop or tablet.
• Mind maps can be shared with Facebook friends.
• Various nodes and branches can be created for your maps.
• It's free.
• Nodes and branches can be re-sized.
• You can add titles and descriptions for branches.

Advice from Pippa Malmgren

I've been very lucky; a lot of interesting things came my way. I used to be like the old Soviet Union with a rigid Five Year Plan. That worked well but I also learned to make room for surprises outside the original plan; it's a matter of finding a balance between the two.

If you love what you do, you'll be better at it than anybody and the money will follow.

---

Cultures that do not accept, let alone celebrate, failure, don't have the capacity to innovate. Failure is needed in order to learn and innovate, and when you've nothing to lose, the opportunities for risk-taking and creativity drastically improve.

---

All big businesses started out at the kitchen table or in the garage. Two thirds of the net new jobs are created by firms that employ fewer than 50 people. So SMBs are critical to economic success. They may not have easy access to capital, but this is actually a huge advantage for them. Capital constraints force them to act with immense discipline, and that's how good businesses are founded.

---

Nobody tells you that running a small business is a character test. People will tell you your ideas are crazy. This forces you to decide what you really believe and to stand, usually alone, behind your beliefs.

---

(Pippa Malmgren is a politics and policy expert who used to be Special Assistant to the President of the United States for Economic Policy on the National Economic Council and former member of the U.S. President's Working Group on Financial Markets.)

How to create the perfect #Tweet

Points to remember:

• avoid capitalizing words, unless you want to look as if you're shouting.
• link your tweet to a source but make sure it's worth a click.
• leave some empty space so people can add a comment when they share your tweet.

Mixamo Is Building A Platform For Game Developers To Create Their Own 3D Characters

With app stores becoming ever more competitive, game makers have had to upgrade from building 2D games to creating 3D titles. That has meant even more creative and intensive work for artists and producers.

Mixamo offers a web-based service that helps developers tool and animate 3D characters by making rigging and animation easier. A developer can upload the mesh for a character, place joint locators and locator rings to figure out how to make the character move, and then run Mixamo's auto-rigging software. For console titles, the company says they can cut the cost of 500 seconds of animations by anywhere from 70 to 80 percent compared to standard techniques like keyframing and motion capture.

How Your Brain Can Turn Anxiety into Calmness

Physician, author, speaker, researcher and consultant Martin L. Rossman, MD, discusses how to reduce stress and anxiety, relieve pain and change lifestyle habits.

Burglars are using social media sites to target you

The flip side of using social media.

Everything you share can and will be used against you.

The average person is exposed to 3,000 marketing message per day

7 Words You Should Avoid Using In Your Sales Pitch

1. Exciting

There is no word more boring than the word "exciting." Claiming that something is "exciting" tells everybody that it's not.

2. Innovative

Same here. I can't remember ever hearing Apple claim to be innovative; they just are. They don't have to point it out.

3. Honestly

When this word comes out of your mouth, it makes everything else you've said so far seem like you were probably lying.

4. Discount

Let's leave this tired old term back in the world where "But, wait! There's more!" is state-of-the-art sales patter. Look, your stuff has a price and maybe you've got some flexibility. But offering a "discount"? How cheesy.

5. Guarantee

Everyone in the world who has an ounce of sense knows that a "guarantee" means absolutely nothing.

6. Opportunity

Calling any sales situation an "opportunity" is telling the customer that you're all about closing the deal. Just like any other opportunist.

7. Collaborate

How did this dreadful word get into the business vocabulary, anyway? Yes, you've got to work together with people to get stuff done, but "collaborate"? Hey, that's what the Vichy France did with the Nazis.

Matt Cuts on Advertorials

Google's disinformation agent Matt Cutts on advertorials:

What's a niche? 10 Definitions

• Seth Godin:

"if it's not mass, if it's just for some, not all, it's a niche."

• Jeremy Jones:

"a niche is a specific target marketed topic you can become known for"

• Content Marketing Institute:

"a niche needs to be small enough that there is the possibility to position you or your company as the leading expert in the world at that niche. Most companies go too broad with their niche (hence, not a good niche to pick). When you try to create content for everyone, you often end up being of little value to anyone."

