Where It All Begins

As you know I spend a lot of time on reading my RSS feeds news every day. Almost 4 hours of my daily life is reading what is going on here and there. Some of my blog posts are influenced from what I read and the many researches I do on a daily basis. Today I was reading on CNET news this article about the first blogger on the net, and that blogs turn 10… so I wanted to share it with you. Please know that the article below is brought to you by CNET news:

Someone, somewhere created the very first Web log. It’s just not quite clear who.

It may not be one of the Internet’s grandest accomplishments, but with the number of active bloggers hovering somewhere around 100 million, according to one estimate, there are some serious bragging rights to be claimed by the first person who provably laid fingers to keyboard in the traditional bloggy way.

Was the first blogger the irascible Dave Winer? The iconoclastic Jorn Barger? Or was the first blogger really Justin Hall, a Web diarist and online gaming expert whom The New York Times Magazine once called the “founding father of personal blogging”?

Or did all three merely make incremental improvements on earlier proto-blogs? The answer is most likely “yes” to all of the above. In truth, awarding the title “first blogger” is more than a little tricky because the definitions of blog and blogger are slippery. Any definition should probably include posts sorted by date, with the newest posts at the top and the rest archived for future use (criteria that would eliminate the Drudge Report, for instance).

Winer is a pioneer of Web syndication techniques and editor of Scripting News, which launched on April 1, 1997.

He boasts on his site that Scripting News “bootstrapped the blogging revolution” and that it is the “longest currently running Web log on the Internet.” A decade ago, however, Winer wasn’t actually using the term “Web log,” nor does he claim to have invented the term. Winer did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CNET News.com until after this article appeared. He replied in a post claiming “the first blogs were inspired” by Scripting News.

Barger, a programmer, futurist and James Joyce scholar, is not afraid to say, indeed, he’s the guy who invented the term “Web log.” In December 1997, he created RobotWisdom.com to feature entirely bloggy collections of links to articles about politics, culture, books and technology that he found interesting.

“Since I made up the word, I assume I get to define it,” Barger said in an e-mail message to CNET News.com on Monday. “And by my strictest definition Winer wasn’t quite a blog–he mixed up the reverse-chronological ordering too much. So–unsurprisingly–the first 100 percent Weblog would be mine.”

Barger said his site amounted to something of a day-to-day log of his reading and intellectual pursuits–and because it was online, he called it a “WebLog.” And thus a new term, which would soon be abbreviated and de-capitalized to “blog” by Peter Merholz of Peterme.com, was born.

“Winer called them ‘news pages,’ but I didn’t plan to do mainly news, but rather anything I found that I thought was worth reading or visiting,” Barger said in an e-mail. “So at the last minute I needed to come up with a title, and I used AltaVista to see whether various possibilities were already taken (with ‘log’ being the critical descriptive term). ‘Weblog’ was being used as a synonym for ’server log’ or ‘html log’ by site administrators, but since they had the other options I grabbed the more general one.”

Building on the .plan
But as any Internet graybeard will tell you, early Net denizens were just as active in sharing details of their personal lives and commenting on politics (though, perhaps, not the antics of their pet cats) as the latest generation of bloggers. They did it on mailing lists and through a now virtually forgotten technique called a “.plan” file that was invented in the early 1970s.

A .plan file was a publicly visible text file of any length that could be attached to each individual account on a Unix system and often used reverse-chronological blog-like ordering with newer items at the top. Internet users could edit their own .plan files to include details of their personal life, work projects or musings on the nature of reality.

Many did. One of the most famous .plan files was created by John Carmack, who co-founded Id Software and was the lead programmer on blockbuster video games including Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. (Carmack’s .plan file has since been converted to a blog.)

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They started with a search page; yesterday they got it all, from web video sharing to internet advertising to media. Today they are ruling over everything on the net, and tomorrow they will start with a new sector the mobile phones. Finally, after all the rumors Google Mobile Phone got birth, it has a shape and we can see it.

So it seems that the oft-rumored handset from Google has taken that final leap into the “confirmed” column, though it may not be quite the be-all, end-all device we were expecting. Isabel Aguilera, Google’s chief executive in Spain and Portugal, has admitted that the searchmeisters have some mobile goodness in the works but appeared to play down the project, noting that the phone is just one of 18 R&D initiatives the company currently has underway. Furthermore, she mentioned that Google’s mobile skunkworks were designed to make their way into developing countries, suggesting that this may not be the Samsung sourced, iPhone-killing monster we’d been getting an earful about as of late. But hey, if Apple intends to turn the iPhone into a multi-device franchise, Google’s entitled to do the same, is it not?

So now we are sure that Google is developing its own mobile phone, while they are not commenting directly on leaks from Europe and the United States which describe a low-cost, Internet-connected phone with a color, wide-screen design. Newspaper and blog reports in recent months have Google shopping its phone design to potential mobile phone manufacturing partners in Asia.

This is not going to be a high-end device but a mass market device aimed at bringing Google to users who don’t have a PC.

