There was a case a few days ago in Utah where some guy decided to take a woman hostage and hold a police stand off, during which he updated Facebook. His updates included messages to friends and family, and replies to comments of support as well as others trying to get him to turn himself in and do the right thing. In yet another societal break, the guy even made new friends on Facebook during the standoff. (Seems like every time I post something on here, it has some kind of bad societal implication – I don’t wanna think too much on that one.) Some of his existing friends were able to go to the location, see what the police were doing, and comment on Facebook, warning him as to their strategy and position.

All this doesn’t really surprise me, though the more tech savvy these folks become, the more savvy the rest of us need to also become. What I am wondering is how much of this is going to make it’s way into legislation? I mean, I am sure there are some laws on the books that can be applied to these circumstances, but the probability of news laws pertaining to the use of social media to aid and abet criminals will probably be written.

Social media has done many good things. It has also been used to do some not so great things. When you are using social media yourself, be mindful of what information you are putting out there, and who can see it. Don’t give the bad guys any more tools than they already have. If you’d like more information on web security, check out http://noodleonthis.com . This blog, written by my brother in law, is chock full of security warnings and other need to know items to keep you and your information safe online. Check it out.

One such niche site is Markdown.com, recently launched by Glenn Beck. This site is different in that it will only offer deals from companies with values that are near and dear to Beck’s heart. For example, today’s deal is from Chocolate.com. Chocolate.com offers products not from a mass wholesaler, but rather from small business owners all over the country. Beck’s vision for the site is much like his usual dogma “Value and Values”. He willonly promote sites on his Markdown.com that have the values he thinks are worthwhile. Therefore, he is able to reach a very niche audience who will appreciate his efforts, and will in many cases want to support his causes. In this particular case, it happens to be small chocolatiers from all over the country. Not a bad first choice – everyone loves chocolate, and most people in the country want to do all they can to help bolster small businesses. This site is different, enough so that WebProNews contributor Chris Crum posted the About Us page. I think it’s worth reading, so I would suggest you hope over to read all of it, but I’ll post part of it here just so you can see what I am talking about:

“To put it simply, we believe that we can only be a great company if we are a good one. That means being good to our employees, our partners and our customers. It means making the right decisions, not just the easy or profitable ones. But, most of all, it means being the kind of place that we’re proud to say we work at; the kind of business that we’d want to do business with ourselves; and the kind of company that we’d be excited to send our own family and friends to.”

That’s valuable. I think it’s important to do business this way, and honestly, I will look to support this kind of site more than any other – it’s the way business should be done, and it’s the way we do business here.

Marketing on discount sites such as these will continue to be a trend. Since women are the main shoppers, and so many have started shopping online in the last 10 years or so, they are going to expect coupons and discounts. Whenever we go to buy something online, I know I search for a coupon code or wait for some discount first. The ability to target your audience, through niche or location, or a combination of the two, is going to become more and more important, and a great way to drive traffic to your site.

So, have you used a discount site to market your product or service? How’d you do? Would you do it again?

Anyway, LinkedIn went Public yesterday, selling shares at the start for around $45. I think WebProNews reported that they are now somewhere around $105. Pretty sweet, and fairly amazing, considering that LinkedIn not as popular as Twitter or Facebook – yet. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, and his cohorts are probably pretty darn happy today. I hope that the company continues to grow – they’ve been doing some pretty interesting things over at LinkedIn lately, and this will give them the opportunity to expand their products even further (assuming we’re not looking at some sort of social media bubble like the tech bubble of the mid nineties to 2000). Looking forward to seeing what the come up with, I mean, if I’m still here Monday – or Zombies haven’t invaded or anything. I think I’ll go leave a set of my clothes draped over my office chair. Come Monday morning, most of the Group will think I’ve been “raptured” and I can go play golf – who’s with me?

LinkedIn was launched on May 5th, 2003. It has probably grown a little more slowly than other social media platforms, but I also think it that is a good thing, I think it indicates longevity. It currently boasts more than 100 million members. I think the slightly slower growth points to the fact that people take it seriously – they don’t open an account just because, they have a purpose behind it – whether it is networking, looking for talent, or promoting yourself or your business. The profiles are carefully constructed, and I think most people who make connections on LinkedIn do so because they have actually met, they want to recommend someone, or some other fruitful purpose – not simply because they found their profile, or they went to the same college, even if they graduated 10 years apart. And best of all, you don’t have to look at vacation pictures of your boss in a speedo.