• John Blue is the Chief of Community Creation at Truffle Media:

"Niche for our needs are well defined groups of people interested in a similar issues or topic. For example pork producers who have more than 30,000 pigs is a very defined group of people. Niche does not necessarily mean small numbers of people. You can have a well defined group and have hundreds of thousands of people. Examples would include people interested in _just_ IU basketball, people interested in ice fishing, or people interested in cattle rodeos."

• HeidiCohen, President of Riverside Marketing StrategiesHeidiCohen.com:

"A niche is a well-defined segment of a larger market. The more specific you are in delineating your niche audience; the easier it is to target your marketing. A niche market provides an organization with the opportunity to uniquely fulfill the needs of its members based on their interests, past behavior, social media preferences and role in the purchase process. When defining your target market, it's useful to create a marketing persona as well as a social media persona to better understand your audience and the tradeoffs they're willing to make."

• Eric Spellmann, founder of EricSpellmann.com:

"I define a niche as simply "a specialized area of interest." On the Internet, at least with my customers, I have discovered that the businesses that have a more targeted, laser-focused niche do better than those with a vague, Wal-Mart-like goal. While a niche product has a smaller potential customer base, it also has fewer competitors to rise above."

• Jim Cockrum:

"From an online marketers perspective (my perspective specifically) a "niche" is a topic, item or concept that has the potential to be an online rallying point for those with similar interests and needs related to the given topic, item or concept. The true opportunity in niche marketing is for the leaders, mavericks, and trend setters in those niche markets. Done well, you can become a trusted source of information and leadership on virtually any topic, item or concept as long as there are others online with similar interests or curiosities."

• Shawn Collins, AffiliateSummit.com:

"Niche is simply synonymous with a vertical or topic."

• Bob Speyer, co-founder of WebSuccessTeam.com:

"A niche is a defined marketplace and targets a select segment of a larger group. In the social media sphere, a niche is a group of people that share common interests, hobbies or professional associations. Often times these special groups incorporate community guidelines. Brands can utilize niches to drill down and target consumers in less congested environments other than Facebook and Twitter, like Instagram, Pinterest and Foodspotting."

• Chris Brown, Founder of Resources-Results.com and Branding & Marketing:

"A niche is defined as a narrow target market. I think the word niche means small and focused. A niche can be described by a variety of demographic, psychographic and geographic qualifiers. While some people might define your niche by the products or services you are selling, to me It is more about who you are selling to rather than what you are selling. A very broad niche might include a whole industry: Computer users. Automobile drivers. Architects. A narrower niche might be: First time mothers of twins with household income of over $70K."

Keep pushing, pushing, pushing...

The biggest mistake innovators make is to think all they have to do is to introduce a new idea or system, and then everyone will embrace it. No way. To change a system, you have to keep intervening.

Read more about what innovators do when others fear change.

Learn to let go...

It can be difficult for an entrepreneur to move away from the old adage, "If I want something done right, I should just do it myself." But great leaders ensure that their employees have the opportunity to learn and operate independently. Loosening the reins not only fosters growth in your team, it frees you up for higher-level tasks.

Don't make your customers jump through hoops

Potential customers aren't going to jump through hoops just to interact with your brand. Remove barriers to entry, like forcing users to log into Facebook to access your promotion. The more steps potential customers have to go through in order to participate in your promotion, the less likely they will be to enter.

A free utility to make sharing files easier

Email was originally never meant to be used to transfer files. As files get bigger and different companies use different tools and techniques to filter incoming emails, this is becoming more and more painfully clear. Some servers won't accept emails with "big" attachments (whatever "big" may be), others will strip certain files (such as zip files) from emails,... There really is no way for the sender to know that the email he sent reached the recipient with all the files he attached still there.

A solution is to include a link to the files instead of attaching it to the email. FTPUploader is a small and free utility for Windows that enables you to upload files with a simple right-click.

It's very easy to use: locate the file, right-click and select FTPUploader. The file will be uploaded to your server and the url for the uploaded file will be copied to your clipboard, ready for you to paste in your email message (or blog post).

