Home-Based Entrepreneur

Renewing License

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:29:32 GMT

Renewing License

Stand by ...

Is this working now?

Test ... crashed my wireless connection (port conflict?) ... rebooted, turned off Skype ... test again.

OK -- didn't crash radio or the wireless. Maybe it's Skype. (Note to self: send Lawrence another note.)

Sorry, folks -- I'm having a little trouble here. With luck, it will be ironed out soon.

iPhone, iPhone, iPhone ...

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 17:06:07 GMT

All the news today is about the iPhone.

So you don't need to read it here. Suffice it to say that most of the reports are glowingly enthusiastic, although they all contain disclaimers about the product's shortcomings. I'm still going to wait for v.2 before plunking down the money. I need a phone that supports business features, and at this point the iPhone is pretty much a consumer device. Cool, yes. Essential, no. As useful as my current phone, definitely not.

Resuming this Weblog (again)

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 16:39:21 GMT

Picking up where I left off -- sort of.

Life has a funny way of catching up with you and overtaking all those plans you made. OBE, we used to call it. Overtaken by events. That's what happened to me last year, and to tell the truth, I was losing the race for a couple of years before that. But now I'm hoping to get back on the road.

I'll be deleting a lot of the old posts and articles. I am no longer running a network marketing business and do not anticipate going back to it. There was nothing wrong with the company or the idea, it was just more than I could handle with the commitments I had then, and it will be more than I can do with the commitments I have now.

However, I will continue to promote and support the home-based entrepreneurial effort, to identify opportunities for eLearning entrepreneurs, and to report developments in technology that might be useful to readers in either of these categories.

Key emerging technologies

Thu, 10 Aug 2006 19:43:46 GMT

Looking for The Next Big Thing?

Gartner offers opinions about what to pay attention to. Some are useful for marketing, some for learning, some for both, and some for neither.

Gartner Names Hot Technologies With Greatest Potential Impact (Antone Gonsalves/InformationWeek). via InformationWeek and [Techmeme]

Search engines

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 20:58:11 GMT

Add your own customized search engine to your Web page.

This is just too cool.

Announcing Yahoo! Search Builder (Yahoo! Search blog).

Source: Yahoo! Search blog
Link: http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000339.html

via [Techmeme]

Search strategies

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:57:15 GMT

Dealing with Weblog content overload.

Technorati is a search engine for Weblog content. It's not the easiest service to figure out. Here's some help.

Technophilia: Ten ways to search with Technorati. via [Lifehacker]

Social bookmarking

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:26:13 GMT

del.icio.us networking made easier.

Share your del.icio.us links with network badges. via [Lifehacker]

Lifelong learning

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:23:31 GMT

Supporting learning in personal life: Wikia

People don't only learn in school or on the job. People with hobbies, interests in expanding their aesthetic experience, or curious about the world around them use a variety of resources for learning. (Some are calling this "informal learning" but I have some issues with that designation -- learning is learning, however it happens. But that's an argument for another post.) So now along comes Wikia, which may be an early adopter's resource of choice, beginning with travel-related information. A trend to watch ...

Are Wikis the Best Format For Travel Guides?.

Wikia, a for-profit offshoot of Wikipedia, will announce the launch of a free, editable “worldwide guide of places to go and things to do” on Monday, called World Wikia.

via [TechCrunch]

Hosted Weblog services

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 17:08:19 GMT

Need a Weblog? Want a free host?

Wordpress is a free, hosted weblog service, with 300,000 weblogs and growing. Possibly an improvement over Blogger? Word of warning: No domain parking is available (yet) -- you can't point an existing domain to your Wordpress weblog.

Online security threats

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 19:33:14 GMT

Cross-site scripting issues.

Simply accessing some social software sites is now hazardous to your privacy and gives away your information to spammers.

Researchers warn over web worms.

via [The Register]

Google index news

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 19:26:48 GMT

Webmaster Central Blog: Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index

This was news to me. Something to be aware of if you are tracking your site's performance.

More webmaster tools

Source: Webmaster Central Blog
Author: Vanessa Fox
Link: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/08…

via [Techmeme]

Free (or cheap) communication services

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 19:08:46 GMT

Lower your business costs with free or cheap communication services.

The title and the lead that Lifehacker gave this article is a bit misleading. Actually, MyMoneyBlog provides pointers for free or cheap communication services (phone answering, fax, email, postal service). Which is fine and if the suggestions meet your needs, they will save you some money.

Weekend Project: Put together your cheap virtual office. [Lifehacker]

Hubpages

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 18:58:30 GMT

Hubpages: Publish your passions, (maybe) make some money.

Hubpages are a way for individuals to create topical web pages. This sounds, at first, like such earlier "expert" sites as About.com, but the idea has been expanded. With Hubpages, you can include blog-like features and you can link to eBay, Amazon, and other ad sources in order to profit from pay-per-click. It's a business model, but only if you are willing to put in the work to create a hub that (a) serves a currently unserved niche, and (b) gives readers a reason to come back on a regular basis. If you look at some of the existing Hubs, you will see a lot of examples of what NOT to do. In other words, just because someone is giving you a horse to ride, winning the Triple Crown still takes dedication, smarts, and consistent effort.

Read more about Hubpages in this TechCrunch review.

