Today’s virtual and globalized working environment finds company CEOs looking at employee engagement as a key challenge. Reaching out to its people in a distributed working environment is done through the global phenomenon – the internet.

The World Wide Web brings closer the physical distances and bridges these distances between people in the communities and the society as a whole. While this method of communication is not yet all pervasive, it is certain to become the basic standard for communication in the future.

Blogs, an abbreviation for “weblogs” are microsites on the web that stand by themselves or are part of traditional websites. A corporate blog is either published by or with the support of an organization in order to reach the organizational goals. External blogs help strengthen relationships with target groups and position the organization as industry experts. Internal blogs on the other hand are used as tools for knowledge management and collaboration.

From politicians to novelists, business pros and aspiring businessmen, everyone seems to be starting a blog. Many large corporations already use blogs to communicate internally to their employees on a regular basis. This helps the organizational heads to cut across hierarchies and deliver their views without the concern of misinterpretation. Blogs are also considered to be a less formal way of communicating with the existing customers, prospective customers and investors. While many of the blogs are authored by individuals, group blogs are also becoming popular in a company setting. Read the rest of this entry »

That’s all you hear all the time. Gotta have a GREAT product. That’s how you get the big bucks. Okay, but how?

For an internet marketer, one of the most difficult things to do is coming up with product ideas. For people who are new to internet marketing, it becomes even more difficult as they have no idea where to begin or even if their idea is going to be a success.

There is nothing better than creating your own product. Let us see how you can go about getting new products into the market. Once you come up with an idea that you like, make sure it is implemented immediately. This is where a newbie remains new for a long time. Because they are unsure of themselves and of their product, they do not implement many of their ideas.

“Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not one has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.”
~~ Andre Malraux Read the rest of this entry »

Nobody likes being called a thief, even those that download pirated music online. But the fact remains that people who perform free music downloads or buy music online using credit cards, from controversial web sites may be part of international piracy.

For many shoppers online, “legal” and “legitimate” are two words that do not mean much and they would not mind buying music from unethical sources, if it means having to pay much less than what it actually sells for.

There are several websites that sell all the latest downloads from top American artists for pennies on the dollar. Music fans are only too thrilled at the prospect of getting music so cheap, especially with the quality and experience being almost the same as the music downloads found at legitimate music sites such as iTunes and others. They willingly enter into the black illegal world of piracy, where they are asked to use their credit cards to purchase music downloads.

What they fail to realize is that, by buying music from these illegal sources, they are becoming part of the theft and piracy racket.

Not many music aficionados who download music from these file-sharing sites really understand the extent of this crime, but even those that do, pay no heed because of the convenience associated with such sites, in terms of low prices and newest songs. Read the rest of this entry »

Outsourcing is subcontracting work to a third-party company, either for product creation, design or some service. Outsourcing has always been carried out by many major businesses as well as smaller companies. As far as corporations go, this means business process outsourcing (BPO.)

Internet has long been bitten by the outsourcing bug and most online businesses tend to allot most of their product creation and some have started outsourcing their marketing as well. Internet marketers outsource ebook creation, article writing, web development and designing, software development, making lists of affiliate programs with all the details, sorting particular information into lists and every other job that is either time consuming or requires expertise.

Outsourcing is being described by some as an unfortunate byproduct of a global economy. The thinking is simply that when the same work can be done by someone else cheaper, get it done. While this is certainly a more profitable way of conducting a business, it does have its negative side too.

It is said to be for people who have little patience and a lot of money. There may be people who think that looking at the disadvantages of outsourcing amounts to thinking negatively; however, it is always better to consider all the disadvantages in advance to avoid any future surprises or should we says shocks.

One of the most crucial facts of life is that no third person or company can understand the product better than the owner. In spite of their best efforts, they may not be able to help business owners reach their goals.

Communication gap is said to be one of the demerits of outsourcing, where the person who the work is outsourced to may not be familiar with a particular culture and that lack of understanding could reflect in the work performed. Read the rest of this entry »

The creation of a large-scale search engine is an onerous task and one that entails huge challenges.

A perfect automated search engine in the current scenario is one that crawls the web quickly and gathers all the documents to keep them up-to-date. Plenty of storage space is required to efficiently store indices or the documents themselves.

The magnitude of data that has to be handled on the ever-growing internet includes billions of queries daily. The indexing system of a search engine should be capable of processing huge amounts of data by using the space most efficiently and handling thousands of queries per second. The best navigation experience should be provided to the users, in the form of finding almost anything on the Web, excluding the junk results with the use of high precision tools, which is the main problem users’ face.

The anatomy of a search engine includes major applications such as crawling the web, indexing and searching.

Web Crawling

Search engines of today depend on spiders or robots, which are special software, designed to continuously search the web to find new pages.

Web crawling is the most important aspect of a search engine and is the most challenging. It involves interaction with thousands of web servers and name servers. It is performed by many fast distributed crawlers. They keep getting information regarding lists of URLs they need to crawl and store, from a URL server. The crawlers start their travel with the most used servers and highly popular pages. Each crawler keeps hundreds of connections open at one time in order to retrieve web pages quickly. The crawler has to look up the DNS, connect to the host, send a request and receive a response. It does not rank the web pages but retrieves copies of all the web pages and stores them in a repository by compressing them, to later index and rank them based on different criteria. Everything from the visible text, images, alt tags, other non-HTML content, word processor documents and more are indexed.

