Vista stopped me cold. It is not ready for prime time. If you need your computer to work, rely not on Vista! Granted, some of the problems I faced were related to the software I was trying to run (QuickTime Pro and Adobe Premiere Elements), but really, by Microsoft’s own logic, the applications can’t be separated from the operating system. When I’m trying to export a large MOV file and the computer issues a cryptic error message and reboots, who cares whether the OS or the application caused the problem?

My advice: Avoid Vista unless you only are running applications that come on the Vista disk. You will struggle using any serious application that demand the operating to perform. Vista will improve. Vista applications will improve. But for now, they are not ready to be used as reliable tools for getting real work done.

I’ll try Vista again when service pack 1 is released toward the end of the year

—END OF RANT—

Don’t pay for SEO. Instead, pay for a good site design (or redesign) or hire a writer to produce quality content.

Why people hate SEO… (and why SMO is bulls$%t) – The Jason Calacanis Weblog: “There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don’t consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means ‘gaming the system’ to 90% of us.

Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you’re gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don’t smoke the SEO-crack… you’ll just wind up chasing your tail as digg and Google close the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.”

Celebrities and corporations have known for years that supporting charities makes good business sense. It is good PR for them, helps promote a cause they believe in and makes the world a better place.

If you have a cause that you want to give something back to, Kevin Bacon (the actor) and Network for Good have teamed up to create a website called “6 Degrees”. Through them, you can create a badge like the one to right that promotes your favorite causes.

Here a quote from Kevin Bacon:

“You’ve probably heard of the Six Degrees concept. Any one person (including me, Kevin Bacon) is connected to any other person through six or fewer relationships, because it’s a small world.

“www.SixDegrees.org is about using this idea to accomplish something good. It’s social networking with a social conscience. Through this web site, you can learn about and support the charities of celebrities and your friends, as well as fundraise for the causes close to your heart.

“I started www.SixDegrees.org in partnership with the nonprofit Network for Good in January 2007, more than 10 years after the game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” made the rounds of college campuses and lived on to be a shorthand term for the small world phenomenon. It is my hope that Six Degrees will soon be something more than a game or a gimmick. It will also be a force for good.”

So take this chance to get yourself a little publicity and give something back to your favorite cause.

This change reflects that this isn’t really a personal blog any more. It is being written conjunction with my internet consulting business and so needs to be a bit more formal.

To reduce the chance of getting blacklisted, it is important to be familiar with their spam feedback services and follow their bulk sending guidelines closely. Though they do not publish their blacklists, many major ISPs provide guidelines for senders of large newsletters to monitor their email. Even if your newsletters are opt-in, you must follow the ISP’s bulk sender guidelines to assure delivery of your email.

Each major provider handles these issues a little differently. Fortunately, they all have websites that describe their policies and the tools they have available. To get a list of the tools at some of the major email providers, check out this great article at rackTIPs:

Playing Nice – Using the Postmaster Services of Major ISPs

As a business owner, you need to protect yourself against this. You don’t want to be accused of sending spam, or worse, viruses.

All of this can be prevented by setting up an SPF (Send Policy Framework) record on the DNS server for your domain. If you are so inclined, you can get the hairy details at the Open SPF website. In a nutshell, SPF tells other mail servers the addresses computers that are allowed to send e-mail from your domain. If someone tries to send e-mail from an address that’s not listed, the e-mail should be considered unauthorized.

SPF records are highly recommended, especially if you send out a newsletter. In October, 2004, some large e-mail providers, like hotmail started quietly dropping e-mail that violated the SPF record. Even so, most webhosts still don’t add them by default.

How do you know whether you are vulnerable? You can go to you command prompt (on just about any computer that can access the internet) and type “nslookup -q=TXT your-domain.com”. Look for a line that starts with “v=spf…”. If it doesn’t show one, then your domain name isn’t protected.

If you need assistance configuring an SPF record, contact Modern Webspace about our website checkup service. We will check over 200 settings that could affect your ability to do business on the internet.

If you have an opt-in e-mail newsletter (or any business that uses e-mail, for that matter), it is important that you check the blacklists occasionally. Sometimes, legitimate opt-in newsletters will get blacklisted, even when they shouldn’t.

If your e-mail server does get blacklisted, you need to know it right away so that you can take steps to resolve it. Some blacklists have a way of getting your server removed from their list, but sometimes, you may need to start sending your newletter from a different server (or the same server with a new IP address).

Fortunately, there is a website where you can easily check your server against 710 known blacklists. It is called dr. Jørgen Mash’s DNS database list checker. The page isn’t pretty to look at, but it is a very effective tool. The information that it gives you is pretty straightforward and easy to understand.

It’s hard enough to get you subscribers to read your newsletter, but you’re doomed if it doesn’t even get delivered. Be sure that your not being stopped by the blacklists.

Topics include:

• Convert more traffic using Wordtracker
• Understand your customers’ real motivations
• Combine thousands of phrases for an effective PPC campaign
• Use Wordtracker to find the size of the market
• Discover the most important sites in your marketplace
• Find inspiration in Wordtracker’s Top 1,000 Words report
• Learn how an ad agency uses keyword research to position a client
• Use Wordtracker to identify niche opportunities
• Incorporate keywords into your content and copy

Read it