Now you are asking yourself how much this phone would cost, NO? Well as the rumors says it will be cheaper than the iphone which got a starting price of $500USD, and some other rumors says it will be sold out in the market for only $300USD. I believe that it will be a cheap mobile phone.

But my question is: Where Google will reach with all this, they are monopolizing everything related to communication and not only gathering the information of the world in one place!!!

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Now what about credit card deals, made with those who credit card applications, or toys r us credit card for small business credit card. Credit card consolidation only apply visa credit card , gm credit card are the best credit card rates for credit card processing machines and credit card application.
Never use a citi credit card or a city credit card because of alaska airlines credit card are the mbna credit card for student credit cards and or for business credit card so 0 credit cards
credit card zero. Now business credit cards and credit card offers, there are 0 credit card for
airline credit card that apply online credit card.
To compare credit cards or credit card balance transfer or credit card deal there is 0 apr credit card, banks like citibank credit card, best credit cards, express credit card.
Jumping to low interest credit cards, or best cash back credit card or credit card transfer for miles credit card and for credit card merchant.
Visa credit card are know the most familiar and sponsored one, and they are with low interest credit card those are credit card help for student credit card at no interest credit cards credit card merchant account. Seriously the best credit card is the only for no interest at all.
The capitalone credit card is allowed for credit card acceptance and to chase credit card is against the low, for credit card rates and credit card debt.

You just spent like 1 minute of your time or 2 minutes reading a nonsense post, well that was a joke, i was just bored and wanted to share a boring saturday night with you, sorry to have such a silly post as a joke on my blog, that will only happen this time and no other time.

Excuse me for that silly joke again and again and again.

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I just found this article on PC World magazine, and I thought to share it with you, it is a nice thing to read especially if your blog is hosted by Google Blog software BLOGGER.

According to Fortinet, Genuine-looking blogs on topics as wide-ranging as “Star Wars, school, furniture, Christmas, cars and girlfriends” are now being created to host a variety of script-initiated malware. It would be impossible for visitors to spot the danger of these sites, which now number in the hundreds, the company said. Although they look genuine, it appears that all the sites have been specially crafted to fool visitors.

Fortinet gives examples of the sites, including one for a supposed fan of the Honda CR450 motor car, which attempts to infect visitors with the Wonka Trojan. In another, the fake blog redirects visitors to a store front purporting to be Pharmacy Express, a phishing site that has turned up in many spam emails distributed by the Stration worm.

“These are not legitimate blogs that were compromised. They appear to be deliberately set up to promote phishing, which is against our terms of service. We are investigating, and blogs found to include malicious code or promote phishing will be deleted,” Google said in a statement to CNET.

The fake blog scam is another example of social networking sites - the Internet’s big growth area - being exploited for gain. In recent times, MySpace and YouTube have all been used to host or redirect to malware. Last October, MySpace was used as the lure for phishing, while earlier in the year its users were infected with adware from the site.

In November, it was the turn of another Google company, YouTube, to play host attempted redirect scams, this time using fake porn videos as the bait.

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We all prefer Bluetooth technology much more than infrared for many reasons; as well we always find difficulties in finding the receiver and send them files, with the pairing tricks and so on.

It won’t be ready till December, but the folks at the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) are already demoing the next version of Bluetooth dubbed Bluetooth 2.1+EDR. The feature we’re psyched about the most is near field communication. NFC lets you pair and transfer files/images from one Bluetooth gadget to another by putting them within range of one another. So you can send pics from your cameraphone to your photo printer or pair your cell phone with a wireless headset via a virtual handshake (as you can tell by the post-jump video). Another bonus is…

That Bluetooth 2.1+EDR will suck up less battery, so you can expect 5x more battery life when you have Bluetooth turned on. As long as it works as promised, these features are good enough to make a casual Bluetooth user like myself wanna use it more often.

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The day after Vista was released to consumers, a workaround was presented on the web, that would allow you to postpone Vista activation for up to 120 days. Now there’s a new workaround that I think you’ll enjoy. I just found that webcast with Brian Livingston from WindowsSecrets.com who introduced a new way of bypassing Windows Vista activation that, when used in conjunction with slmgr-rearm, can get you by with one year of activation. This trick uses a registry key called SkipRearm which Microsoft’s own TechNet document says:

“All licensing and registry data related to activation is either removed or reset. Any grace period timers are reset as well.“

Extend Vista Activation To 120 Days

First off, Vista gives you a 30–day grace period to activate Vista if you don’t enter in a product key during the installation process (just press Enter when asked for a key to bypass it). Then at the end of each month right when your grace period is about to end you can get an additional 30 days by using this small trick that was discovered about a month ago:

1. First you need to start a Command Prompt as an administrator. You can do this by clicking the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. You may also do this by finding the Command Prompt option located in your Accessories folder:
   
   If asked to approve a User Account Control prompt, please do so and provide an administrator password if needed.
2. At the prompt type the following command and press Enter:
   slmgr -rearm Every time you run this command it will add 30 days to the amount of time you have to activate Windows Vista. However, it will only be effective up to 3 times. If you add this time onto your original grace period it will give you 120 days total.
   
