Back in the day, I had a webcam and used it often. I had it linked on my blog so that the whole internet was invited to my virtual peep show…so to speak. Mostly, I used it to goof off with online friends. Person.com is trying to bring back the webcam and make it hot again by putting together hundreds of webcam users together in one place. (Hmm…sounds like a recipe for some naughtiness!) You can check it out at Person.com - webcams, chat, personals. (They snagged a helluva a domain name, didn’t they?)

Personally, this kind of thing doesn’t hold much interest for me. I’m too busy online to chat with strangers. But for you single types out there, this is MySpace on steroids. You can make your own live webcam show, watch others, rate photos, read personal ads, visit forums, and join chatrooms. The site has 276,023 active members, and when I visited, over 3200 were online at the same time, so you won’t ever be lonely.

To those of you who are of the…younger generation…you probably don’t remember a time in your lives without a computer, and possibly, you can’t remember a time without internet access. (The day your DSL went out for 12 hours doesn’t count.)

As for me, I remember taking an elective computer course in the 8th grade, where we learned how to do the most basic programming, line by line. I didn’t get online til 1997 when I was a stay at home mom awaiting the birth of my 2nd child. Our first computer was a hand me down from a relative, and it was all of 1.5 GB of hard drive. I remember seeing new Gateways with a 6GB hard drive and thinking you couldn’t EVER fill that up.

The point of all this? That little thing we know as the internet is turning 25 this month. From software created in a college dorm room (Napster) to internet access paid by the hour (AOL), it’s been a run ride. Thanks, internet! I love you.

When I ran my own website, we incorporated and had an accountant do our taxes every year. It was then that I discovered not all accountants are created equal. We found ours through the lawyer who incorporated our business, and he was good, but definitely a high priced kind of guy. I didn’t know any better at the time, but I could have had someone do the same work, for less money. Live and learn, right? Most accountants probably get the majority of their business from word of mouth, but a new website in the UK is hoping to change that. You can find bookkeeping services and accountants at their website - just fill out a form, and you get 4 quotes. The benefit of using the site is that they can match your needs with the accountant who can help you best. Maybe you’re a small business owner like I was, and you need a bit of personal attention and one-on-one. Maybe you’re running a Fortune 500 company and you need a whole team of accountants to handle your business needs. Whatever you need, be it taxation help or someone to process your payroll, JustAccountants can help your business. You avoid making a bunch of calls to find what type of accountant can handle your business and instead get the right type of person sent directly to YOU.

I was a little distracted by the PR update starting yesterday, so I neglected to take care of Supahstar Saturday! This week’s featured blogger is Doris, who blogs at Life..Passion..Travel & More…

Doris is a self confessed travel freak as well as a stay at home / work at home mom (or “mum”, depending on who you ask) living in Singapore. (I’m extremely jealous because one of her most recent blog entries mentions shopping at Ikea. How come Ikea can build in Singapore, but there’s not one by me yet? I wanna shop at Ikea TOO!)

Why do you blog? It started when I was expecting Clayton and being new to motherhood and all, I needed a ’space’ of my own. But the truth was when he came, I had simply no time to maintain the blog and got back to it only after our first New Zealand trip in Oct 2004.

Blogging now is become a daily activity for me now. I blog because I can be ‘me’ in this space and the upside of blogging, I make lots of friends and meet many interesting bloggers out there. Staying in touch, networking and being able to express yourself are the main reasons to keep my blogging momentum going.

What do you like best about blogging? The ability to share my thoughts, experiences and opinions on life, passions and everything else! Developing virtual friendships is the
next best for me.

Ready to write? Put together an entry on your blog about Doris & her blog, with 2 or 3 links to entries that caught your eye. All done? Come back here and leave a comment with the link to the entry you wrote. Feel free to use one of the following images in your entry or on your site, please save it and upload it to your own. You’ve got a whole week to write and submit an entry about Doris, and once you’ve participated in 5 separate Supahstar Saturdays, you’re eligible to be picked as a featured blogger!

For more info and guidelines, please read my post explaining how Supahstar Saturday works.

Technorati Tags: Supahstar Saturday, blog, blog promotion, Technorati, PR, pagerank, Google pagerank, SEO, Tecnorati ranking, promote your blog

You heard it here first. Fifty-seventh. Google’s pagerank update is happening today - yay! So far, I’m only seeing fluctuations for one of my sites. Don’t rejoice or get upset yet - while the datacenters are pulling different info, anything could happen. Wait til the dust has settled before you do anything.