LinkedIn has rolled out new features over the last several years. This year they have added Twitter and blog feeds, TextIn, LinkedIn Industry specific news feeds, and various other new features that make using LinkedIn pretty handy. One pretty relevant feature is the Student Job Protal which helps recent graduates find jobs in their field. Pretty cool – if you’re a recent graduate, you should check it out. So here’s to eight years for LinkedIn – if you haven’t set up a profile, I would recommend it – go check them out – they have a fun video up on the blog that shows the growth of the company over the last eight years.

The article actually cites Akron, Ohio as potentially having fewer job candidates than other techy hotspots, at least, this was the case a decade ago. As technology has grown, so has the ability to recruit from anywhere in the country. Fortunately for TKG, we have not had to look much past our own backyard for great people. Besides the tech schools in the area, TKG has offered training in the form of the TKG Institute in the past. This gave us the ability to train and hire from a group of people with skill sets we needed – and we knew what they could do, because we taught them how to do it. I think this sort of training is going to become more and more popular. We have an employee who also teaches at the premiere university, Full Sail Academy in Florida. He says that the students know that if you go after a four year degree in any sort of computer related technology, your degree will be outdated by the time you hit your junior year. So, faster, more flexible training needs to be taking place for people to have the skill set they need to find a job when they graduate. I think this is going to mean that at least these particular degree programs are going to have to change and become more flexible – 18 month degrees, and so on. Get in, get the skill set and get to work.

Anyway, back to the article – the steps given are as follows:
1. Making use of the Human Cloud – hiring freelance worker who work from home – programming, copy writing, etc.
2. Become proficient at managing workers both in your office, and potentially, across the country or globe. TKG has employees in several states. We make that work by many methods, but utilizing so many forms of instant communication – texting, messaging, email, etc. enables TKG to have a presence in several states without the need for an actual office in several states.
3. Being a good manager means knowing how to create a relationship with people you might never meet in person. Knowing how to compile enough information from various platforms to make a hire, build trust with that individual, etc. are all going to be skills needed in this new business world.

The article was pretty good – give it a look if you’d like more information. I think what it all boils down to is that employers are going to have to be ready to get creative if they want the best folks working for them. Fortunately, the Web makes it possible to find the best person for your business anywhere in the world. You are no longer constrained to your own backyard…but sometimes, that’s where you find the best folks. My advice? Check the backyard – it will often have everything you need, but if necessary, be ready to branch out. It’s a strange new world out there, but it’s exciting.

Apparently some evil folks with not enough to keep them occupied found ways to put malicious code onto literally millions of websites. For the most part, this code was spammers trying creative ways to get links to their products or services (to mainly reputable sites whose owners have apparently employed more black hat SEOs – You’d think they’d learn after the whole Overstock/JC Penny fiasco). So, TKG has taken opportunity to greatly improve network security and believe that we have eliminated the threat entirely (at least for us and our clients).

(The following is from the email TKG sent out to clients, letting them know the steps we had taken.)
Here are the steps we’ve taken to ramp up security: (Warning: what follows is a bunch of geek-speak. For those not fluent in “geek,” the short version is that we did a bunch of stuff to make our websites much more secure):
• Put more stringent restrictions on FTP access to the server resources
• Tightened security on “open source” site management (WordPress, Joomla, XCART, OSCommerce)
• Implemented site-by-site security screens for current sites
• Performed file system audits to ensure file access is reduced to it’s most common operational denominator
• Performed data audits to ensure sensitive data is not being maintained on our database system
• Implemented server side application firewalls that evaluate and eliminate known threats
• Changed procedures for incoming site transfers to include audits on all of the above (TKG created sites were already secure)

The TKG blogs, being WordPress blogs, were among the sites affected. And as we say so often around here, TKG’s sites and blogs are like the cobbler’s children – they wait to get new “shoes” until after all client work has been taken care of.

WordPress has holes in it’s programming, and if you know how to work around the programming, you can spam the living daylights out of a blog with Trackbacks and spammy comments. When we got Websense and the other blogs back up, they were immediately SLAMMED with tons of spam – some of which was not family friendly, if you know what I mean. So, we took the blogs down again, added some of our own tweaks to “harden” the blogs and now we should be back in action!