10 Things To Do Every Workday

1. Read something related to my industry.
2. Read something related to business development.
3. Send two emails to touch base with old colleagues.
4. Empty my private client inbox by responding to all career coaching questions within one business day.
5. Check in with each team member on their progress.
6. Have a short non-work related conversation with every employee.
7. Review my top three goals for my company that are focused on its growth.
8. Identify and execute one task to support each of my top three goals.
9. Post five valuable pieces of content on all my major social media accounts.
10. Take a full minute to appreciate what I have and how far I've come.

By J.T. O'Donnell.

Not all TLDs support whoisguard

When you register a domain name and buy whois protection from your registrar it's important to remember that not all TLDs (top level domains) allow the registrant to hide his info behind such a service.

Registries that don't allow you to hide your information from the public:

• .in
• .us
• .coop
• .es
• .eu
• .travel
• .uk

Some registrars (such as Name) will warn you about this. Others, like Namecheap for example, will happily let you buy their whoisguard service, but you won't be able to apply it to your domain. Always check the rules when buying domains in a TLD you are not familiar with.

Why it's hard to predict the costs of seo and why great seo is expensive.

This infographic from SEOBook explains why it has become harder and harder to estimate the costs of an ongoing seo campaign and why successful long-term seo campaigns are expensive.

Celebrating 7 Years of Twitter

Twitter celebrates its 7th birthday with a video.

Yesterday marked seven years since Twitter's creator, Jack Dorsey, sent the very first tweet. Today Twitter has become one of the most active sites with 200 million active users sending more than 400 million tweets daily.

Use hashtag #Twitter7 to follow the celebration.

Bets of Bitcoin

Bets of Bitcoin is a prediction market. It's a site where bets are made towards the outcome of future events. The winners will get their wagers back plus earn the wagers from those who lost (less a small commission paid to the site operators).

Anyone can create a bet statement. Bets range from who will win a certain election to what the price of gold will be at the end of the month. The difference between Bets of Bitcoin and other prediction markets, such as Intrade and Betfair, is that Bets of Bitcoin is completely anonymous. To place a bet you deposit bitcoins and you get paid in bitcoins if you win.

What is the maximum length of a Twitter username?

A: The maximum length of a Twitter username (or Twitter handle as the company officially calls them) is 15 characters.

Twitter Tweet Cheat Sheet To Increase Engagement

How a few tiny changes to your tweets can tremendously increase the effectiveness of your Twitter campaigns:

Matt Langer: "Stop Calling it Curation"

Matt Langer on content curation and "the Curator's Code":

What we do online every day is no different, and neither the introduction of an audience nor the torrent of information we wade through on a daily basis does anything at all to alter or enhance this fundamental behavior. Call it sifting, call it filtering, call it editing even, but it sure as hell isn't curating.

Which makes it all very curious to me that those most eager to self-desribe as "curators" are often the most vocal in their concerns with "proper" attribution. And attribution I can get behind! Footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies-I'm a big fan! I'm also a big fan of the internet's native form of attribution, the hyperlink. Yet the Curator's Code seeks to bolt an additional piece of ultimately vestigial metadata onto this native form-the "ᔥ"-an addition only made necessary so as to distinguish this one particular form of attribution from that other one which Popova and others are so eager to see elevated: the "via."

Now the "hat-tip" has long been a simple courtesy, not some kind of moral commandment; its omission from any citation is in no way the sort of punishable offense that failing to attribute any borrowed content would be. That's because usually the greatest sin of omitting a "via" is denying someone else the moment of flattery that comes with the recognition that some other person follows whatever it is they have to share, whereas omitting a link to original content is, you know, stealing.

But as far as value-adds go the "via" generally offers little more than a cookie crumb trail of others who have also read the material in question-the digital equivalent of finding the previous borrower's name scribbled on the card in the back of a library book. Which is neat, I guess? But come on now, none of us here is Averroes rediscovering Aristotle or Poggio Bracciolini serendipitously plucking Lucretius off a dusty shelf-this is people posting pictures of yawning kittens on Tumblr blogs we're talking about here.

And yet we see this sort of thing happen all the time on the internet, all these great hand-wringing debates over "proper" attribution ("proper" usually meaning "sending traffic my way as a reward for finding something first").

And it all stinks to high heaven of self-importance.