I love Wikipedia. I’m a naturally curious type (some would say nosy, I say curious) and if I don’t know enough about something, I like to find out more. Today it was Stephen Hawking. I read this post on Pesky Apostrophe about flight on zero gravity jet and wanted to know more. I know OF Stephen Hawking, but I don’t know much about him. So, I turned to Wikipedia and there it was - a complete bio about Stephen Hawking with photos, links, and important dates in his life. What geek wouldn’t love this online encyclopedia?

You can find out more about just about anything on Wikipedia. Last week I learned about Charles Whitman (I wasn’t born when he became infamous, so I wanted to know more about his crime) and read up on Boris Yeltsin. I’m gearing up to appear on Jeopardy someday. And yes, I was the type of kid who would pick up a volume of Funk & Wagnalls and read it…for fun. Don’t hate me me because I have a thirst for knowledge!

At my last company, we got raises and reviews at the same time every year. It was nice knowing you could count on that - but at the same time, unless you got a sudden promotion, you knew you weren’t getting a raise until that time next year. (Lucky me - I did get a promotion, and a few months later when my manager left, petitioned to our operations manager for more and got it again!)

In my new job, they used to be a bit lax about reviews…but not raises. I’ve got a raise once or twice a year, ever year, but this year was the first time I ever had a formal review. I guess someone finally purchased some employee evaluation software and got the ball rolling on doing scheduled reviews! Programs like ManagerAssistant make doing reviews easy. With this program, you can track employee performance and activities and use the software to review that employee as often as you’d like. No more checking one spreadsheet to see how often an employee called in absent or came in late…because it’s all in one spot. The newest version of ManagerAssistant will be launched in just a few weeks.

Another reason I like them? The company is right in my area…they’re based out of St. Petersburg, FL. I love supporting local companies!

I got Grand Theft Auto (the trilogy) for Christmas, and I love the game. Right after the holidays, we had visiting friends who had a 15 year old, and I let him place the game to show me some tips and tricks and cheats. But alas, he had to return home, and I’m stuck. I’m at the point in the game where you ride through alleys chasing the guy on the motorcycle, shooting at home. I’ve tried it 100 different times, and I can’t keep up with him. It’s so flippin’ frustrating! I need to find a teenager around here to help me beat the level, because it’s apparently too much for my 30 year old brain.

Back in the day, when I was a wee 21 year old, I worked for a small local builder. My big job there was using Act (does anyone even use that anymore?) to track all of the people who came by to look at homes, to send out mailers to those people, and to gauge their interest in the software. It’s called tracking leads - and customer relationship management software has changed a lot in the past 10 years. The clunky system I used has been replaced, and one of the crm software programs being used today is AimPromote. With features like visitor tracking, automatic lead distribution, and campaign tracking, you can see how it’s improved on the systems of old. When you visit the site, you’ll be able to watch an online demo showing how the software can effectively manage your sales leads, freeing you up to sell!

I can laugh at this, because I’m not using Vista. However, my mother is, and this guy is right. Nothing is compatible with Vista! It looks great on her PC, I love the new desktop features, but she can’t install anything that she was using previously. More hassle than it’s worth! Watch how this guy loads Vista onto his “machine”.

Via: Video Blog

Bloggers and radio station DJ’s are the only people concerned about disclosure issues. The corporate world takes the issue of disclosure seriously as well. For example, we might have a relationship at work with a particular internet job board. We do a lot of business with them. Doesn’t sound like a big deal, right? But when I tell you we used to own that company, it might change your opinion about using them - because now you know my company may or may not have a vested interest in the deal. Wouldn’t you want to know if there was a reason for a stock, a product being recommended for purchase? Q4 is a company that deals specifically with the issue of corporate disclosure so that publicly traded companies can avoid sticky situations.

The company helps you to increase transparency and gives you the ability to automate the disclosure of changes in your business in an easy to follow web format. Something like this will only help you in the long run, especially if you ever plan to take things public.

When I needed to cheap in high school, I’d write test answers on my leg. Or have a little cheat sheet hidden under my desk. The kids these days - they’ve got it too easy - they can use their iPods to cheat! Students are recording themselves reading the answers and playing them during the test. Pretty smart if you ask me.

