To tax or not to tax? That is the question. Taxing access to the Internet, access to email and the like has been looked at by the government for several years now but so far has escaped their grasp. A new bill dubbed “The Internet Tax Freedom Extension Act of 2007” was introduced in the Senate yesterday. If passed, this bill would extend the current ban on Internet access taxes for another four years.
Have you ever been someplace besides your home or office with the old laptop in hand and attempted to “sniff out” a WiFi access so you can get online? You better be careful in the future because apparently tapping into a WiFi connection that you do not have authorization to do so can get you arrested.
Owning a few directories myself, this is a question that is of interest to me, especially after Matt Cutts recently stirred up some controversy when he invited people everywhere to report paid links as spam. With our directories, some listings are editorial while others are paid. In the beginning, every site added was editorial simply to populate the directory. Today we require payment for every submission simply to compensate for the time that is taken to review, edit and include the listing.
My thinking for the last few years now is that static search engine ranking reports hold little value in and of themselves. These are reports typically run by a software program in which a list of keywords is added along with the main URL of the site(s) you wish to check and the software then queries pre-selected search engines, creating a report showing where your site ranked for each term.
I just came across this story at WebProNews regarding a new IRS proposal that could have a negative impact on e-commerce. Essentially, The U.S. Treasury Department wants to crack down on Internet businesses like eBay and Amazon.com and require them to share their customer’s personal data with the Internal Revenue Service. What data specifically do they want? The obvious – names, addresses, etc. but then the not so obvious, social security numbers.
I came across a video of our own Arizona senator and presidential hopeful, John McCain being interviewed by Google CEO, Eric Schmidt at the Googleplex thanks to Barry Schwartz. In the video, Eric plays the role of genial talk show host. McCain also fielded questions from several Google employees including questions about how the senator feels about atheists, what he plans to do about the current situation with Iran and nuclear weapons and even his opinions on gays in the military.
In January, I wrote a post about how I was fed up with the Better Business’s Bureau’s Online Reliability program in which they force an additional fee on already paying members in order fro them to be able to display the BBB logo on their sites. A few weeks later, I received a phone call from one of their representatives congratulating me on my post, stating they also wanted to see the program done away with and that my post was helping to speed up that process.
However, little over three months later I get a renewal bill in which the price has now increased from $135 annually to $177.50. I’m not paying. It is not the money… really it is not. It is the principle.
Blogs exist on just about every variety of subject one can imagine. And more and more blogs come online each and every day. But what does it take to really have an active blog that people will subscribe to and come back again and again to read? It requires creativity. It requires dedication. Even more so, it requires an addiction to the act of blogging itself.
How about you? Are you a blog addict? Here are ten signs that may indicate that you have an addiction, my friend.
When talking to a potential customer, I can usually tell in a minute or less if they are going to be problematic. Call it intuition. Call it sixth sense. Or simply chalk it up to years of experience. It usually starts with a gut feeling that tells you, “Don’t take on this new client, it is going to be more trouble than its worth.” It is then up to you to decide whether to listen to that still small voice or go against it and sell out for the money. Everytime I have done the latter, I have lived to regret it. Fortunately the longer I do this, I learn from past mistakes and pay more attention to the voice inside my head.
Unless you have been living in a cave for the last month, you have no doubt heard of Google’s plan to acquire online advertising company, DoubleClick. Along with that deal, they will acquire search marketing company, Performics which DoubleClick had purchased beforehand in 2004. This has created a stir of controversy among search marketers who are now concerned over the fact that Google owns a search marketing company. Will they embrace it of which there would then be concerns over whether Google would give them preference over other search marketing efforts? Will they sell it to avoid the obvious conflict of interest? Or will they simply shut it down.
