While it’s recommended that you keep the family computer in a central location where you can supervise your child’s Internet usage, the fact remains that you simply can’t keep guard 24/7 - especially as your children get older. For example, you have more control when setting time limits on a six-year-old’s computer time than you do when restricting a teenager’s time. High school homework assignments can require hours of research - are you willing to hover for hours on end each night?

While supervision is one of your best tools, you can’t always be reading over your child’s shoulder. Instead, you need some sort of monitoring plan. Software is readily available to help you in this quest. For example, Windows Vista has a feature called Parental Controls that allows you to restrict websites, set time limits, and view reports about what types of websites your child is visiting.

Don’t have Windows Vista? You can always perform simple monitoring by checking the history list in Internet Explorer. This list will reveal all of the websites visited by date, by website, most visited, or currently visited today - provided that the history file has not been deleted. Computer savvy children will likely know how to clear the Internet Explorer history list, so relying on this technique for older children has its pitfalls.

Want a better way? Try software specifically designed to help you control and monitor your family’s Web usage. You don’t have to spend a fortune either. In fact, many of these programs are offered as a service to parents such as yourself. For example, PG Surfer is one such application from a leading software security firm, ParetoLogic Software.

Microsoft also offers a free tool, Windows Live OneCare Family Safety. This is another option that uses age-based filtering as well as blocking and monitoring of online activities. Both PGSurfer and OneCare Family Safety take parental controls to a higher level and put you back in control.

While monitoring products allow you to control and monitor Internet usage and history, they also have their shortcomings. Both PGSurfer and OneCare Family Safety allow you to set up multiple users accounts so that each family member has a profile. However, this means that each family member must log in and out of the computer in order to be effective. Because many people don’t do so, these tools generally automatically log out users after a set period of time.

While this helps prevent children from getting into too much trouble when using a computer under a different profile, it can be annoying to parents. After all, who likes being disconnected from the Internet and prompted for a password every five or ten minutes? Fortunately, this setting can be adjusted but the disconnections and prompts do continue, only at longer intervals.

Monitoring has a few inconveniences and takes a little bit of experimenting to find the right balance. However, it’s worthwhile to use one of these products. Not only will you be able to see what’s going on online, your children will know that you are serious about this issue. That alone may prevent them from getting into trouble.

I belong to several different Google Groups - all of which require privacy. One such group is a group of neighborhood moms who use the Google group to coordinate play dates with each other’s kids. We certainly don’t predators to know where and when we’ll be hanging out in public places with our children nor do we want our addresses, kids’ names, and other information posted publicly. My other group involves a circle of fellow writers who regularly critique each other’s manuscripts. None of us want our works in progress circulating on the Internet.

When you first set up a Google Groups, you have an option to make it: Public, Announcement Only, or Restricted. Public groups are open to anyone who stumbles across your group and wants to join it. Announcement groups are also open to anyone though only managers are able to perform many functions. Restricted groups are by invitation only. No one but members can view any information posted.

What if you originally set up a group as a Public or Announcement group but would prefer to make it private? Fortunately, this is easy to do. First, sign into your Google Group. You must be a Group owner in order to make this change. On the right side of the screen, you’ll see a list of options. Click on Group Settings. Next, click on the Access tab.

Now, you must go through each option and change it for complete privacy. The most critical options to change are:

• Who can view - change to “Only members can view group content”
• Directory listing - change to “Do not list this group”
• Who can join - change to “People have to be invited”
• Who can post messages - change to “Members only”

If you’re unsure about whether your group is private or not, you can quickly check your group’s status by going to the “About this group” link on the right side of the screen. This will show you a summary of the group’s membership, description, language, category, access, group e-mail address, and feeds. Look under Access. You will see who can view the group content, who can join, who can create pages, who can upload files, and who can post. If any of these settings are not restricted to members or managers only, click on “edit” and make the required changes.

That’s all there is to it!

Yes! I’m always amazed at how many people don’t realize that this is possible. As a writer, the ability to filter search engine results is incredibly valuable to me. For example, searching the Internet yields millions of results most of the time. I don’t know about you, but I’m not willing to click, click, click, click, my way through page after page of irrelevant results.

