Freedom Flynn

Anyone using AdSense on their websites should have received  a email from Google like the one below here. Something that you may want to review and look into. What do you think about Google’s new interest-based advertising?

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Hi,

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”).  To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network.  As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category.  To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009.  Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

It appears that adults are rapidly jumping into social media. This is great news for folks that are taking advantage of social media to promote business and services to adults. Majority of small to medium companies I talk with really see no value in social marketing and this just backs up the fact that it is not all just teens using these mediums.

Excerpt from Clickz.com

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Teens aren’t alone in the growing population of social networkers;
adults are increasing among the ranks of the popular online sites, says
“Adults and Social Network Web Sites,” a study released by Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Use of social networking sites among those 18 and older quadrupled
over the past four years. The percentage of adults using sites such as
MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn grew from 8 percent in 2005 to 35
percent in 2008. While 65 percent of online teens have profiles on
social networking sites, Pew Internet Senior Research Specialist Amanda
Lenhart points out that adults make up a larger portion of the U.S.
population, so the 35 percent represents a larger number of users than
the 65 percent of teens on social networks.

Heavier usage occurs with younger adults:

• 75 percent of online adults 18 to 24 have a profile on a social networking site.

• 57 percent of online adults 25 to 34 have a profile on a social networking site.
• 30 percent of online adults 35 to 44 have a profile on a social networking site.
• 19 percent of online adults 45 to 54 have a profile on a social networking site.
• 10 percent of online adults 65 and older have a profile on a social networking site.

“It is important to pay attention to age,” said Lenhart. “The age
suggests that though they may be adults, [a high percentage of users]
were recently teens. The large picture is it’s younger Americans who
are using these sites.”

Read the full story here.

I wish everyone the best for this new year. May you all prosper and move forward in life. I am excited to start the new year with a new direction.

Thank you to all my clients and business associates for making 2008 a great year. I look forward to working with you over the coming year and building our relationships.

Social Media is a wonderful thing to keep in contact with all of your acquaintances, promote yourself and have fun interacting with those you meet on the internet and real life. In my quest for going mobile I have put a lot of time into making social media as easy as possible for me to keep up with, even using my phone majority of the time. If you are like me you have several different social outlets and managing them and keeping up can be very difficult or even overwhelming at times. Well in this article I will briefly share what works for me so far.

I have a few different categories of social media I use.

Blogging – Which I am now improving on keeping up with since I have a system.
Social networking websites – Facebook, My Space, Linked In, Plaxo, etc. etc.

I have not used all of these by any means to the fullest extent. I have though promised myself to start using all of these and have now got all the tools in-place to do so and loose that overwhelming feeling of being in several places at once. I know that some may have some better options and ideas to accomplish the same thing and I recommend looking into and trying as many as possible to find one that will work for you and keep you on top of everything.

Let’s start with Blogging and web posting.

I have had a personal blog on Blogger for years and felt I never had the time to share things with family and friends. Blogger is a very easy to use blog and anyone with a Google account doesn’t need any additional sig-up’s or log ins. Blogger by far made their system the easiest for mobile posting as well. They offer posting via MMS (picture messaging posting) which is very easy to set-up and use, posting via email, as well as, simply logging in and posting. So after having these options set-up you can very easily simply send a picture message and post on your blog. I finally have some posts now over the last couple of months. Nothing too significant, however at least I am building a habit of posting and will continue to do so and become more and more active.

My blog here uses Wordpress, Wordpress is a great blogging system. I would only recommend Wordpress for those that have some experience with basic websites though, as it is a bit more complicated and I feel that you should get your feet wet with something a little easier like blogger first. Wordpress options for mobile and remote blogging are a little more intensive as well to set-up than Blogger, but once it is set-up you can post via email to your Wordpress blog. You can set-up posting via email. Since most most mobile carriers allow you to send an MMS message to an email address, that means you can also post via picture message just like Blogger. However, with either blogging system I recommend email if you have a data plan and phone that allows, as you can then send longer messages for your posts. If you are using Wordpress and have a T-Mobile G1 like me, I definitely recommend the wpToGo app. This app gives you pretty much the same functionality as Scribefire add-on for Firefox, which is a must have for any blogger – Thanks Vince. wpToGo has full category support, image attachment options and more. Since I don’t have an iPhone and go rid of my Blackberry Curve for the G1 I am not sure what options exist for those platforms but recommend checking to see if there is something comparable.