Think of how often the words "broke the reblog chain" get bandied about in breathy Tumblr scolds, as if the put-off bloggers behind these scolds are all willfully ignorant of the possibility-hard to believe! I know!-that someone could have run across the same piece of original content elsewhere on the internet. Or think of how often one link aggregator complains that another link aggregator has "stolen" his material without giving proper credit. Aggregators! Arguing about who aggregated what first!!

So much ink has been spilled over something so ridiculously petty. People seem downright incapable of the innocent excitement that comes from seeing other people enjoy a piece of solid writing-and this sadly seems unlikely to change, at least until we change the very language we use to describe it, since by calling the activity of people who traffic in links "curation" instead of "sharing" we imbue it with all sorts of hollow importance and circumscribe it as something wholly apart from the selfless and benevolent sharing of knowledge.

The self-described "curator" of the modern day web seeks special recognition for what is nothing more than a pattern of behavior that distinguishes an individual from those with uncurious, idle minds. Rather than issuing demerits on the latter we're instead being invited-no! implored, rather, via an "actionable code of ethics"-to heap praise upon the former. And I'm sorry, but I refuse to be bullied into giving people credit for shit they're supposed to be doing, especially not when that comes at the price of devaluing the most important object of attribution-original content-by setting it up as just one among a multitude of things deserving of attribution.

Copied from http://blog.mattlanger.com/post/19184734567.

Entrepreneurship: Scaling Yor Business

An audiocast on how to scale and optimize your business to make more profit and enhance your competitive advantage. The issues covered include:

• Standardization: making one version of what you do.
• Proceduralization: making one version of how you do it.
• Optimization: speeding up and automating your procedures.
• Knowledge Capture: maintaining and growing your operation within the context of staff coming and going.
• Optimizing at the level of the whole business: only doing the things that it makes sense to do.

Namecheap accepts bitcoin payments

Namecheap is the first major domain registrar that accepts bitcoin payments. This is a significant boost for the e-currency and takes it closer to the mainstream.

Rackspace Cloud Affiliate Program Shutdown

Rackspace affiliates received the following email message:

This notice is to inform you that the Rackspace Cloud Affiliate Program has reached an end-of-life. Pursuant to Section 9 of the Rackspace Cloud Partner Agreement (the "Agreement") in effect between you and Rackspace, this e-mail shall serve as Rackspace's written notice of its intent to terminate the Agreement. Such termination shall take effect ten (10) days from the date of this e-mail. Pursuant to Section 10 of the Agreement, Rackspace will continue to make commission payments to you for a period of twelve (12) months following this termination, provided that you remain in compliance with the surviving terms of the Agreement.

Cliff notes: If you are promoting the Rackspace Cloud Affiliate Program, you have 10 days to take down your links.

An extra twist to the "broken link"-link building strategy

I read and commented on Kristi Hines' article on "How to Use the Broken Link Building Strategy to Get Links". The basic strategy is very simple:

• You find a broken outgoing link on a website.
• You email the website's owner telling him you found a broken link and you suggest a good replacement link (one to your site of course).

One way to build on this strategy and make it better is to check why the link is broken. Is it pointing to a missing file on an active website? In other words; does it return a 404 error page? Or does the domain name no longer exist? In other words: did the domain expire? If the domain expired, you may have found a good opportunity to add an extra mini-site to your network. If one webmaster still has a link on his site pointing to that domain, chances are other sites still have them up as well. Do your standard domain background check, the same way you would for any other aged domain, and if it looks good; register the domain and throw up a mini-site about your niche. That way all those broken links have now become normal working links again and you are now the recipient of all that link juice.

Piracy doesn't always hurt the content creator

Game of Thrones has been the most pirated TV show of 2012, being downloaded an average of 3.9 million times per episode. When confronted with these numbers, David Petrarca, who has directed episodes of Game of Thrones, responded that the illegal downloads did not matter because such shows thrived on "cultural buzz" and capitalized on the increased social commentary the added viewership creates.

Nanacast is slow... too slow.

I promote a couple of products through Nanacast and I have noticed that their affiliate links are becoming increasingly slow. When I click one of my links (or when a potential buyer clicks them), the Nanacast redirect takes forever to load. No wonder my Nanacast sales have been almost non-existent lately.

