Five easy ways to make your business website more social
Social media is an increasingly important part of the internet. But many businesses are still trying to decipher what it's really all about and how it can relate to their bottom lines. Naturally, not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon and throwing all their resources at Twitter, Facebook, et. al.
The truth is that for many businesses social media makes sense -- in moderate doses. If you're a small business owner, chances are you don't need to hire a full-time social media manager and the only thing social you're likely to get from social media experts is a lot of smooth-talk.
Target going in-house for e-commerce
Target, the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, has announced that it will bring its e-commerce website, Target.com, in-house in time for the 2011 holiday season.
Since 2001, Target.com has been run in partnership with Amazon.com. The e-commerce giant's platform powers the Target.com website and Amazon.com handles much of the call center and fulfillment operations.
Is a major social network denial-of-service attack underway?
Twitter is down. LiveJournal has been down, although it appears to be back up. Facebook users are experiencing problems too. What's going on?
In Twitter's case, the culprit has been confirmed as a denial-of-service attack. A note on the Twitter status page states "we are defending against a denial-of-service attack". There is no word yet on the cause of the LiveJournal and Facebook issues that have been reported. Needless to say, the fact that three popular social networking services are all having a bad morning hints at the possibility that the most important parts of the social internets are under siege.
Choosing a platform: seven considerations for developers
It's a good to be an independent developer. The number and variety of
development platforms on which to build has exploded over the past
several years. From the iPhone to Salesforce to Facebook, opportunity
knocks at every turn.
But if you're an independent developer, choosing which platform to develop for can be a difficult task. Many developers today decide to develop for the platforms that seem to offer the quickest path to riches.
Warner Music Can't Go For Keyboard Cat
Fatso the Cat playing "You Make My Dream Come True" to images of Helen Hunt throwing herself out a window may have gotten over 376,000 views on YouTube, but Warner Music wasn't about to let the owner's violation of its copyright go unpunished.
This week the music company decided to pull its Hall & Oates audio from a Keyboard Cat video and put an end to the video's viral growth.
Instead, Warner lost an opportunity to monetize its back catalog and angered plenty of web surfers in the proces.
The new economics of entrepreneurship? Nah
Is a recession a good time to be an entrepreneur? Has it changed the economics of starting a business?
Silicon Valley veteran Guy Kawasaki believes the answer to both is "yes".
Lightning strikes Amazon's EC2
Cloud computing is growing in popularity and many businesses, both large and small, are turning to the cloud to host critical applications.
Amazon's EC2 is one of the most popular offerings but all it took was a single lightening strike to take part of the EC2 cloud down last night.
Adobe's BrowserLab is every web designer's dream come true
Internet technology seems to advance at warp speed but if you're a web designer, the process of testing a website for cross-browser compatibility hasn't improved much since the days when knowledge of Microsoft FrontPage made someone a 'web designer'.
But a new service from Adobe looks set to change that.
Your photos, immortalized on Facebook
When you delete a photo that you had uploaded to a social network, what happens?
You might expect that it's deleted. After all, why would Facebook, for instance, want to store that old photo of you and Aunt Hilda any longer than it has to? Even you don't want that photo.
Website security as SEO
If you're putting together a list of all the components of a successful SEO strategy, there's a decent chance website security probably isn't on it.
After all, how is website security going to boost your placement in the SERPs?
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