Hubpages Launches, Gets $2 m from Hummer Winblad.

[TechCrunch]

Succeeding at business

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 18:38:36 GMT

How to Succeed in Business (by paying attention)

This is a great weblog entry and excellent advice. Best quote: "[A] successful entrepreneur obsesses over the pulse of his or her business. Much of that pulse is numbers."

Daily Key to Success

Source: Fractals of Change
Author: Tom Evslin
Link: http://blog.tomevslin.com/2006/08/daily_key_to_su.html

via [Techmeme]

Cheap promotion

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:44:23 GMT

"Movie trailers" to promote products.

Here's an idea you could adapt to help promote your products and services. And if video production is too expensive (even with students producing it), what about Flash movies?

New in Book Marketing: Online Videos. Some large book publishers are running the equivalent of movie trailers on the web to attract new audiences...
[MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing]

Google and advertising revenue

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:40:23 GMT

Watch what you say and how you say it!

If you're running Google ads on your weblog, anyway. If your content gets too randy for the search engine's "family safe" policy, they'll pull their ads. But they won't tell you which words will trigger the ad exit.

Overly Sensitive?.

The East Bay Express - an alternative SF Bay area publication - today published a piece about Google's advertising filters and the impact they have - and potentially have - on independent news coverage. It's an interesting read. From it:

[John Battelle's Searchblog]

Online video demand growth

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 19:35:15 GMT

Online video content demand strong and growing.

This includes all types of online video, not just entertainment but also educational content. Is it time to catch the wave, or is it too early? Hard to tell, but it would make sense to start going to school on the technology and the markets -- particularly the demand in your market.

Online Video Market to Grow Tenfold in Five Years. The worldwide market for online video content will grow tenfold in the five years leading to 2010, according...
[MarketingVOX - The Voice of Online Marketing]

Google Code Project Hosting

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:57:28 GMT

For developers and project managers.

If Sourceforge makes you crazy, here's something you should know about.

Sourceforge has new competition from Google.

[Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger]

Bootable thumbdrives

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:14:14 GMT

Can you use this?

Another geek project that might be worth thinking about. Make a portable learning environment? Send your product to customers who can't get online, or who are on the "wrong" operating system?

Build a Bootable Windows Thumbdrive.

(via Digg)

[technology filter]

3D Virtual Space

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:10:11 GMT

Photosynth tool launched.

Not sure how you'll use this, but it's too interesting to ignore. Does not yet work in a browser, but maybe it will sooner or later.

Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth: This is Cool.

John F. zapped me this link to Microsoft's Live Labs' latest release, Photosynth. (He zapped it to me back on Friday, but I wasn't able to post it until this morning. Sorry, John.) This is some really cool stuff. The software basically takes a whole bunch of photos, analyzes them for similarities and then renders the whole thing as a reconstructed 3D virtual space.

[technology filter]

Usability

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:01:21 GMT

Jakob riffs on screen resolution.

OK. In case you hadn't figured it out already, Jakob explains everything to you. Geez. Now if only the e-Learning tool vendors will also catch up to most of the users in the world. (via Brent Schlenker)

1024x768 gets the stamp of approval

[Corporate eLearning Development]

User-generated content

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:58:14 GMT

Dave riffs on ads and user-generated content.

"User-generated content is actually on the road to nirvana, but it's not a sustainable model in itself. In all that content, which today's companies view as frankfurter meat, undifferentiated slurry, a medium for unwanted hitch-hikers, is the idea for the next iPod, or the formula for peace in the Middle East, the campaign platform for the President we'll elect in 2012, perhaps even a solution for global warming. You just have to believe that intelligence isn't concentrated among the people who rose to the top of the 20th century's ladders to believe that there are nuggets of wisdom waiting out there for the taking, among the minds that created all that UGC."

Making money with ads? Not much longer....

[Scripting News]

Communicating with users

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:47:29 GMT

IM your readers and customers.

Meebo is an "embeddable IM widget that you can put almost anywhere on the web! It’s a lightweight, simple widget that enables you (in meebo.com) to see the people who are visiting your web page and chat with them if you’d like." Read more at the link below.

Source: meeblog
Author: Sandy
Link: http://blog.meebo.com/?p=175

Techmeme permalink

[Techmeme]

Search engines

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:39:32 GMT

How are your customers looking for you?

Information about how people are searching today. US users accessed 57 search engines during the test period, but only three of them account for 95% of all those searches.

Source: Bill Tancer - Hitwise US
Author: Bill Tancer
Link: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/2006/08…

Techmeme permalink

[Techmeme]

Online research tools

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 16:33:36 GMT

New research tool.

I've been using OneNote for a couple of years for my research and notes, but much as I love it, there are problems. For one thing, I can't use it to collaborate with other people unless they also have OneNote. But it looks like Diigo ("dee go") is going to change that, and do so much more. Skip the gushing review on TechCrunch and just go sign up. Between this, del.icio.us, and elgg, research and collaboration are going to get a lot simpler.

Diigo is a research tool that rocks.

I just looked at the new research megatool Diigo and though several bloggers have covered it in the past and in previous incarnations (including our charming leader) I think they really missed the boat when many called it an unexciting entry into the crowded social bookmarking space. This is a web based knowledge worker’s dream come true, it’s the kind of thing that makes me love web apps.

[TechCrunch]