If I were researching a topic such as “light bulbs,” I’d get over 13 million hits with many web sites designed for selling light bulbs. However, if I were to filter the results, I could get more relevant web sites. To do this, I use the advanced search and filtering options of various search engines.

Let’s use Google as an example. Right next to the Google Search Bar, you’ll see three lines of linked text. Enter your search terms as normal and then click on Advanced Search. In this case, I have entered “light bulbs.” Depending on what type of information you want, you can specify exact phrases to search for, exclude pages containing certain words, limit the type of file format searched, or search a specific category of domain. You can even restrict the search results on the age of the web page.

I like to restrict my searches to .org or .gov domains. This way, I can be sure that the information I discover will come from non-profits or government agencies. For example, by restricting my light bulb search to domains that end in .org, I’ve filtered the search results from over 13 million down to just 327,000. Still a lot but, these are already far more relevant for my purposes. Let’s say that I’m interested in the safe disposal of light bulbs. I’ve just added the word “disposal” in the Advanced Search filter (and have kept the .org restriction). Now, my results are down to 90,000.

Using those two restrictions, the first page of results is perfect! The various websites listed feature tips on recycling light bulbs, benefits of recycling compact florescent lights, low-energy bulb disposal warnings, and more - all from legitimate non-profit organizations.

In addition to the different search options, Google also has topic-specific searches including Microsoft, Macintosh, Linux, Google Scholar, news archives, universities, and government agencies. Need to learn about configuring DNS Server? No problem, use the Microsoft filter and get detailed, relevant results directly from Microsoft or other technical websites. Searching for studies related to obesity? Use Google Scholar and enter “obesity” in the Search Box. You’ll get hundreds of links to articles on the topic by medical experts.

Am I excited about filtering search engines? You bet! The ability to drill down to relevant information is invaluable to me. Why wade through thousands of websites with mixed results when so much credible information is readily available. No matter what you’re researching, using the advanced filters of the various search engines is sure to provide you with amazing results in an instant!

Blogging: What you need to know to start your own Blog right now!

1. What’s a “Blog”?

“Blog” is the shortened form of the word ‘weblog’, coined by John Barger, one of the earliest weblog authors. According to Wikipedia, Peter Merholz abbreviated the term to just “blog” with the line “I’ve decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee’- blog. Or “blog” for short.” And a new Internet sensation had a brand new name.

2. What Are They Used For?

When weblogs first began, they were generally just a daily [public] journal, or a list of web links the author found interesting or useful, and sometimes some commentary on the links.  Today, blogs are ubiquitous and serve purposes ranging from the original - a daily public diary - to the commercial, containing information and commentary about products or services. A political candidate almost has to have a blog these days, where he can rally his supporters and tell them what his platform is and what he’s doing. Many businesses create blogs that allow them to inform customers and clients about current and future events, new products, or new ways to use the products they already own. Individuals create blogs to express themselves, to record the events in their lives, or to keep wide-spread families updated on their personal events.  People create blogs about their hobbies, their cars, their dogs… the list goes on. There are as many reasons for creating blogs as there are blogs, and they are extremely popular. Technorati.com - a site that tracks and aggregates blogs - is currently tracking 112.8 million of them!

Before you set out to create a blog, you’ll need to decide what your blog will do. Will it be your public diary? Will it be the place where you wax enthusiastic about your Mustang, or your garden? Will it be the place you review the music that you love, or the art that you find compelling? Will you talk about books, or furniture construction, or fishing? Only you can decide. You should already have an idea what you want to blog about before you set out to build one.

3. Hosting Considerations 

Having decided what to blog about, you’ll still be faced with some important decisions that are technical in nature. Hosting is the term describing the service performed by the web server - it hosts the blog, or stores the blog’s information locally and serves it up to web browsers when they ask for it by name. A blogger can host their blog in several ways.