3. Reboot the PC to make the Vista activation deadline get pushed back.
   

Extend Vista Activation Another 240 Days

So what do you do after the 120 days is up? You could either purchase a product key from Microsoft, or use another method to extend the activation grace period another 8 times making it a total of 12 months (the initial 1 month + 3 months from above + 8 months = 1 year). Just like before, this uses the slmgr -rearm command, but it also uses a registry setting to allow the command to run another 8 times:

1. Click the Start button, type regedit into the Search box, and press Enter.
   
2. Find the SkipRearm key in the Windows Registry that you just opened which is located in the following “folder”:
3. Right-click on the SkipRearm and select Modify. Change the “Value Data” to any positive integer, such as
   1. Press OK and close the Registry Editor.
   
4. Now you need to start a Command Prompt as an administrator. You can do this by clicking the Start button, enter cmd in the Search box, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. You may also do this by finding the Command Prompt option located in your Accessories folder:
   
   If asked to approve a User Account Control prompt, please do so and provide an administrator password if needed.
5. At the prompt type the following command and press Enter:
   slmgr -rearm

0. 
1. Reboot the PC to make the Vista activation deadline get pushed back.
   
   You can always use the command slmgr -xpr at a Command Prompt to have it show when Vista will expire to ensure that the trick has worked.
2. Every time you do the steps above it will essentially reset all activation information on your computer. You’re really starting from a clean slate each time (in terms of activation) which means you will need to repeat these steps every 30 days.
1. • Start of month 1: Install Vista without a product key (do this by pressing Enter during the installation setup).
   • End of months 1 to 3: Use the first set of steps outlined above to extend the activation grace period.
   • End of months 4 to 11: Use the second set of steps outlined above to extend the activation grace period.
   • End of month 12: Reinstall Vista.

Note: All of my PC’s are legally activated so I didn’t try this trick out for myself.I am in no way condoning piracy, but I wrote about this because it was something that seemed just too easy and only utilized tools already found in Vista. After watching the webcast I was shown just how easy it was to extend the deadline. This is still quite a pain though, because at the end of each month you’ll have to make sure to reset the activation system. Your calendar would look something like this:

This could really spell disaster for Microsoft because hackers will probably come out with some little program that will automatically extend the period every 30 days, and then it will prompt you to reboot your computer. It sounds so simple and it really is…I could whip up a quick program in just a few minutes that would do everything that you needed to.

The real worry for Microsoft comes when someone figures out where the slmgr limitation is stored. There is obviously something in Vista preventing a user from abusing the command more than what has already been demonstrated above. Once someone finds out what’s the limiting factor, there is going to be a whole can of worms opened up.

Why can users postpone activation in the first place?

Microsoft implemented a new Volume Licensing system in Windows Vista to hopefully stop widespread piracy that occurred with previous versions of Windows. In Windows XP Microsoft provided a single product key for corporations that wouldn’t require that Windows be activated at all. This caused a huge dilemma so Microsoft sought out another solution…and the result was Volume Licensing 2.0.

This new licensing system requires all computers be activated which can be an unweilding burden for administrators with 1000’s of computers to activate. Microsoft offers several different ways for these computers to be activated, but all of them are still time consuming. Therefore Microsoft implemented the command slmgr -rearm that would push back the activation period 30 days at a time for up to 120 days. That way administrators would be given more time to get all of their systems activated.

There is one small catch though, this was originally intended for business use but also worked on home versions of Vista. Since then Microsoft appears to have patched all retail versions of Vista Home, but it should still work for Vista Business, Vista Enterprise, and Vista Ultimate since those were the intended operating systems. Of course, pirates would probably be downloading Vista illegally from torrents and they would undoubtedly go for the Ultimate edition since it packs the most value.

While this can easily be done, it is surely no fun having to watch what patches are being downloaded in your Windows Update…and using cracks created by anyone else but yourself is just asking for trouble. Who knows what information those cracks could be sending to some unknown source! Now I’m left wondering what kind of update Microsoft will push through to try and correct this issue.

Thanks to Brian Livingston for inviting us to be part of his demo!

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Web 2.0  a phrase coined by by Tim O’reilly for a series of conferences in 2004  where some technicians and marketers adopted it, and they opened many debates about its right definition or meaning.  Many are listed below and your are free to decide which describes it best.

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I’ve elsewhere called ‘harnessing collective intelligence.’) Tim O’reilly “.

Eric Schmidt has an even briefer formulation of this rule: “Don’t fight the internet.” That’s actually a wonderful way to think about it. Think deeply about the way the internet works, and build systems and applications that use it more richly, freed from the constraints of PC-era thinking, and you’re well on your way.

As it is known in the world of computer every software or application has a version number, and so is the Web in its 2nd version 2.0, it is a bit off weird when we hear it because we all knew the web and that’s it, we never thought that we might have versions for it, it might be true or not.