Crawlers usually visit the same web pages repeatedly to ensure the site is a stable one and that the pages are being updated frequently. If a certain web page is not functioning at some point, the crawlers are usually programmed to go back later to try again. However, if it is found that the page is either down continuously or not being updated frequently, they stay away for longer periods of time or index it slowly.

Crawlers also have the capability of following all the links found on the web pages, which they visit as an when they find them or visit them later. Read the rest of this entry »

Veveo has taken the web by storm. I know how video should be spelled but I am talking about something else.

Veveo Inc. is a company that has just beta-launched its video searching vTap. This is a free service and is designed to enhance user experience on broadband enabled phones. The company claims that it has huge listings of web videos much more than any other video portals.

As everyone knows, although the latest smart phones come with big screens and have the capability of bringing video to life, finding a video that plays the format compatible with the smart phone is a tough task and most people give up because of the effort and time involved.

The main advantage of v-Tap lies in its ability to find videos even using phones and TVs. Although the videos on vTap are from several different sites and these online videos are in various formats that do not play on phones, Veveo converts the original video format into a format that can stream and play on a particular phone.

This application is said to work on Windows Mobile, Nokia N-series, and many different handsets from manufacturers such as Sanyo, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, LG and Samsung. The fact that they also have a version that works on the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch makes it very appealing to the younger generation. Read the rest of this entry »

Online maps are extremely popular and millions of people use them every day to either find local businesses, to obtain driving directions, to see high-definition aerial images of places or even to check real-time traffic information.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL compete with each other to improve their online mapping services, which have become an important part of local search websites.

Google is the unbeaten leader in web computing software delivered over the internet and literally runs inside a browser. However, many browser applications cannot do all those things that the powerful PC-based software can. Google has been trying to close that gap and finally achieved the fruits of its efforts.

Google said that third party developers can now use the programming interfaces to Google Earth, which is their 3-D visualization software. This will enable developers to embed Google Earth on websites.

Google Maps is currently being used by thousands of websites that have created applications, to be able to do various things like pointing the place where a crime has taken place or showing the various apartment rentals in various cities and even showing the path of airplanes in flight. These sites will now be able to improve on those applications with better visualization software from Google Earth. Developers will also be able to make use of Google Earth’s 3-D imaging, to create new applications to run on their sites. These applications will be embedded in the websites and will be accessible through a browser, and they will work even if users have not installed Google Earth on their computers. Read the rest of this entry »

With more and more websites allowing user comments and cloaking the users’ identities with the excuse of catering to the “free speech online” concept, malicious gossip is freely posted by negative elements who are secure in the knowledge that they are safe in their anonymity.

Previously, there used to be a few sites that allowed user comments, such as AOL and Yahoo! The advantage they had was that, when someone subpoenaed the website host, they could get the person’s home address and full name. But that is not the case anymore. Now, most of these websites that allow comments either wipe them out or do not store the details necessary to track down visitors to their sites.

Several users suffer due to this, as malicious posts about them do the rounds which give their full name, attacking their integrity in several ways, such as calling them anorexic, a homosexual, or that they have sexual diseases etc. These things just cannot be shrugged off as this has an enormous effect on the reputation and the mental state of being of the person concerned.

There are very few legal means to compel websites to police message boards. The Communications Decency Act of 1996, has protected these websites from suits concerning user comments for many years now. Their stand is that such sites are similar to public parks and are not considered publications.

According to some lawmakers, these protections are too broad and they are now asking for changes in the law in order to address this growing problem. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are looking to start an internet business, the first thing that has to be done is choosing a niche market. We know there is plenty of competition out there for every niche. But not everybody offers the same as you do.

The first thing that has to be done is to get a good idea on whether to pursue a niche market or not. This entails keyword research, which includes coming up with keywords that people are searching for and finding out how much competition there is for that particular keyword.

Initially, it is no good going for generic keywords that have a lot of competition. For example, if you type “Golf,” it is a generic term with millions of sites. If you target your keywords better, such as “Golf balls” or “Travel Golf,” you will find less number of searches but you are aiming at a particular audience in the niche. Remember! It is always better to be a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.

After you have chosen your niche, choose a few more keywords specific to your niche. Now time to check on your competition. What are the keywords and phrases they are using? Right click on “view source” and look at the META description tag (you will find it at the top.) Are these keyphrases helpful to you? Narrow down your list. Search on Google with the keyphrases you are planning on using and see if any similar sites are coming up. If they are, you are on the right track. Some of these keyphrases will be used on your site in the content and some will be used as links.

To do well with your website, it is important to be high up in the search engine rankings. Anyone who tells you otherwise is wrong. How many times have you gone to the 3rd page of Google search results when looking for something? Most people click on the first few results only. Read the rest of this entry »

As an internet marketer, the first thing one has to do is look for a good domain name to register. Domain names are the real estate of online business. They are the cornerstones of a good internet business. It is really not a difficult task finding a domain name. There are several places online where a search can be done to check if a domain name is available. You must be wondering, if it was such a simple thing, why all the hue and cry about domain names.

That is because, it is a tough task deciding on the kind of domain name that catches people’s attention.

There are a couple of ways to go about this. One is using the keyword method and the other is branding.

The keyword method involves keyword research, where one searches for a domain name that is rich in keywords, on the niche that is being targeted. They say that Google loves keyword rich domains.

For example, if you are planning on setting up a website on weight loss, the first keyword rich name that comes to mind is obviously something like weightloss.com, which would obviously be taken already. So, you will need to search for other keywords in the same niche. Read the rest of this entry »