Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a wonderful web application because of your ability to reach potentially millions of individuals easily, but it has become somewhat of a mess lately. A new site that is currently in “Beta” is almost identical to the structure and flow of facebook (you will see what I mean when you start using it), I feel like this new site will became more effective than facebook for socially responsible enterprises to network online. The site is called UnltdWorld. It is essentially a niche version of facebook geared entirely to individuals and organizations that are interested in socially responsible organizations. Hopefully they have learned from the mess that is now my Facebook inbox which I constantly have to hit “Ignore” buttons for application requests about who should sleep with who, and movie quizes, and will really tighten up on what all makes this site effective.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Facebook for its original intent, staying up to date with friends, however I am glad to see smaller niched social networking sites that are learning from the pros and cons of Facebook. Check the site out and be sure to become “friends” with me (http://unltdworld.com/profile/chrisauer/).

As if people didn’t have enough to worry about, I saw this tricky little scheme on my wife’s site. If you are like most site owners out there, chances are you are constantly checking out your site statistics to find more information about where your traffic is originating from. If you do the same, you may be used to a section like the following, which shows you what sites are referring to your site:

The referal that made it into second place somehow caught my eye as being suspicious. Upon research, I found that the site will try to install some not-so-nice software on your computer if you visit the site and click around a little. You obviously do not want to click on this link to find out where your site is listed.

Obviously, to help protect yourself, if there is a really suspicious looking domain in the list of referring links, don’t click on it unless you are sure it is a legitimate site. Just type the domain in Google and see what comes up if you are not sure (in this case, tvsetmp3.com). It will become clear from the Google responses whether or not you want to visit this site.

As if Sir. Richard Branson hasn’t shaken up enough industries already. It seems as though the Virgin empire is going to change the way small businesses are financed by making it easier for an entrepreneur to raise their start up money among family and friends. Virgin is already helping individuals organize loans for small businesses, mortgages, and personal loans, and is planning to expand into other loan areas as well, such as student loans. The interesting part about Virgin Money is that instead of the bank telling you what interest rate and loan terms you will have, the group gets to pick the loan terms and interest rate.

Like all Virgin companies, Virgin Money believes in getting customers a better deal. With money from family and friends, you can pick your own interest rate and loan terms to fit your situation. Rather than giving interest to a bank, you can keep it in the family – often adding up to thousands of dollars of savings.

Old man story time, so sit down and get a load of this; I remember when the internet was born. Yeap, I guess I am that old. Ever since the day the first few packets flowed across the “world wide web”, we have been completely focused on giving individuals access to information from anywere on the planet. I am not going to lie, this has certainly done wonders for business and globalization has never been so readily available.

I challenge you though to thank about the money making aspect of the internet from the opposite perspective of globalization and reaching the farthest corners of the planet. Think about how you can use the internet to bring smaller geographical regions in closer to one another. There are so many opportunities yet to be filled by thinking this way simply because everyone is focused on the bigger side of things.

Think about what interests individuals when you talk about a confined geographical location. Now also think about what information users want to come to them instead of spending time seeking the information out. A few things come to my mind:

1. Safety first and foremost. How useful would it be to have instant access to police reports and user generated safety warnings. I want to know if there have been any more car fires in my neighborhood, or what that gang sign spray painted on a wall relates too.
2. Where am I going to get the best service. When was the last time you surveyed 700 of your closest neighbors to find out the best service station to take your car. Admit it, you haven’t, but that would be darn nice to have.
3. Why can’t I be notified of deals once I walk over to the town center. I am married, and therefore, I am cheap. My wife and my purchasing decision is 100% always affected by the existance of a discount coupon.

Change your thoughts from thinking of the internet as the perfect place to reach billions world wide, and start thinking of it as the perfect place to reach thousands locally. Interesting business models might start to show that could be valued pretty high.

SEO is a science, and therefore it is expensive. If you are looking for relatively quick results that you don’t have to do much work for, then you can hire an outside firm to help you build a strategy. If you are looking for a cheaper alternative, there are firms that outsource the process which are significantly cheaper, however may use some risky ways of building your rankings. For my new web site, I decided to do as much as I can by myself because I am, A. cheap, and B. too scared of the tatics that outsourced SEO firms would use.

Here are a few tips that I used while starting the SEO process for my new site. Remember SEO is an ongoing process. Its very difficult to receive results right away. But here are some things you can do to help your rankings.

A.) Keyword Selection - do a few google searches for keywords that you think your customers are likely to use to find your products or services. For my example, I will say the keywords “nonprofit technology” are what I am after.

B.) Page Analysis - take a look at the current rankings for those keywords and try to figure out why they are ranked in that order. There are a number of tricks you can do such as placing the keywords your after in <h1>tags, the page title, and in a high frequency throughout the page. Pick the top ranked site to start and see how frequent your target keywords come up and where they come up. Take care in noting if the keywords are in any special tag. Also look in the header section of the HTML code to see if there are meta tags that the site uses to increase the rankings.