Web 2.0 is an improved form of what is called the “World Wide Web” where many web applications are used such as weblogs, social bookmarking sites, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, social software, Web Standards and many other online services that imply a significant change in web usage.

Also the “Web 2.0” can refer to the following:

1. The transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, those become computing platforms serving web applications to end users.
2. A place to share and re-use of content such as articles, images, videos, music, as well a social place for dating.
3. Enhanced organization and categorization of content.

In the opening talk of the first Web 2.0 conference, Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle summarized key principles of Web 2.0 applications:

1. the web as a platform
2. data as the driving force
3. network effects created by an architecture of participation
4. innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of “open source” development)
5. lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication
6. the end of the software adoption cycle (”the perpetual beta”)
7. software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of The Long Tail.
8. easy to pick up by early adopters

Tim O’Reilly gave examples of companies or products that embody these principles in his description of his “four plus one” levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0-ness:

1. Level 3 applications, the most “Web 2.0″, which could only exist on the Internet, deriving their power from the human connections and network effects Web 2.0 makes possible, and growing in effectiveness the more people use them. O’Reilly gives as examples: eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, and Adsense.
2. Level 2 applications, which can operate offline but which gain advantages from going online. O’Reilly cited Flickr, which benefits from its shared photo-database and from its community-generated tag database.
3. Level 1 applications, also available offline but which gain features online. O’Reilly pointed to Writely (since 10 October 2006: Google Docs & Spreadsheets, offering group-editing capability online) and iTunes (because of its music-store portion).
4. Level 0 applications would work as well offline. O’Reilly gave the examples of MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps. Mapping applications using contributions from users to advantage can rank as level 2.
5. non-web applications like email, instant-messaging clients and the telephone.

Examples of Web 2.0:

Characteristics of Web 2.0

While interested parties continue to debate the definition of a Web 2.0 application, a Web 2.0 web-site may exhibit some basic characteristics. These might include:

1. “Network as platform” — delivering applications entirely through a browser.
2. Users owning the data on the site and able to control that data.
3. An option that allow users to add value to the application as they use it, as we believe a site made for the users is built by the users.
4. A rich, interactive, user-friendly interface based on Ajax or similar frameworks.
5. Some social-networking aspects.

Technology Overview

The new technology infrastructure of Web 2.0 includes server software, content syndication, messaging-protocols, standards-based browsers with plug-ins and extensions (like we see it in firefox), and various client applications. These different things gave another look for the web that goes beyond what the public formerly expected of websites.

A Web 2.0 website may typically feature a number of the following techniques:

1. Rich Internet application techniques, optionally Ajax-based
2. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
3. Semantically valid XHTML markup and the use of Microformats
4. Syndication and aggregation of data in RSS/Atom
5. Clean and meaningful URLs
6. Extensive use of tags
7. Use of wiki software either completely or partially
8. Weblog publishing
9. Mashups (A mashup is a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience. It is sometimes created as a critique or commentary on an existing work or product)
10. REST or XML Webservice APIs (Representational State Transfer (REST) is a software architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems like the world wide web)

Innovations associated with “Web 2.0″

Web-based applications

The richer user experience afforded by Ajax gave the web an advanced technology, where developers are able to develop web applications that are similar to desktop applications such as word processing, spreadsheet, and slide-show presentation. Also WYSIWIG wiki sites and other such as project management applications.

Several browser-based operating systems or online desktops have appeared, which give the user to access his computer, or desktop within any modern browser.

Rich Internet applications

Rich internet application techniques such as Ajax, Flash, and Flex have evolved that can improve the user-experience in browser based applications. These technologies allow a web-page to request update for some part of its content without reloading the whole page.

RSS

The first and the most important step (according to one point of view) of evolution towards Web 2.0 involves the syndication of site content, using standardized protocols which permit end-users to make use of a site’s data in another context, ranging from another web-site, to a browser plug-in, or to a separate desktop application. Protocols which permit syndication include RSS (Really Simple Syndication — also known as “web syndication”), RDF (as in RSS 1.1), and Atom, all of them flavors of XML. Specialized protocols such as FOAF and XFN (both for social networking) extend functionality of sites or permit end-users to interact without centralized web-sites

Web Protocols

Web communication protocols provide a key element of the Web 2.0 infrastructure. Major protocols include REST and SOAP.

1. REST (Representational State Transfer) indicates a way to access and manipulate data on a server using the HTTP verbs GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE
2. SOAP involves POSTing XML messages and requests to a server that may contain quite complex, but pre-defined, instructions for the server to follow

In both cases, an API defines access to the service. Often servers use proprietary APIs, but standard web-service APIs (for example, for posting to a blog) have also come into wide use. Most (but not all) communications with web services involve some form of XML

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Internet Radio has developed a lot through out the years and especially in the past 2 years. This service is one of the main solutions on the net to listen to music without being involved in music piracy or whatever illegal things related.