Wordpress is best option to me for a blog, since you can host it on Wordpress.com, or your own server if you choose. Blogger does not have this option. With the wpToGo app for Android as well it gives you the most posting options of the two as well. Wordpress also offers substantial plug-ins, hacks and apps. you could even have an online store, forums and more added onto your Wordpress site through community developed apps and widgets. Blogger has a ton of add-ons as well and majority of them involve no coding or remote uploading, so they can be activated with just a few clicks. I suggest looking into both and trying to set them up for mobile posting and see which works best for you.

Mobile Social Networking

If you were like me then you got invited to every social network on the web and had / have several profiles over several different websites. I currently have a profile on Facebook, MySpace, Plaxo, Twitter, Fast Pitch Networking and more…

Keeping up with all of them on a consistent basis not only is frustrating but can take a lot of time. Most people really only want to see what you are up to anyway so I found the easiest solution that works from me. Using Twitter to control the rest. Facebook, My Space, Plaxo and Fast Pitch let you add Twitter feeds to your profile. This way you can just update Twitter and it will update your account on all of the above. LinkedIn and others have yet to add this feature, but I am sure the high demand will make them follow suit very soon. Since most people want to see what you are up to this should keep you one of the most active people on your friends lists. Haven’t used Twitter yet? Then you should definately try it for thirty days and see what it is all about. Then after activating your Twitter account simply log-in to all your social networking sites and add the Twitter app to your profile and you are all set. I won’t get into setting each one up but if you have added any apps to your profile it is just that easy.

Then after setting up your Twitter account you can configure your account to accept text messages for Tweeting. Tweets are the 140 character mini-blog post you submit to Twitter. There are several apps for mobile phones also that increase the functionality of Twitter if you have a compatible phone with a data plan then this is the way to go. I use Twidriod for my G1 and Twitterberry for my Blackberry, looks like there are also some apps for the iPhone to use as well. These apps do virtually the same thing. However, between TwitterBerry and Twidriod, Twidroid is far superior with the functionality, you basically never need to log into the Twitter website again with this app. Since all these social sites will now be linked to your Twitter account and can be auto updated by your tweets, all you have to do is Tweet away with a text message or one of these great apps.

If you don’t want to get a Twitter account or think it is best to keep all of these seperate. Then there are some great apps for almost any smart phone out there to use with these sites and the mobile version of these sites have come a long way so you can definately go that route. I currenly use Twidroid and FBook for for my G1 and never log into Facebook or any of my other accounts. So far Linked In is the only one that I log into when I need to update something. Hopefully they will get on the bandwagon and we will either see Twitter integration or an app for the G1 in the near future.

On the flip side majority of these social sites also allow you to pull in a feed from your blog into your account or display your feeds from these social sites on your blog. I use Twitter feeds on both my blogs.

Well hopefully this will get you started on becoming mobile for social life and give you a few ideas to look into.

Today is a freezing cold day here in the Denver Metro area. I started to the office this morning and forgot my keys. This prompted me to turn around, head back home and go on a quest to make myself truly as mobile as possible and take everything with me at anytime in my pocket if possible. I currently am about half way there and thought that I would share what I have come up with so far.

Being mobile has become a necessity for me, so I am never tied down to one spot, one peice of hardware, or in-case I have a complete system failure like last weeks Windows Vista crash I went though, I never have to slow down. However, I do not want to loose an of my current productivity and organization. I have to say that my business success to this point has depended highly on these two items.

So with that in mind moving to the cloud so that I can be truly mobile is proving to be very easy and difficult at the same time. Easy for the fact that all the technology is truly there now. Difficult due to the fact that there are so many different choices and making a final decision with limited knowledge of these technologies is proving to be slightly difficult.

I would love to have a completely consolidated service that will work, but unfortunately I have not found a complete option yet to fit my needs.

Here is what I have so far.

Hardware:

Office desktop
Personal laptop
T-Mobile G1 with Android operating system

Web based applications and software choices that will meet my needs on all of the above to this point.

Communication:

Gtalk; Skype; Yahoo Messenger – All of these are availible for download and work very well on all my hardware.

