From the monthly archives:

February 2009

Help me get back

Today I visited your website and I liked it. It looks great and I really like what you have to offer, but I just don’t have time for it right now. I’ll come back later … if I can remember where to find you … or if Google can help me find you again … [...]

Read the full article → February 27, 2009

Unlisted

It’s been quite a while since I last registered for new phone service anywhere, but I distinctly remember being asked if I wanted my number to be listed in the phone book. Sure. Of course. Otherwise how would someone find me if they needed to, right? On the other hand, maybe being unlisted is better [...]

Read the full article → February 26, 2009

Twitter for small business

I ran into a friend of mine at lunch today who asked me several good questions about Twitter and how it might help in his business. As we talked, I realized that there was a good blog post in the questions and the answers.
First off, it’s really important to know what Twitter is and what [...]

Read the full article → February 25, 2009

No secret sauce

In regular day to day life, I get asked a lot of questions about marketing on the internet and blogging. A lot of the time, the questions are:

How do you get more Twitter followers/Facebook friends?
How do people find your blog?
How can I increase my site traffic?
Do you (or Can I) make money on the Internet?

Sometimes [...]

Read the full article → February 24, 2009

No man is an island

No man is an island, but your web site … it might be. Technically your web site is supposed to be a part of the grand interconnectedness of the web. You’ve done the SEO, provided great outgoing links and you’ve even built a few doorway pages to help people find your site. But they’re still [...]

Read the full article → February 23, 2009

Fill a need

Sometimes there’s not much to be added to a really great article like this one: Why You Can’t Make Money Blogging. My favorite part: “Provide value. Solve actual problems. Uncover what’s bugging people and fix it for them.”
Online business is just business.

Read the full article → February 21, 2009

Email is so 20th century

I’m sure by now you’ve heard that email is dead. Most of the time when people talk about the death of email, it’s not about the death of email as a tool for interpersonal communications. We all still use email everyday to communicate with coworkers, friends, family and it works great.
The problem relates to communicating [...]

Read the full article → February 20, 2009

Sometimes, the web is scary

It’s true. Sometimes just participating online is intimidating and scary. There are the stories of identity theft and cyberstalking and phishing. Even the terms are intimidating and scary.
Today I received (yet another) phishing message. This time, however, it didn’t come through email. This one came to me as a meeting reminder on Google Calendar. It [...]

Read the full article → February 19, 2009

On conversations

When is the last time you sat down with someone for the express purpose of learning? Maybe your neighbor is a professional video editor and you’ve been thinking about creating a family DVD for the holidays. Assuming that scenario, would you ask for advice?
I find it interesting that people spend so much money on professional [...]

Read the full article → February 18, 2009

Improve my eBook

In 2003, I needed to build a custom PHP extension for an email tool I was writing in PHP. I found the online documentation to be available but sparse and difficult to grok as it lacked context and examples.
After working through a trial extension and then the actual production extension that we needed, I decided [...]

Read the full article → February 17, 2009

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