With all the development of this service over the net, we cannot find any good local station that has special online schedule or broadcast. To be honest I didn’t notice this unless I traveled after the last war. There I was searching for some local or Arabic music to listen to, and than I got to Radio Sawt Beirut. Here we go to our post main subject, which I would like to talk a bit about this online radio of which am proud of.

Radio Sawt Beirut started in 2005; the idea was to let all Lebanese’s from all over the world to gather in one place. Where they do feel their mother country ambiance, even if they are miles far away from it

The radio founder’s idea was, as radio owners and team, to be very close to the listeners, build up a relation in between. They activated msn between the radio and the listeners, and e-mails were always active so both parties were always in contact.

Also the radio got a very big online advertising campaign, especially during the last Lebanese war (summer 20007) with the 24/7 coverage of what’s happening or going on, so people one more time can know and feel they are next to their beloved ones in their mother country in the hardest moments, and for sure related songs aired on the radio all time. During that period, comfm.com awarded the radio the #1 in their weekly charts. Also alexa ranked them as the most popular Lebanese site/radio. Today, they are powered by paltalk.com the first multimedia community on the net.

Radio Sawt Beirut became since Lebanon war, Radio Sawt Beirut International!!

The radio team works from CANADA, AMERICA, SWEDEN, GERMANY, DENMARK, UAE, LEBANON, KUWAIT, AUSTRALIA, and soon in South America…

Finally, I would love to thank everyone working to keep up this radio alive!

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Was looking forward for a serious upgrade for my desktop, its operating system which is windows XP and the Microsoft office 2003. But after the reviews I read and the Beta RC2 test for windows vista I preferred to keep on using XP with service pack 2. On the other hand I gambled and bought the office 2007 and right now I am using it and happy cause I did go for this choice, and let me admit it for the first time I like a Microsoft product and not being obliged to use it.

The office 2007 was rebuild with a different interfaces and new file formats, but still you can save the files to be accessed by the older versions of office in the save as option. The new Office doesn’t look like its predecessors; it’s likely to spark intense love-hate responses from users. I found that this upgrade isn’t for everyone: If you’re patient, eager to try the latest tools, and willing to relearn most of what you already know about Office, then you may relish the challenge of Office 2007.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 can produce a lot more polished documents and presentations, even Outlook’s new interface make it more familiar and reliable for use.

Those professionals who like to impress their clients, managers, co-workers with attractive reports , charts, and slide shows will find this new office a worthy upgrade.

If you use office applications with their basic or minimum functions, maybe you will try the office 2007 for free for 2 months than you will put it on the shelf, and get back to the 2003 version as you don’t need for more and It is easier for you.

Those who used to master old versions of Microsoft Office, will be on the right track to master this new version like I am doing, but it will take a bit of time, but once you will get familiar with it you wont be able to use older versions, and those using older versions will find difficulties in accessing your files and they need special patches to do so, which will be a problem in the future. To not forget, also Office 2007 offer complex functions that you cant find elsewhere right now.
I would like to state some of the Interface and features from what I found on a cnet article about office:

Interface

Once you open each Office 2007 application, you’ll see a radically different, blue interface that’s brighter than in the past. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint arrange features within a tabbed Ribbon toolbar that largely replaces the gray drop-down menus and dialog boxes from a quarter-century of Office software.

The Office logo menu, docked in the upper left corner, bundles many commands from the old File and Edit menus. Outlook lacks the logo button and adopts the Ribbon only within its message composition and scheduling windows.

There’s a core set of always-on tabs, as well as contextual tabs that hide until the software detects that you need them. For instance, the Picture Tools Format tab only shows up when you click on an image. We were stumped at first about how to format images, tables, and charts until we got used to clicking on them first.

The Office 2007 programs, which share a new graphics engine, strongly emphasize ways to decorate documents. Pull-down Style Galleries let you preview how new fonts, color themes, chart styles, images and such appear before you apply the change.

This is great for selecting from menus of fonts or page templates. At the same time, however, the “intelligent” shape-shifting may bewilder those who don’t realize that they must click a style to apply a formatting change. In most cases, the preformatted styles only present colors within the same range already used by your document.

And sometimes the pull-down galleries jut into the document and obscure the charts or images you’re trying to change, and you can’t turn them off.

Nor do the dynamic previews apply to all style elements. For example, from the Page Layout tab of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, you can preview Themes of colors and templates by mousing over them. But the Page Borders option takes you to an unhelpful, old-school pop-up box without dynamic previews.

On the one hand, newbies to Office software, particularly young, visual learners, may find the 2007 interface easier to master than Office 2003. Icons label most of the commands, and many expand into pull-down menus. There are inconsistencies, though, such as buttons that open older dialog boxes. And many items have moved to places that we don’t find intuitive.

For instance, the dictionary and thesaurus in Word are under the Review tab, not References near the footnote and bibliography buttons. And the Insert Rows command in Excel 2007 is located beneath the Home tab, not the Insert tab. Likewise, PowerPoint’s New Slide button is under Home instead of Insert. Notice a pattern? Although the Home tab houses many frequently used features, it’s not the first place we look for them.

