links for 2009-03-24

The important thing to realize is that this growth will not happen overnight. It took many years for Alexander Graham Bell to materialize the telephone. What did he do? He had an idea, he shared it, and he asked for help. Now, how many people are using it to get their message across? Share your ideas, and ask people for help every now and then, and on the other side of the coin, don’t hesitate to give help to someone who asks for it. When someone you are following asks a relevant question, reply to it with a thoughtful answer.

What about social media? What about Twitter? Do you follow everyone who follows you? Do you send automatic direct messages after someone follows you? Do you blast your Twitter followers with advertising more than once a day? Do you fire off a reply or derogatory direct message when someone doesn’t agree with you or you feel slighted?

That whole bit about it being “easier” to just tweet than to go to the trouble of adding a link from a person’s site is kind of scary, because I have no doubt that it’s true. I’ve done it myself. As the article points out, there is an ideal scenario, but what in this industry actually functions in an ideal manner, all according to plan?

The article is fairly inflammatory, as the paragraph above suggests. The idea is that Google is somehow aiding would-be child abductors. Further down in the article a more explicit connection between StreetView and crime is made:

We’re not typically in the business of reporting on celebrity gossip, but when TwitterTwitter reviewsTwitter reviews plays a staring role, we’d be a little remiss to not share the news with you. That’s why we find it incredibly interesting that the Telegraph is claiming that Jennifer Aniston kicked John Mayer to the curb in part for his twittering ways.

The media outlet asserts that “people claiming to be friends of the actress have told Star magazine that she finished the affair after discovering Mayer, 31, spent hours on the networking website, despite telling her he was too busy to get in touch with her.”

At CES the product I was most excited by was the Palm Pre. After all, they had hired a bunch of people from Apple and it went further than the iPhone in many places. It had a keyboard. It has an OS that let you run multiple applications at the same time (something the iPhone doesn’t do) and did copy and paste. The OS seemed even better thought out than the iPhone was. Contacts collected data from Facebook and other social networks.

Performance is a key factor for any successful website. And since WordPress is becoming more popular than ever, it will only be at its best when raised in the proper conditions. Here are a few things to try if you find that your WordPress site is not performing as well as it could be due to high traffic or hidden issues you don’t know about.

Every search engine advertiser should be using negative keywords in their Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns and/or Ad Groups. Negative keywords are words and phrases that you do not want searchers to associate with your products and services (see Google’s AdWords blog for some high-level information about negative keywords).

InformationWeek reports that, after an initial burst of usage, Internet Explorer 8's market share numbers appeared to have dropped on Monday morning. Writer Paul McDougall's theory is that users who installed IE8 don't like it, and are removing it to restore Internet Explorer 7.

The LinkedIn strategist is what's called a LION, which stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. Out of her 5,500 connections on LinkedIn, she estimates she personally knows only about 10 percent of them.

I love twitter. What blogging is to email, twitter is to instant messaging (IM) … and then some. You can follow me on twitter as Timberry. I'm like a fish with a shiny new thing. And, with due respect to the MSNBC line (if you don't get it, you're too old) — I'm 61. But that's nothing: my 89-year-old dad is on twitter too.

Better Gmail for Google Chrome is a compilation of user scripts designed to enhance your Gmail experience—and to make it easy, we've tested and bundled them together in one easy download.

Cybercriminals have copied the technique of search engine optimization (SEO), by which legitimate websites use key words to boost their rankings on Internet searches, to hatch a scheme that rakes in as much as $10,800 a day, according to a Web security company.

Bottom line: Guy Kawasaki, creator of Alltop and Truemors, has three other people writing through his Twitter account on his behalf.

With the vast array of web development knowledge available on the Internet, there’s certainly no shortage of cheat sheets to be found. However, finding a way to wrangle them all into one place isn’t quite as easy. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of some of the best cheat sheet collections out there. That’s right: this is your newest cheat sheet for cheat sheeting.

Dopplr is a free online service for smarter travel. Dopplr helps you make more of your travels by sharing your future trips privately with friends and colleagues. The service then highlights coincidences, for example, telling you that three people you know will be in Tokyo when you will be there too. Every year Dopplr sends you a Personal Annual Report of your travels. Here's how Dopplr works.

Envizualize makes videos that help people understand your product, service, or message using clear, approachable, hand-drawn animation.