Glad to be back! What have you been up to?

http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202486373422&Web_Host_Liable_for_Contributory_Infringement
Sheri Qualters All Articles
The National Law Journal

So here’s the basic rundown: A web hosting and SEO firm in South Carolina called Bright Builders hosts a site and provides SEO services for a counterfeit golf club company. The fake golf club company openly states on it’s site that they make and sell the best fake Cleveland Golf clubs on the internet. Cleveland Golf gets wind of this and sues. Judge decides a verdict against Bright Builders (the web hosting company) to the tune of $770,750!!!!!!! The fake golf club guys get a jury return of a mere $28,250 statutory damages verdict.

A lawyer (Finnerty) in the case maintains that hosting a web site is the same as being a landlord –
“A Web-hosting company’s obligation is similar to that of a landlord’s, he said. A landlord doesn’t have the obligation to act as an investigator against his tenants to find out they are doing anything illegal, but once they knew or should have known, they have to act,” Finnerty said. “How is that any different online?”

Basically stating that a Web hosting company has a minimal obligation to know what they are hosting, as a landlord has a minimal obligation to know whom he is renting an apartment. If the hosting company or SEO provider discovers something remiss, or flat out illegal, they are obliged to report it.

I guess that’s just basic common sense. I don’t know that I want to get hit with a monetary judgment because I wasn’t aware of what a client had on a Web site TKG is hosting or does SEO for. I think for the most part, we are fairly familiar with all of our clients and would notice something going on. In this particular case, it was clear and obvious that Bright Builders knew what was up, and just didn’t do anything about it. TKG has always upheld the highest Web standards, and hopefully, this would never be an issue. That being said, we host hundreds of Web sites, and a few are just hosted here, we haven’t touched them other than to host.

As law catches up to technology, we’re going to see more and more of these cases. Judges are going to have to try and use existing law as a precedent, as in the landlord example. Or they are going to be setting landmark precedents. Hopefully, these types of cases will be decided justly, and won’t impinge on the freedom of the Web.

What are your thoughts on this case? Do you think the hosting company should have been liable for damages, or do you think it’s a crock? I think I am in the middle on this one. If they were aware of the situation, then yeah, they are liable, but I don’t see how they are more liable than the actual site owners. That one baffles me a little. What say you?

It’s a pretty cool idea, and can probably help you get the news that is relevant to you. The way it works is fairly obvious, the news stories shared the most often by your connections, coworkers and peers will be presented to you in an industry specific. If you follow more than one industry, as many would want to, clients’ industries, others that affect your business, etc. then the top five news stories that affect the industries you follow will be highlighted.

From the LinkedIn Blog, “By following industries, you can get the relevant news on your Front Page and in the top navigation. We’ll also send you a weekly email of the top industry headlines across all of the industries you follow. And, no matter how many industries you follow, we will only send you one news email per week.”

They also have apps for your phone of course. If you are pretty busy, and don’t want to wade through all the regular news to try and get the industry specific news you are looking for, this could be a beneficial tool. Aren’t we getting lazy? Too many clicks through a news site, just pipe the news I want right to me and forget the rest! In any case, you can do just that now, on your LinkedIn profile. Kinda cool, sort of a one stop for the business community, which I am sure is the whole point.

I think LinkedIn is a great tool. I think this could make it even more useful, unless it clutters up a good thing. We’ll see how it pans out.
If you want to read more about it, check out the LinkedIn Blog post, or watch the video below, originally posted on the LinkedIn Blog.

In light of the devastating effects of this earthquake and tsunami, many people would like to make donations to help out. Amazingly, there are already scammers making calls and taking donations. Please, if you want to donate to help the people of Japan, call yourself, or go to a trusted site. Don’t make a donation to anyone who calls you on the phone, and be very careful when using a website. Be sure you are actually in the right place, these scammers like to change the spelling of the url very slightly so that you don’t notice, and make a nice little donation to them, rather than your intended recipient.

In an effort to be helpful, here are a couple of organizations taking donations – these places are legit.
Catholic Charities
Mercy Corps

Please keep the people of Japan in your prayers. They are in for a long haul – it’s not going to be easy.

This is a great idea, and I really think it will serve the small business community well. We’ve often had clients who want a website, and in the process of developing the site and teaching them how to use it, we discover that computers and technical stuff just aren’t their forte. This would be a perfect fit, and really, a great price for this type of service. For the small business owner that doesn’t have a need to keep an IT staff, or can’t afford to, this is a great option.
If you want to read more about it, check out the link above, or visit your local Apple store.