After more than a year of alternating between Office 2003 and test versions of Office 2007, we still found it hard to break old habits. Microsoft advertises the Ribbon’s ability to help you “browse, pick, and click.” If you’re upgrading, though, you could get stuck in the “browse” stage longer than you’d like, slowing your work.

Rather than piling on more features — Word 2003 alone had some 1,500 commands — Microsoft attempted to better show off functions that already existed. To some extent, the Ribbon meets this goal, as it’s easier to find Conditional Formatting in Excel, among other sophisticated tools. And the View tab in Word and Excel better provides options for viewing two or three open documents at once.

You can customize Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to some extent, such as by adding buttons to the small, Quick Access Toolbar, but not as much as with their predecessors.

Luckily, keyboard shortcuts remain the same; just press ALT at any time to see tiny “badges” that label the quick keys for the Ribbon’s commands. We like that you can hide the Ribbon by double-clicking on any tab. Plus, Microsoft has killed Clippy, the annoying animated pop-up assistant that would interrupt your work in Office 2003. A subtle new quick formatting toolbar in Word 2007 fades in and out near your cursor.

Overall, our favorite interface tweak is the slider bar in the lower right corner that lets you zoom in and out with ease.

Features

Many of the changes to Office 2007 feel skin deep. By that, we mean that there’s a strong emphasis on making documents, spreadsheets, and presentations easier on the eyes.

You can adjust the brightness of images, for instance, and add 3D effects such as drop shadows and glows to pictures and charts. And many of the features that might appear new are simply easier to stumble upon in the new interface. The useful Document Inspector provides old and new ways to clean up hidden metadata in files. But don’t expect too many new features.

Word 2007 offers some basic tools that you’d otherwise look to in desktop publishing programs such as Microsoft Publisher or Adobe InDesign. A host of new templates as well as preformatted styles and SmartArt diagrams let you dress up reports, flyers, and so on with images and charts.

However, you can’t precisely control the placement of design elements on the page as you can with professional publishing software. And for wordsmiths who just work with plain old text, there’s little need to upgrade. There’s a new method of comparing document drafts side by side, but you still can’t post a password-protected file to the Web without having Groove or server tools.

At the same time, academic researchers should appreciate the Review tab’s handy pull-down menus of footnotes, citations, and tables of content. And Word’s new blogging abilities might be handy, but even its cleaned-up HTML is far more cluttered than we’d like.

We find that the Ribbon layout in Excel improves its usefulness for working with complex spreadsheets. For instance, scientists and other researchers can access all the formulas in handy pull-down menus. You can make deeper data sorts and work with as many as a million rows.

It’s easier to find the Conditional Formatting for drawing heat maps or adding icons in order to display data patterns. Plus, along with the other glossier graphics throughout Office, Excel charts get a facelift.

You’ll probably want to upgrade to PowerPoint 2007 if you frequently depend upon professional-looking slide shows to help close a deal. The new template themes are more attractive and less flat-looking than those of the past, although there’s little new in the way of managing multimedia content.

Among the four applications in Office Standard, Outlook 2007 provides the most practical improvements. To start, it lets you drag tasks and e-mail messages to the calendar, a long-awaited feature that makes scheduling more simple. The new To-Do Bar’s task and calendar overview and the ability to flag an e-mail for follow up at a specific time are terrific for time management.

Outlook’s built-in RSS reader is useful if you manage lots of news feeds, but we were disappointed that it matches up only with RSS feeds in Internet Explorer 7 and not other browsers. We also wish there were a simpler way of organizing e-mail messages than in nested folders and Search Folders. Tagging messages by subject might be nice, as Gmail allows.

The new Instant Search — which lets you troll through e-mail messages, calendar entries, to-do items, and contacts — improves upon Outlook 2003’s clutzy lookups. Plus, Outlook’s new protection against junk mail and phishing scams disables suspicious links.

But Outlook 2007 uses Word 2007’s HTML standards rather than those of Internet Explorer 7, which could make some of your newsletters look lopsided when compared with their appearance in Outlook 2003.

When sending e-mail attachments from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the Outlook composition window opens with all of its formatting options. Integration has improved throughout the applications, but it’s not fully there yet.

For instance, we like that you can tinker with a chart’s appearance within Word and PowerPoint while managing the connected data in Excel at the same time. You can click through a preview of a PowerPoint slide show attached to an Outlook e-mail message. But why can’t you get a quick, split-pane view of two applications at once at any other time?

We’re disappointed at the current lack of integration with Web-based services. If you don’t want to buy Groove to collaborate with other Groove users, and you’re not using Office on a shared office server, then you’ll have to turn to a third-party service, such as Zoho Writer, Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and ThinkFree to upload and collaborate on documents without having to e-mail them around.

We had hoped to see such capabilities added, perhaps in the form of tie-ins to Microsoft’s Windows Live or Office Live.