Hosted on their own server, provided their ISP’s terms of service allow it. This solution is labor intensive and security intensive. Any web server will be faced with many attempted attacks from “black hats” - the generic term for people who want to do something bad to your system, whether it’s simply crash it, deface it, or take it over and use it to send spam. For this reason and others, you should only host your own blog if you’re extremely comfortable securing and maintaining servers.
Hosted at a web hosting company, where a staff maintains the servers’ hardware, but the blogger is responsible for maintaining the web server software, and installing and maintaining their own blog software, like Movable Type, WordPress, or B2Evolution. This is a solution for someone who’s very technically competent, but doesn’t want to host their own web site. This might be because of the labor overhead or the terms of service from the ISP, since most of them prohibit running ’servers’ on residential Internet service.
Hosted at a dedicated blog hosting site. There are quite a few such sites that aggregate multiple blogs on one hosting substrate. Usually they’ll have a domain, and your blog will be distinguished by the bit of the name known as the hostname. For instance, you might have myblog.blogspot.com. Blogger.com is a popular blog hosting site, and if you establish a blog there, your blog’s name will be prepended to the domain name.

For most beginning bloggers, the third solution is going to be the right one, for several reasons:

Maintenance - These blog hosting services have a staff that maintains the hardware and software involved in delivering your blog to Internet at large. You don’t have to buy, power, or maintain anything but your blog itself.
Reliability - Most of these hosting services are much more reliable than you could expect your PC to be as a server platform.
Exposure - Most of these hosting services have their own aggregation processes that can highlight your content for other users, and have features that make it simple for you to update the common aggregation and syndication sites, like Technorati.com and feedburner.com.
Simplicity - Most of these services make it extremely simple to create posts, manage archives, and generate RSS or Atom feeds (we’ll talk about those in a bit).

4. Getting Started

You can search Google for the phrase “blog hosting sites” and find, literally, twenty or more sites that will allow you to set up a blog for free. Some of the most popular are blogger.com, livejournal.com, typepad.com, and wordpress.com. Any one of the services would serve the purposes of a beginning blogger very well.

To sign up, all you’ll need is an email address. Blogger.com is one of my favorites, and it’s as good a place as any to start your journey. When you go there to sign up, you’ll be asked to create a “Google Account”.  If you already have a gmail account, you can use that - if you don’t, you should probably get one, as it’s useful far beyond the scope of blogger.com. But if you’re in a hurry, you can use your current address. You’ll need to supply your email address, a password, a Display Name (this is the name that blogger will put in the byline on all of your blog posts). You’ll need to confirm the captcha, which is an image of distorted alphanumeric text designed to make sure that you’re a human and not a spammer. It doesn’t always work, but it’s a pretty good protection.  Finally, you’ll need to read and accept the terms of service.

If you’ve filled out all the proper information, the next screen you’ll see asks you for a blog title. Fill that in - it’s what will show up on the blog page. It can be whatever you want. “Steve’s Blog” or similar. Choose a URL that you like (and that’s not taken!) - this is the address that will go in the address bar of the browser. Pick a template you like, and click continue. You can change the template later if you decide you don’t like it. You’ll see a confirmation page that says “Your blog has been created”, and you can click on “Start Blogging”.

You’re ready to create your first blog post! Put in a title, click on the main window and start writing. Blogger now autosaves drafts, so even if you get disconnected, you won’t lose your post. Click on “Publish Post” and you’ve completed your very first blog post.  Click on “View Blog” to see what it will look like to the rest of the Internet when they stumble across your little corner.

5. Comments

On the internet, comments can be problematic. If you turn them off, you’ll turn off a certain percentage of viewers, because blogs are widely viewed as interactive media. If you leave them on, you’d better have thick skin - a certain percentage of Internet commenters feel that it is their personal job to be scathingly critical of everyone who attempts to express themselves in a public forum. “Comment Spam” is another common problem of blogs, where “bots” (scripts) or hired flunkies post comments that are not much more than a list of links to sites featuring all kinds of “services” ranging from anatomical treatments to “ch3ap v1agra”. Many sites have spam fighting techniques implemented, like registration or captchas, and this can save you a LOT of work. The alternative is comment moderation.  Comment moderation is a system where you, the blog owner, have to review every comment posted and approve or reject it. This approach is labor intensive, but ultimately ensures the highest quality of dialog, provided the blog owner (you) is prompt.

Another type of response is called a trackback, sometimes referred to as a pingback. This is when someone sees your blog post and wants to respond to it, but feels that the response requires more space than the comment system allows. They post on their own blog and send a trackback to your site. If your site supports trackbacks, the response will appear in your comment area with a link to the entire post on the responder’s blog.