What geek wouldn’t want a new TV, say a nice big 50 inch? (Can you imagine playing Grand Theft Auto on that baby?) And what geek wouldn’t want to get that TV by winning it? It’s true, you can win a brand new 50 inch TV, or an Apple iPhone, or tons of other great prizes when you visit bid4prizes. This isn’t your traditional auction website - here, it’s not the highest bid that wins, but rather the lowest unique bid. (Unique because obviously, if it were just the lowest bid, I’d bid a penny and win. Duh!) Totally unique concept, totally awesome prizes - I’m all in! Now, what would a geek bid? What’s a geeky number? Hmm…might need more research.

Earlier today, I was over at Utterly Geek and read Julie’s blog entry about Marge Simpson using Google.

I’m watching a rerun of The Simpsons right now, and Homer is in jail. One of the other inmates (Snake) reminds him about a jailbreak scheduled for later that evening. When Homer complains that no one told him, Snake says “”I sent you an Evite. You never responded. Nice netiquette, jerk!”

To quote Nelson:

Ha, ha!

We do a lot of conference calling at work. With so many of us working from home, being able to do
web conferencing eliminates the need to make the trip into the office to meet in person. You can easily schedule online meetings with ConferenceCall.com. They’ve got a variety of products to fit your needs, whether you’re hosting a smaller meeting, like we do, or having a conference for thousands. They’ve even got a rewards program that gives you reward points (redeemable for airline miles or gift certificates) for each minute of usage through your conferencing account!

Ever heard about the “Zone of Silence” in the Durango Desert of Mexico?

Reading about places where TV and radio signals don’t work always makes me wonder WHY. What kind of natural interference is the Earth giving off in places like that? How the heck does that work? I get it when my WiFi signal doesn’t work because someone in the other room is using a microwave or something like that…but this is just weird.

Even geeks need a getaway from time to time. What’s this geeks dream getaway? How about a vacation where I can leave my laptop at home, and return to find that not a soul has emailed me in my time away? I know, I know, I’m dreaming! Leisuretime Holidays can’t promise me an empty inbox, but they can promise great vacations for years to come! By buying points in their vacation plan, you get your pick of resorts and dates for tons of vacations over the next few years. Go as often as you want, wherever you want.

Now that’s my kind of dream! I love having that kind of flexibility in my travel plans, and eliminating all of the hassle on finding a hotel or resort to stay at.

Wow!

Jarrod of Sponsored Reviews had some really nice feedback on his blog about about my (unpaid) review of his service. While it’s true that I didn’t get paid for my review, it accomplished a few things:

• It made more people aware of the service that Sponsored Reviews provides (both bloggers and advertisers, hopefully).
• It gave me great content that will pull people into this site, and get people active on our message boards if they want to find out more about paid blogging.
• Jarrod is now posting on OUR message board asking for feedback and answering questions, which is great for our paid blogging community.
• And…Jarrod encouraged his readers to digg my review, which will result in more traffic here.

Results like that make me happy. Increasing exposure for this site for free is always a great benefit of blogging!

I think it’s really neat how schools have embraced technology as a career option, and are letting students avoid a more traditional education, and instead letting students take coursework that can be truly applied in the workplace. Sure, you need to take Composition I to learn how to write a memo to your employees, but trust me - I am never going to use all of that Algebra I had to take! One such school making a big move towards tech coursework is Collins College - some of the classes they’re currently offering are animation, game design, network technology, and visual communication. Interested? Fill in your info at the Collins College contact form and find out what they can do for you!

The game design major reminds me of an old Far Side comic. Picture a boy, madly playing video games, while his parents dream of classified ads 20 years into the future, all wanting to hire someone who can get to certain levels of Mario…HA!

My review of Sponsored Reviews this week has really benefited the GeekySpeaky message boards. How? The owner of Sponsored Reviews is now a registered member and is answering our questions about how is site works, what we’d like to see changed, and what the future holds for the company.

Jarrod joins several other reps from paid blogging companies. We’ve got Tony from PayU2Blog fielding questions in our PayU2Blog forum, and the head honco of Blogitive answering people in our Blogitive forum. It’s really great that employees of the various paid blogging programs have stepped in to answer concerns and questions in our forums like this, without ever being asked to do so.

If you want to find out more about paid blogging, the GeekySpeaky forums are the place to do it!