Brilliant Thinking

Social media - when applied to the web and mobile technologies - is a collective term for any place where dialogue can occur. This dialogue is generated by members of the community where the interaction occurs and could be text, pictures, video or audio, or any combination of these. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM).

Although there is a huge buzz about social media currently, social media has been around for a long time.

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Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include

• Search engine optimization (or SEO),
• Paid placement,
• Contextual advertising, and
• Paid inclusion.

In this article we will look at link building and how it fits within the overall marketing strategy for your site. 

In the above methodologies, link building sits mainly as contextual advertising but can also fit into paid placement and paid inclusion (if you have to pay for the link, obviously).

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Over the past few days I have been receiving a steady stream of credit notes and invoices from my registrar 1&1. I use them for lots (we’re talking hundreds) of domain registrations for me and my clients.

The reason they are doing this is that the rate of VAT changed in the UK on 1st December 2008 from 17.5% to 15%. From their control panel:

Since 1 December 2008 the VAT rate has been lowered in UK from 17.5% to 15%. Although it was not a legal requirement, 1&1 Internet Ltd. has decided to refund all of its customers any difference that has raised due to the VAT rate change. However, as changes to VAT are seldom and because many of our products are billed months in advance, some of our adjustments may be difficult to understand.

In order to do that we have cancelled the invoice/s in full (only that invoice in which the charge was related to the period entering into December 2008). A new invoice has been raised because of the previously cancelled invoice that is charging you as per the accurate rates i.e 17.5% till 30 November 2008 and at 15% from 1 December 2008.

We will not recharge any of the invoices again, rather, we will simply credit the affected accounts with the adjusted amount, for all amounts over £3. If the adjustment is under £3, we will simply refund the amount on the next invoice.

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After Peter’s comment on my recent post comparing SugarSync, DropBox & Live Mesh saying that I hadn’t looked at Syncplicity - his preferred Cloud-based synchronisation tool - I decided to install it and try out the free 2Gb storage as a trial.

I was quite impressed with the simplicity of the interface - it was very informative about what was being uploaded to the cloud, what was being downloaded and what it was going to do next. It was also very easy adding existing folders to the sync set (much more so than Live Mesh: see Live Mesh Syncing Folders).

Everything was going well until Syncplicity told me that I had exceeded my storage quota and would need to pay to upgrade my account in order to continue to sync the files. This was strange because I only had 1.6Gb of files to sync, and allowing for possible differences in quota allocated to the files in the cloud versus the Windows PC, this should not have been an issue.

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The Mashable article below is interesting in that in these days of visual browsers, graphical interfaces, visual layouts and all the bells and whistles, a company is experimenting with a command line interface for the web.

As Mashable suggests “the concept is far more interesting than the execution…”

Although Kwyno is looking to offer a command line to the web, it still is tied to the way information is presented at present. The brief outline from Mashable suggests that you are essentially configuring your account to set up your own preferred sources - e.g. CNN for news, etc - and then issuing short commands (i.e. text messages) to the service to return information packaged for your device.

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