Why you should consider a small-business blog--and how you can start one

In the last few years, blogs have gotten more popular than ever. According to the blog tracking firm Technorati, there are an estimated 175,000 new blogs and almost six million blog updates published daily. With blogs growing at this rate, why should your business start one?

Because blogs are a wonderful marketing tool, a great way to increase your company web site rankings with search engines and an excellent tool for generating sales leads.

Here are some suggestions to help you get started, plus some background information in case you might not be familiar familiar with blogging. More...

SharePoint is on fire across the country and across the globe. More and more organizations, especially in the Federal government and defense sector, are adopting or digging deeper into SharePoint implementations.

SharePoint has now made the vital jump to Microsoft Office interoperability and has been doing it for enough versions to have survived the "will it continue to be supported?" waiting period that many companies use as a measure of whether something is safe to adopt.

If you are not well versed in what SharePoint offers, it is worth your time to pay some attention, as it might well be in your future. The big draw is that SharePoint takes a big chunk of unstructured data off the file servers and puts it into structured SQL Server storage. A lot of really useful extra functionality comes with it, such as content-based search, user maintainable meta-data, versioning and powerful collaboration functionality for things like creating project Web sites. More...

Searching the Internet returns a long list of cheap budget host providers, all offering hosting plans with prices ranging from free to under ten dollars a month.

The two most noticeable features of these plans are the large amounts of storage space and data transfer included in each plan. Consequently, these three items, price, storage and data transfer, then become the criteria the novice buyer uses to evaluate the various hosting plans; and they usually select the plan that provides the most storage and data transfer for the least amount of money.

What the novice buyer fails to realize is that there is another list of criteria that have far more impact on the true value of these hosting plans. These criteria are kept hidden deep inside these companies "Terms of Service (TOS)" and/or "Abuse of Service (AOS)" policies that greatly restrict how the storage and data transfer may be used, and greatly diminishing the value of the services offered at the budget price.

So what might the first-time buyer find if they were to search for and read the TOS or AOS? The two biggest restrictions usually imposed on these budget plans are the amount of computer processor time your site can use and the number of connections that can be made to your web site at the same time. More...

I've been watching gas prices increase steadily over the passing months and was really shocked to see gas at $4.75 per gallon for regular at a station along my route to Sam's Club the other day. To help save money on your fill-up, I've decided to post the lowest prices for gasoline in the Los Angeles area on our web site for your convenience (and mine). If you're heading out to buy gas, you might want to check if there is a station near you with an enticingly low price. 

Check it out: http://www.VisitUsAt.com

For those of you with kids that surf the Internet, here are a 10 suggestions you can share with them to help them surf safely.

1. If you are surfing the net and you enter a web site that makes you feel uncomfortable or scared tell someone RIGHT AWAY.

2. Protect yourself. NEVER send personal information about yourself into cyberspace unless you talk to your parents FIRST.

3. Keep your private information private--your telephone number and address should NOT be sent out into cyberspace.

4. Before sending ANYONE your picture or ANY information about yourself, make sure to check with your parents FIRST!

5. Never agree to meet up with someone that you meet while chatting online UNLESS you check with your parents FIRST. IF you do meet up with someone, NEVER GO ALONE. A parent or caregiver should ALWAYS go with you. Make sure meeting places are in a public place and NEVER someone's house. More...