It is difficult to compete sometimes – that’s natural. But the Web Industry suffers from a huge number of amateurs who are pretending to be professionals. And sometimes you meet a client who wants to compare your (truly) professional services with those of these charlatans masquerading as a “worthy” adversary.

If you are using Twitter, or for that matter, publishing any kind of links on the Internet via a social forum – e.g. blogs, Facebook, Posterous, etc – you should start a bit.ly account (it’s free). Here’s why.

Lately, the industry has seen an elevated level of attempts to take advantage of code vulnerabilities in the software powering websites. Hackers are a common and persistent threat to any website, but there are steps you can take to protect yourself and to make your websites and applications harder to exploit.

I read a brilliant post on ZDnet today by Ed Bott about the recent exploit of Adobe, Google and other companies. A lot of media channels have tabled this exploit as reason to abandon Internet Explorer and, while there is an inherent trust issue with Internet Explorer (which is explained in depth in the report and summarised below), the fear induced by other media reports should be taken with a pinch of salt – if you adopt good security practice if you are using IE (or any browser or operating system for that matter), you will be as safe as you can be.

I have been reading Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk recently (an excellent and very practical book by the way) and came across a section on Web Analytics in the book. I have reproduced it below (with permission) as it makes a very important point – don’t obsess about your web stats!