6. Feeds

A feed is a means of syndication, such as RSS or Atom, that offer blog readers a means of aggregating the blogs they read into a convenient format. Probably the single most popular syndication reader is Google Reader, but there are many standalone readers, generically referred to as “RSS Readers”, even though they support Atom as well, in general. Most of the blog hosting sites will provide these feeds for you, with a link that says something like “Subscribe to this Blog”. Users can copy this link and paste it into Google Reader, and whenever you make a post it will show up in their Google Reader views.

7. Notification

There are several services that track new posts and update various search engines and aggregators with the information that your blog has been updated. The one I use is called “Ping-O-Matic”, at pingomatic.com. This service will update 21 search engines and aggregation sites with one notice from you, making it efficient and useful.  You can visit the site and look at the list of services that it updates for an idea of the type of sites that need to know about your blog. Why do we want to do this? So people can find your blog. That’s the beauty of the Internet - it democratizes information. You can have thousands of eyeballs on your site in a matter of days if your topic is compelling enough and you show up in the right search engines.

8. Profit?

There are blogs that make money for their owners. They are few and far between. Blogs make money with advertisements, and the only way to make money with advertisements is to put them on your blog. Many Internet businesses will pay you per click or per sale for people coming to their site from your links. This may sound too good to be true - and it is. You need a LOT of pageviews and targeted advertisements to make enough money to matter. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use Google’s pay per click system, or Amazon’s affiliate program, I’m just telling you that you probably won’t get rich at it.

But if you decide to try an make money with your blog, I have a few suggestions for you.
Don’t become a link farm - sites that build articles solely to drive traffic to their list of links become easily recognizable as spam very quickly. You might make a hundred bucks the first month, but after that you’ve got a domain that’s spoiled.
Be selective about advertisements. If you have a blog about cars, don’t run advertisements about home vacuum cleaners. Run ads about car wax or car wheels or even auto photo albums, but make sure that people who are actually interested in your topic will probably be interested in your advertisements, as well.
Engage in SEO in a good sense. We don’t want to drive just anyone to the site. We want to drive people to the site that are actually interested in what you, the blogger, have to say. This makes it much easier to target advertisements, as well, and if you provide good content, no one will be irritated by the advertisements on your blog.

Conclusion

You now have your very own blog. It’s a place you can express yourself, a place where millions of people might see what you have to say. It’s a very simple process, and it can be very rewarding if you put some thought and time into it. If you do it for long enough, you can build a fairly impressive body of work, essays that you can then assemble into your own personal book, be it commentary, opinion, or just narrative. So get busy, and Happy Blogging!

Learn From 15 Ebay PowerSellers How They Raked In Over $11,726,200 Last Year Alone

Eight Steps to Making Money with a Social Network Site

You don’t need to be a major metropolitan broadcaster or newspaper or a large corporation to succeed with social networking, nor must you take a major leap to get started. You can test the social waters slowly with just a feature or two, if that is your business’ comfort level and budget. 

Here are the steps:

Before you buy equipment, hire contractors or staff or advertise your social media product, you must plan.  It is vital that you give a lot of thought to what you are doing and why.  Is it because your current readers, clients, customers, patients or community members are asking for it? The biggest mistake business people make in setting up a social network or user-generated community site is that they forget to research and plan. You must set policies in place, know the step-by-step procedures you are going to take, and who is going to do what. You must also determine if you are going to police community-contributed content. If so, who is going to be responsible for that and when? The best wisdom is that you allow comments uncensored and let other community members flag them for review if they find them offensive.

Assign a product manager. This should be someone who really understands the community you’re targeting, and someone that many community members know and trust.  It might be a well-known local business owner, performer or prominent activist.    If your community isn’t geographic but rather a niche community of like-minded individuals, you’ll want someone recognizable in that avocation, occupation or interest.

You should decide on what features you want to offer immediately, and those you’ll add later. This will help you decide on any vendors you must hire. 

You might:

• Offer blogs or allow community members to upload their own
• Allow individual profiles
• Provide online entry of user-generated photos, videos and/or articles, reviews, ratings or contribution of events to your community calendar.
• Include classified advertising and allow buyer /seller conversations.
• Hold contests and sweepstakes
• Enable an audio player for music listening and uploading

You must detail all aspects of your social media profit.  Of course it’s important to determine how you are going to make money with your social network site. Beyond that, however, you must decide who is going to sell your products and how you are going to compensate them for that. You must set your fees and make sure you have a platform that will allow for short term specials. Will you offer classified advertising, banner advertising, pay per click or other form of advertising such as sponsorships?  