I have decided to disable all Nanacast links on my blog network until they fix their system... which I hope will be soon.

How people consume online content.

An infographic from DKNewMedia, with data culled from Forrester, on how people consume content from brands. Who do they follow and why do they follow them? And more importantly; Who has the most influence?

Why you should not use Disqus

Vitaly Tennant compared the IntenseDebate, Disqus, Livefyre and WordPress comment platforms in this post.

My reply:

A major Disqus issue you should be aware of when choosing a commenting platform is that visitors that are blocking Google Analytics (In their personal firewall or another privacy program) will not be able to load the Disqus code [on your site] if Google Analytics integration is enabled in [your] Disqus [settings].

As a growing number of people are becoming more and more aware of the privacy risks they face online, site owners should take this into consideration. If a visitor is blocking Google Analytics, that's no great loss to you. The visitor can still read your content and interact with your site. He can still post comments and buy products and do all the other things a visitor usually does. If however you are closely integrating Google Analytics into your site, like the people at Disqus have done, you are making parts of your site unavailable to people with enhanced privacy settings. In the best case, they merely won't be able to comment on your blog. In the worst case, you are scaring off potential customers or preventing them from buying your products.

Ancillary copyright law under discussion in Germany

The Judiciary Committee of the German Bundestag held on 30 January 2013 an expert hearing on the proposed "ancillary copyright" law for news publishers which will require search engines and others (yes, this includes bloggers) to ask permission from news publishers to link to their content or even give summarize news content.

The draft law was criticized by civil society groups as well as the German association of Internet economy which pointed out the lack of clarity of the terms used in the text and the negative effects that the law may bring by restricting the diversity of information on the internet. Moreover, the legislation is superfluous as publishers are already protected by copyright provisions. If this bill is enacted as-is, search engines would be allowed to display snippets only after having received permission which may involve or not some payment to the news publishers.

Meanwhile, in France, Google is under similar pressure. Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google made a statement on the company blog on 1 February 2013, in an attempt to point out that the search engine had generated "billions of clicks each month" for news publishers, "and our advertising solutions (in which we have invested billions of dollars) help them make money from that traffic."

5 Minutes of Marketing Wisdom by Clay Christensen

One of the best videos on marketing you'll ever watch:

Understanding the job, makes improving the product easy.

WarriorForum Security Breach?

A good strategy to keep your inbox spam-free is to use a different email address every time you sign up for a service. It takes only a minute to setup a new address that forwards all emails to your main account, but it will save you tons of time when the spam starts rolling in. You can easily disable the forwarder, if it gets flooded with spam, and your main address will remain safe.

An added benefit is that you can find out how the spammers got a hold of your address. If your create an address like myname-twitter@mydomain.com and you only use that address to create a Twitter account, you can be sure that all email addressed to myname-twitter@mydomain.com is either coming from Twitter, from someone Twitter gave/sold the address to or from someone who gained illegal access to Twitter's servers.

Today, I received the first spam emails addressed to the email address I used to join the WarriorForum. This means the WarriorForum was either hacked or someone working for them is in bed with the spammers.

Freelancer.com added new messaging features

Yesterday, Freelancer.com announced the release of their new instant messaging system. Features include:

• New Inbox Layout
• Instant Messaging
• Pop up chat window
• Improved Attachments

The importance of getting no-follow links

A comment I just wrote on the ProBlogger blog:

"most comment links are no-follow anyway"

I would not dismiss no-follow links or their usefulness that easily. While they may not carry the same weight as a "follow" link, SE bots do spider no-follow links and any popular website will automatically get a decent number of "naturally acquired" no-follow links for every "naturally acquired" do-follow link it gets.

Several social media platforms [add] no-follow [tags to] links, so when a site becomes popular and people start talking and tweeting about it, it will get lots of no-follow links. One could even argue that a big surge in do-follow links that is not accompanied by a similar surge in no-follow links will be suspicious as it could be an indicator of a big link buying campaign.

BlueGriffon: A free opensource WYSIWYG HTML editor

BlueGriffon is a free WYSIWYG content editor for your websites. It includes the Gecko engine (the same rendering engine Firefox uses) so your sites will look identical in your editor to the way they look in Firefox.