Every application saves work in the new, Office Open XML formats (see our guide and video). Look for an X in the new document extension: DOCX replaces DOC, XLSX replaces XLS, and so forth. The 2007 documents, presentations, and spreadsheets squeeze more data into fewer kilobytes than their predecessors did. If a file becomes corrupted, you should be able to recover its contents better than in the past because the files store text, images, macros, and other elements separately.

Note that when you open older Office files with the 2007 applications, you’ll work in the Compatibility Mode with fewer features until you convert files to the new format. And as with the release of Office 1997, you can’t open a file with the new extension right away when using earlier versions of the programs.

What if you have the new software but need to share work with people who have not upgraded? The 2007 applications let you save backward-compatible files, but not by default. Those who are running Word 2003 or 2000 and need to open a Word 2007 DOCX file have to download a one-time Compatibility Pack.

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Small and mid sized business owners are not 100% sure that Search Engine Optimization (SEP) is the right solution or key for their online marketing needs, when in fact, there are very few instances where SEO is not a crucial and central part of an online marketing strategy.

Since “day one”, the point of SEO was to increase sales by obtaining qualified business leads from Internet search engines. Achieving this goal is possible with almost any business of any size. And, while SEO is a complex, evolving issue and requires tons and tons of work, every business Owner, President, CEO or CMO must recognize that without an organized SEO campaign in place, you will fade off the map, lose sales to competitors and bleed the value of your brand over time. You will spend tons of money on traditional media buys and find it ever so difficult to track and tie sales to those sources. To ignore SEO in its traditional and new evolving forms is to deny your company and its employees the opportunity to succeed online in the long-term.

So what are some of the basic reasons for which business owners and senior managers should take a closer look at SEO?

Obtain Increased and Higher Quality Sales – just as you begin to optimize your website, long tail search volumes will improve. Over the long term, with a lot of hard work, you can achieve significant positions on the major search engines leading to positive, bottom line results:

• • Your website will perform better and receive more traffic shortly after you begin to implement standard optimization tactics. This is not to say that if you sell mortgages (a competitive area), you can optimize for “mortgages” and on day #2 of your work going live on your site, you’ll have more traffic. BUT, if you begin to work on your niche and provide more and more relevant information to your users and to the search engines in a clear, concise manner, you’ll grow your traffic from the outset of your program.
• A lot of businesses are locally based and rely on foot traffic for customers to be within a short drive of their office or retail location. Search engines offer a plethora of local search features, and strategies for local search abound. If you leverage these local search tools and local search strategies properly, you are sure to increase your sales.

Increased Search Engine Visibility – Spread your wings!

• With a solid SEO program in place, you will cater to all major crawler-based search engines. So, not only will you receive exposure on Google (at some point) but also on Yahoo and MSN – and several other outlets. Once you optimize your site for organic search, the 3 major engines will pick up your site and run with it over time.
• As opposed to Push marketing SEO is “PULL Marketing” The quality of a lead that find you through search is very high. When someone searches your keywords and finds you, there is a darn good chance that they are going to be a solid new business lead. When a searcher finds you, they have INTENT. They pulled themselves right to you for a reason; they are looking for what you have. This is just the opposite of PUSH marketing – direct mail, outdoor advertising, TV, radio and other media mediums.

Brand Recognition – small businesses may not have large budgets for major branding. However, strong niche oriented organic search results can lead to your brand being associated with that niche over time. Your brand awareness and brand recall strength will increase as time goes on.

• Your company’s name becomes associated with specific keywords that are embedded in a customer’s mind.
• Control the terms that you associate with your products, services and brands.
• Impression on customers over your competitors – control your messaging with your landing pages.
• • The impression that you make on search results in crucial. To correlate this to a more human level let me ask this: If you went to a business networking event (Search Engine) where you might see a prospective client (Searcher), would you arrive at the event in tattered clothing, hide under a table or hang out in the bathroom for the entire event? Probably not. I’d suggest you’d opt for the former and likely network, move around the room, show your face and be found. This is the same as a search engine. Why hide? Why show up to a business event in dirty tattered clothing? If you poked your head out for the one good lead at the event, would you shake that person’s hand take their business card and hand them a Post it Note with your company’s name and your contact information scribbled on it? Probably not. This is the same thing as ignoring what is returned in search queries about your products and services. That is, poor page descriptions and poor landing pages make a really bad first impression – don’t let this happen to you! Many companies have neglected page links that are in search results which do not make for a strong impression on their prospects. Have you ever searched and get results and click through and you suddenly waiting for a .pdf to download? As a business owner, you must begin to recognize that this is no longer good enough. You get one chance to make a first impression, so don’t hand someone a Post-It with your name scribbled on it. Make a clear, positive impression. Proper optimization can help you with this.