Email and Contacts:

Gmail – So far still the best web based email client and has gotten so much better over the last two months with the addition of themes and other add-ons. Also native integration on my T-Mobile G1.

Calendar:

Google – Still the best web based calendar system on the net and of course native integration with G1 makes this the best choice. If you use Gcal and Outlook, be sure to get the Google Calendar Sync from Google. I waited years for this release, and it works great. Only negative thing about the sync is it is for one calendar only. Since I have several calendars Personal, Family and others to subscribe to and update being web based this let’s me control all of them very easily from any hardware I have.

Document Storage:

Google Docs – Google docs has come a long way since it’s inception. I have even used it several times for not only storing docs but also creating them. It is very smooth now, opposed to the old clumsy Google docs from even a year ago and saves you some money buying Office apps, or compatibility issues with Open Office. I still perfer to create most of my Docs in Office and store them in my Google docs account, hoever this is something that you should revisit and use if you do not. Especially the doc sharing and collaborative features, presentation creation added and blog posting features etc. how could you go wrong for this free app. This app also allows me to read only docs on my G1, I am extremely dissapointed in Google at the moment for not making native complete integration with Android yet. This was something that I was counting on them doing when getting my G1. Since there is not an option currently to even view document email attachments at this point on the G1, let alone edit them.

Notes:

Still struggling with finding a viable replacement for Microsoft One Note, that is web based and can be used with my mobile. I have looked into and use sometimes Google Notes. However it just doesn’t cut it for me currently. I have looked into and am considering:

Evernote or Google Notebook at the moment –

Evernote – Allows for clipping anything from the web. Scanning in business cards and documents, as well as just taking a picture of them and uploading them. The downfall is that there is currently not an App for Android. However there is a mobile site for Evernote that seems to work ok. It also comes with a Firefox plug-in to easily clip while browsing.

Google Notebook – Google notebook does work with everything I have and has a Firefox plug-in to easily clip from the web. However, it doesn’t really meet the standard when it comes to adding pics to notes and the fact that Evernote and One Note do. Since both One Note and Evernote allow for text (even hand written) on images to be searched, this makes Google Notebook a very slim note taking app for me. Although it has come along way over the last few months and definitely does work well with organizing notes in sections as well as easy clipping with the Firefox plug in.

ToDo:

Struggling to find an easy to use solution something to replace the integration that Outlook has to offer. I have set-up but not explored Google’s new Todo integration with Gmail. This is a new service and Google I would hope will expand this app and make Docs integration etc for it. Also disappointed that I will not have G1 integration, so that means all todo’s will have to be handled with one of the computers (which I am trying to get away from). This also means I am not slimming down for the moment when it comes to having multiple tabs or apps open, since I will have to have a Gmail tab constantly open on my browser. However, due to the fact that I would like to consolidate everything into one service as much as possible at this point I will start with Google ToDo and see how it goes.

So at this point I think I am set with the exception of note taking.

Other hosted and integrated alternatives that have I tried and looked into, but decided not to use are as follows:

Sugar CRM or Info@hand – These are great solutions for enterprise solutions. However, for just a mostly one man operation like myself they are a little too much.

Upvise Pro – This seems like a great service and the app for the G1 is extremely top notch and very well developed. However the web based apps and browser integration etc. Seem not to be there yet and really not anyting that I can’t do with my Google account. once agian being small mobility and integration are key for me to get a lot done in a small amount of time.

Zoho – Once agian not too much Zoho has to offer that Google does not, and it is a little over kill for what I currently need.

Remember the Milk – Now the Google ToDo’s offer the same as RTM so there is no need for them anymore since now the Google ToDo is fully integrated with Gmail.

TooDo list for Android – This is a great TooDo list. However took up a little to much space for my taste on my phone and also with the release of Google ToDo it needs to be updated to Sync with this new service from Google labs. However it does sync well with RTM and Toodlero nicely.

These are just the big ones that I did look into and test drive, but decided to go with the Google alternatives for now. Well not really sure why I shared this info today, but hopefully it will help someone looking for the same thing I am. Freedom from being locked to a particular place or peice of equipment at any time.

P.S. Check into Sandisc’s U3 if you haven’t. Not quite there yet with software options. This needs to be the standard in the future though. Software should be able to go anywhere you do. After all you own it not your hardware

See the video of this in action on You Tube.