C.) Change Your Site - taking what you have learned from the top few rankers for your targeted keywords, start making the changes on your site so that the crawlers will start seeing the changes.

D.) Building Inbound Links - this will probably take you the longest time to do because it is time consuming to do correct. Take the sites that rank high in your keyword search and start searching google for the domain name (for example search google for “genericbusiness.com”) and see what outside pages link back to their site. Some of the places you will be able to submit your link to, go ahead and do that. Others might be blogs that you can send an email to the author to see if they will feature your web site or products as well. Others are from services that you may have to pay for. I will leave it up to you if you want to pay for those or not.

It became obviously clear that an individual was attempting to force themselves into one of our clients web sites Sunday night.  Luckily, we caught the individual in the process and quickly followed procedures to make sure that they weren’t able to access any information they weren’t welcome to.  Here is the process that we followed to make sure our systems remained secured:

1. Make darn sure you have the access logs showing every step of the process the attacker took.  If you can, make a backup of the backup and place it someplace else.  This is your hard evidence that something fishy took place.  You are going to need to know what IP address the attacker is using.
2. Block the user out of your entire network at your corporate (or personal) firewall immediately.
3. Use ARIN to find out where the attack is coming from (http://www.arin.net). ARIN will provide you with some useful information, such as the Internet Service Provider of the IP address that the attacker is using, and who to contact to report the abuse.
4. Use the contact information you find in ARIN to contact the ISP to alert them of the attack. Depending on who the ISP is of the attacker, you may or may not receive a response back.
5. Gather up all information you have about the attack and send a fairly detailed description of the attack to your local FBI office (http://www.fbi.gov/contact/fo/fo.htm).  Remember to include information such as the access logs showing the attack or attempted attack, potential damage caused by the attack, contact information for getting in contact with you, and any additional information you can think of.

If you want more information on what to do, the Department of Justice has information on how to handle all different types of attacks, including hacking attempts.  You can find this information here: http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/reporting.htm

I am a major supporter for the One Laptop Per Child project (http://www.laptop.org) is doing. If you haven’t already heard about it, they are developing a very inexpensive laptop that can be used in developing countries to try and improve the learning experience of students that have a difficult life to begin with. But, stumbling upon the following article reminds me that when developing your product, you need to take careful consideration into what the product could potentially be used for.

http://africa.reuters.com/wire/news/usnL19821905.html

I am really excited about this, I have found a project that well… seems a lot like my business in 81 days idea that I am planning on helping out with. Only if this project is successful, it will make 81 days feel like a life time in comparison. The project is called startup weekend and the basic concept is to get a huge group of absolutely crazy individuals together to try and have a business running by Monday morning. 1 weekend to start a business, is it possible? I certainly think we can do it, and I hope to find out in October when one will be held here in the grand ole’ District of Columbia. For more information visit: http://dc.startupweekend.com/

Being a geek, I keep up with geek news. I am not interested in only blogging to other geeks so much as I am to other businesses, so I tend to stay away from a lot of really detailed geek-speak.

I have no problem bringing up Web 2.0 though because if you haven’t seen it on a magazine, or at least heard it mentioned when talking about business in the present couple months, then you have been living under a rock. Saving you from all the acronyms and geek talk associated with the inner workings of a “Web 2.0″ project, the simple answer to the question of what puts the 2.0 in Web 2.0 is that it’s the next wave of venture capital being poured into web startups.

See, apparently VC’s didn’t learn from their mistakes the first time. In light of simple sites being sold for billions of dollars, many VC’s are starting to throw obscene amounts of money at rediculously simple concepts in hopes they will be purchased by one of the success stories of the first internet startup waves. The issue that faces the next wave of overly-financed startups however is that most of the players will have a difficult time keeping users around. The ventures being financed don’t seem to have enough substance to be the next Amazon or Google. These sites are often very niched, and simple to operate, but lack the “I can’t remember life without Google” affect that made one company so successful.

I have never been a fan of this mentality. Traditionally, the world of startups is plaqued with non-disclosure agreements and a lot of secrecy around your business idea. So again, lets take a look at how the opposite from the norm.

I was looking at attending an event and saw a sponsor of the event that piqued my interest. The name is Cambrian House and the concept is “Crowdsourcing”. Spell check doesn’t particularly like this word yet, well because it isn’t a word. Maybe in the near future though, it will be as commonly thrown around as “dun dun da dun… Outsourcing”

The concept of behind crowdsourcing is that anyone is able to join the community and pick projects that they are interested in working on. Their work towards a project earns them royalty points to share the profit for that product. You can learn more about this by visiting their site at: http://www.cambrianhouse.com/