How to improve your site's performance with Apache and htaccess

A faster website means more revenue and traffic:

• Amazon's Greg Linden reported that 100 ms of extra load time caused a 1% drop in sales.
• Google's Marrissa Mayer reported that 500 ms of extra load time caused 20% fewer searches.
• Yahoo!'s Nicole Sullivan reported that 400 ms of extra load time caused a 5–9% increase in the number of people who clicked the back button before the page even loaded.

Reasons enough to make sure your site loads as fast as possible, so here's a tutorial on how to speed up your website using htaccess, mod_deflate and mod_expires.

90% of SEOs won't be using the Google disavow tool

We already talked about the Google disavow tool and why it is a bad idea to use it. A recent poll on SEO Training Dojo reveals that 89.3% of the SEOs who voted said they won't be using it.

Don't waste your time using the disavow tool. Instead, focus on expanding your network. Build more sites and get more links. Buy old domains and revive them. Get more social signals. In other words: building is better than snitching.

About.me is independent again

In 2010, AOL acquired the online identity platform about.me. Today, they announced they've been bought out:

Today, we're thrilled to announce that we'll be spinning about.me back out, returning to life as an independent company that is financially backed by our management team and a truly amazing group of investors who have backed companies such as WordPress and Google. Our team will remain the same for the most part, and we'll continue our roles as co-founders.
Our commitment is to make about.me the web's starting point for identity - we believe everyone will eventually have an about.me page they integrate into their email signature, add to their Twitter Bio or embed in one of their blogs.

Oracle's update didn't plug the holes in Java

An update for Java 7 - which was supposed to fix the critical vulnerabilities that left machines vulnerable to remote exploits - has failed to solve the problem, leaving the door open to further attacks.

Adam Gowdiak from Security Explorations reports:

What we found out and what is a subject of a new security vulnerability (Issue 53) is that unsigned Java code can be successfully executed on a target Windows system regardless of the four Java Control Panel settings described above. Our Proof of Concept code that illustrates Issue 53 has been successfully executed in the environment of latest Java SE 7 Update 11 (JRE version 1.7.0_11-b21) under Windows 7 OS and with "Very High" Java Control Panel security settings.

That said, recently made security "improvements" to Java SE 7 software don't prevent silent exploits at all. Users that require Java content in the web browser need to rely on a Click to Play technology implemented by several web browser vendors in order to mitigate the risk of a silent Java Plugin exploit.

Buying old domains at the Godaddy Closeout Auction

When you try to rank for a new keyword, it's always easier to build on an existing "platform of authority" than trying to build a new site from scratch. An easy way to do this is to buy old domains that already have links pointing to them.

The cheapest way to get old domains is through Godaddy. Omegaweb explains:

When a domain name expires on GoDaddy (note that this is specific to GoDaddy, other registrars do it differently), they make attempts to contact the owner to renew the domain. If the owner never answers the emails after 26 days, GoDaddy will list the domain name in their "Expiring" category on the Auctions page. If nobody bids on the domain in the expiring bin, then they move it to the closeout category. To purchase a closeout domain, you do not have to pay the $5 a year membership, and most domain names are $10-20. If nobody bids on it in the closeout bin, it is officially an expired domain name and is available for anyone to register.

Why IonCube beats SourceGuardian and phpShield

It is the "ASCII wrapper" feature IonCube has!

If you use the normal encoding option with Zend, IonCube, SourceGuardian or phpShield you'll need to ensure your customers upload your encoded script with the binary option selected in their FTP client. Most customers won't do this or even know how and they'll end up with corrupt files on their server. In other words: your scripts won't run.

IonCube has addressed this, allowing you to add an ASCII wrapper to your encoded files.

The default upload for a PHP file is ASCII, as ftp clients expect it just to be text. So using the ASCII wrapper avoids people complaining to you that your script isn't working due to corrupt files.

Critical Java zero-day bug

A previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in the latest version of the Java software framework is under attack online, according to security researchers and bloggers:

• Malware Don't Need Coffee.
• Krebs On Security.
• Kaspersky Lab.