Enhanced Credibility and Legitimacy – Has anyone ever said to you: “I searched your company’s name, but I could not find you.” Have you ever searched for a company by their name (no matter how unique) and you cannot find them? Is that frustrating? Does that make you think less of that company? For me, it does. Some points to remember are:

• Search Engine’s organic / natural results are viewed as authority referrals.

o Google Trust Factor: Some studies suggest that a referral from a friend exponentially increases the probability of closing a sale. Think of leads that come through search as referrals from trusted a friend. Think: “Google is my friend; Google is my brother referring his friends to me!” People trust search engines, especially Google’s authority. Take advantage of the trust factor to build your sales and qualified business leads. Google is viewed as everyone’s trusted friend who makes a referral – what Google says goes. Please don’t deny this fact.

o Each day, journalists go online and search for experts in subjects that they are covering. Can’t afford a high end PR agency? Optimize your site for your niche and be found for interviews in your subject, product and / or service area. Show the world you’re an expert and they’ll come to you for commentary.

Investment in your Domain Name

• Your investment in SEO is an investment in the value of your domain name and your website as a whole. It not only adds up in product and service sales numbers, but as you build links to your site, those links retain a certain value over time – they transfer strength and power to your domain.

Competitive Edge and Research Advantage

• In the USA, we operate in a capitalist society and system – based on competing to win in pretty much every facet of life (some will say I have this wrong, but that’s okay). This applies to marketing and marketing online. We really are in the mode of Survival of the fittest “The end justifies the means”. Optimization and Online Marketing is not a game of chance – it simply is not. You will not succeed without strategy, adaptation, knowledge, tactics and sweat – you simply will not. You will be swallowed by your competition if you do not have a gameplan – SEO is part of that gameplan.
• A solid optimization plan can help you succeed and sows the seeds for your company to grow over the long term. You may be behind now, but once you start, every little raise in ranks, one more long-tail term covered, one more referral from a major search engine counts for your business. I have seen this first hand, how the right referral from a search engine can keep a small business busy for a long, long time.
• Good search optimization can put you in the driver’s seat with your competition. Competitors who see you succeed and beat them out in major search, may in turn bow down to you and want to strike deal with you in any number of business negotiations. Or, you may one day say – hey, I have too much new business coming to me on the web, can you handle my overflow for me and I’ll take a cut????
• Being found in the top ranks of Google or other search engines for your top keywords can impress your business prospects. It can establish you as a leader in your area of expertise. So, not only bring you more qualified business leads, but it influences the buying process such that – as opposed to a competitor who may be ranking lower. So your prospects may say: “you’re beating them at search, so you must be more knowledgeable and have better products or services.” Don’t bank on this concept, but it’s just one more ancillary benefit to a solid SEO program.
• When you begin to play in SEO and watch your site statistics you learn more about your clients, prospective clients, their behavior and what they are looking for. Some companies are even rolling out new products based on the search terms from which visitors are arriving at their websites. With increased exposure as a result of SEO, you’ll glean information about the marketplace that you can then turn around and use for your competitive advantage. You’ll see holes and unique areas to exploit in the market place. So, make sure that you are tracking your stats and reviewing them regularly.

Ad Spend predictability and High Return on Investment (ROI). Optimization has more predictable long term costs and ROI metrics as compared to other components of marketing strategies.

• If you are a small or mid-sized business you have unique and or relatively distinguishable products and services from other companies in your industry. Establish your niche. When you present this information properly to users and search engines, it’s likely that you’ll find savings in obtaining leads from the internet. With organic optimization, your content, based on your niche, will begin to do the work for you.
• Once you are ranking for your keywords you can continue to mount on those existing rankings. You can produce content about your unique service or product to pull the visitors to you organically.
• ROI from SEO can be significantly higher than other forms of advertising and direct marketing. I’ve seen ROI on SEO programs at over 400% (many cases much higher, some lower). And, though I am a big fan of Pay Per Click and paid search advertising, SEO has been known to put PPC to shame – and that’s an understatement. But overall – search is the more important point, so whether its SEO or PPC, both can be managed to a great ROI, well beyond other forms of advertising and marketing.

Passive Business Development – “What are you talking about – Passive Biz Dev?”

• The great part about organic optimization is that once you are ranking well, in most cases, you can hit a plateau and build on that — so long as your industry is not too competitive. Though everyone’s plateau is different, from 1st page, Top 5, Top 3 or even #1!, once you’ve attained it, it is easier to continue on building your program to higher levels – adding keywords to your program and expanding out from the rankings that you have established to that point becomes an easier task – not simple, just slightly easier. You must continue to invest in your optimization in some fashion, but your overall investment can be tempered. Organic rankings help build traffic from other long-tail (more specific) terms and you site gains more and more momentum. This in turn allows you to draw down some of your time, or ramp it up if you so choose. In some cases, once you hit a certain level of optimization, your site can remain relatively competitive (depending on your industry) and you can watch the new business leads come in while you sit on cruise control.
• One way that this works is if you are indeed ranking for various keywords – offsite, external, in-bounds links will come to you naturally over time. Internet users, publishers and bloggers in your space may pick up on your site and link to it for factual information.

There are many drivers and justifications for a business to implement SEO and Search programs. For me, the most compelling reason is the increase in qualified business leads and accordant sales that come as a result of good SEO work.

I’m sure that there are more reasons not listed above. Now ready to hear your feedback!

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