You must choose the vendors that will help you launch and maintain your social network site. For this you’ll want companies that pledge themselves to your success and not those that just want to sell you a product and then disappear.  Look for a vendor that has several clients akin to you in size and target market. If the vendor is new and without a track record, study the background of its founders and key personnel. See if they have familiarity with your type of product or service. 

You must then lure contributors. Most social network sites do not compensate their contributors. Most folks love to see themselves, their families, their neighbors and their pets pictured and talked about on the Web. If, however, you are trying to find community photographers to go out on a regular basis and take multiple photos of community events, consider enabling online sales of the photos. You could then commission your photographers based on the sales.

You have to market your social network site. Grass roots seems to be the preferred marketing method for numerous community user-generated sites. What works best is showing up at community events, sometimes helping to sponsor the events, speaking at local clubs, and handing out tchotchkes.    

Don’t forget to track the results of your social networking efforts. It’s important that you know who is viewing your site, how often, and how long they’re staying.  Your advertisers and advertising prospects will know to know this too.   There are a number of excellent lead generation and CRM products, some that work hand in glove with each other, that will help you keep track of consumer activity on and about your site, and will also let you know what advertising resources companies in your target area or interest are now using.

Keep in mind, as you progress through the creation of your social networking site that there are three key ingredients in your success.  You must first know what it is that you want to accomplish; you must then know what you are going to do each step of the way to make that happen; and, finally, you must take steps to recognize that you accomplished it. With detailed market research and planning, a smart mix of social features and tools, help from the right vendor, the buy-in of your staff, and plenty of grass roots marketing, you can succeed at social networking.

Learn From 15 Ebay PowerSellers How They Raked In Over $11,726,200 Last Year Alone

7 Steps to Successful Buying on EBay

EBay is an online store where you can find almost anything you could ever hope to purchase, but buying on eBay is not without its perils. By following the tips set out below however, you should quickly be able to find what you are looking for and successfully bid on it without falling into any traps!

1. Define your search criteria carefully.  If you want a large size blue dress, then type in blue dress large - or blue dress L.  If you were to type dress L or worse, just dress, you are going to get a lot of items to look though!  Although buying on eBay isn’t tiring on your feet, it can be tiring on your eyes if you have too many pages to look at before finding your ideal item.  If you can’t find anything with your perfect search, widen it slightly (by taking away the specified color for example) and see the search engine shows you.  Only give a general search term when you have exhausted all other possibilities.

2. If you are buying electronics, try and do some research before logging into eBay so that you have some idea what it is you are looking for in terms of makes/models and features. 

3. If you are buying for a gift for someone else, add the word “new” to your search criteria - for example “New Elizabeth Arden moisturizer”.  Other ways new items are defined at eBay are NRFB (never removed from box) and MIB (mint in box).  The second, MIB doesn’t mean that the item hasn’t been removed from the box however so you might like to ask the seller about this if it’s important.  It’s possible that the seller may send it direct to the gift recipient, and some sellers even advertise that they will gift wrap.

4. Once you locate an item, check where the eBay seller will send it.  If they don’t send to your location you have two choices, move on to the next item on the search list, or if there isn’t another choice, ask the seller if they will make an exception.  Although it’s not always the case, if you have 100% positive feedback, and can pay via Paypal, the answer is often yes.

5. Having found an item which the eBay seller will ship to you, check out the shipping costs.  Are these the actual costs or is the seller quoting a “set” figure for all.  This means that regardless of what you buy, you will pay the same amount - and this could include a payment to cover packaging which can be excessive in some cases.  If the seller indicates that there will be packaging fee to add to the shipping, don’t bid until you find out what this is.

6. Check the payment options.  If you can’t pay by the methods requested by the eBay seller, move onto the next item on the search list.

7. If everything seems to be in order, place a bid.  Think about how much you are willing to pay for the item and then put this figure in as your bid amount.  It won’t register immediately at that amount unless someone has bid just below it.  Instead it will automatically keep bidding on your behalf until your maximum is reached.  If this happens, don’t be tempted to bid higher - start the search process again and find a similar item and bid on that instead!