One of the difficulties about social media is the time it takes to publish to so many different social networks. There seems to be a whole new sector developing to address just that. These are 5 of the most popular social media presence management applications:

http://om.shaayad.com/ http://hootsuite.com/ http://ping.fm/...

Reality is catching up with science fiction rather quickly these days. Augmented Reality (AR) gives a whole new meaning to integration. AR involves using existing sources of data to super impose information and images on top of our view of the world. Whether it is viewing a street and finding houses for sale to matching and finding someone's contact info via social networking via face recognition, this technology promises to change the way we view the world. For some killer examples, check out http://bit.ly/uEg5C...

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has imposed new guidelines for bloggers who offer opinion on products or services in their blog. Specifically, the FTC requires bloggers to disclose any "material connections" with endorsements of a product or service. The new rules took effect on December 1, 2009. cmp.ly is a site that provides you with an easy way to facilitate disclosure and provides a simple and easy method to disclose material connections in the content that you publish. Visit http://cmp.ly/ for...

One of the challenges in social media is managing and posting content to multiple accounts in multiple formats (full posts, micro-blogging, etc.). Spredfast.com, a new social media campaign manager, provides a campaign approach similar to email campaigns for distributing content. The application provides a way to schedule content to be delivered to your various social media accounts including your own blog (supports XML RPC) One of the most interesting features is their social media monitoring tool....

Recently came across a vulnerability that apparently has recently surfaced and could potentially be capturing your picture, video, or audio. The vulnerability involves hidden elements on a page that follow your mouse and hijacks your clicks in a way that gives the offending website access to your microphone or camera. They can transmit this capture to the offending website. Moreover, this hack can actually allow the offending site to manipulate your clicks for other reasons like redirects to other...

One of the hardest tasks related to search engine optimization is finding easy to use tools to analyze the most simple of problems including generating sitemaps for search engine submittals, identifying broken links, the use of uppercase vs. lowercase links, identifying duplicate titles or descriptions on pages, page redirections, etc. The Microsoft Search Engine Optimization Toolkit offers a free, incredibly powerful, and easy extension to Internet Information Service (IIS) This extension provides...

It is fascinating to see some of the ingenuity produced by mashup technology. The basic concept of mashup is to take tools or applications designed with a particular utility or audience in mind and repurpose them to solve another need. An example of this approach is the SAP PowerPoint Twitter tools. SAP has developed a free Flash object control that integrates with Twitter and can be inserted into your MS PowerPoint presentation. The control allows you to enter a search term and displays a Twitter...

Suppliers doing business with buyers offering this feature would be remiss not to implement the technology. Buyers' job is simply much easier and faster using this approach for their procurement. This translates into revenue loss for Suppliers who choose not to partake on this opportunity. Developed by SAP, the Open Catalog Interface (OCI) helps connect Supplier-Hosted Catalogs to buyers using SAP systems. OCI is based on connections via HTTP protocol over the Internet, allowing product data to...

Found an excellent article on the art of retweeting. The Twitter community has developed many conventions to continue a conversation within the framework of the 140 characters in Twitter. Some of these have become so popular that Twitter has implemented them as part of their platform. One such convention is the concept of retweeting. Retweeting consists of someone taking a tweet they received and reposting it to a new set of followers. The convention is to using RT at the beginning of the message...

Logging to a DotNetNuke (DNN) site with either username or email is not supported out of the box. Here is a simple way to do this. First, make sure the membership provider in your Web.config is set to require unique emails when creating accounts. You'll find this on this section of your Web.config: add name="AspNetSqlMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="SiteSqlServer" enablePasswordRetrieval="true" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false"...

One of the worst documented features in DotNetNuke is the native role subscription and the integration to PayPal. After hours of Googling and trying several things, this is what worked for us. You'll still need to make sure to set the payment settings in the 'Site Settings' > 'Advanced Settings' > 'Payment Settings' (the processor userid is the email for the PayPal account you are using and the password can be left blank) The DNN page that redirects to PayPal located under WebsiteAdmin/Sales/PayPalSubscription.aspx...

One way of increasing your online sales and increase your level of customer service is to provide a way for customers to get answers quickly and easily. While there are a number of online chat and support applications, one interesting way of providing live support is using IM on any page on your site. For instructions on how to get started go to http://bit.ly/6Aowuf.

One important component of a website is offering a way to educate your visitors on how to get around your site. A useful way of doing this is to offer your visitors a video tour of your site. Jing, a video and still capture application, allows you to easily capture your screen and voice as a video that you can easily post directly to your YouTube account. You can place a link of your YouTube video in your site and lead your users through your site. For more information, go to http://jingproject.com....

A challenge for any business is finding an efficient way to collaborate and share documents with a team. Microsoft offers an easy way to do just that. Office Live is an online collaboration application that provides a secure way for you to store and share documents online easily and for FREE. Once you sign up, you'll be able to save and retrieve documents to the service as easy as you normally do in your local PC. Check out the demo page at http://workspace.officelive.com/en-us/. ...

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most challenging and time consuming tasks when trying to promote your website. While there is no shortage of tools out there, trying to find effective ones is not easy. Google provides a pretty powerful tool called “Wonder Wheel.” It allows you to drill down related searches according to the keyword(s) provided in your search. You can access the tool by going to Google and search for some term. When the search results are displayed, a link with the words...

Creating a memorable, rich, and intuitive web interface is often challenging and costly. In the past, creating animations, and more user friendly web pages required tools such as Adobe Flash or writing expensive and elaborate javascript code. Even when businesses decided to undertake such projects, the idiosyncrasies of making the functionality work on different browsers proved to be a challenge. jQuery, a library of javascript code, simplifies making interactions and animations. The library is designed...

Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8. This new version comes with a new feature called "Web Slices." It is a new approach to publishing and consuming content from any web site. It allows you to publish a fragment of your web site that users can subscribe to. Very easy to implement, you would place some special html tags around the piece of the content of your web site you want published. When the user visits your web site, they see a green highlight around the fragment you published and gives...

Streamlining operations of an organization and achieving operational efficiencies has always been a worthy goal but it is especially true in bad times. One of the approaches to achieve this goal is to getting your existing programs to work together. The tools are widely available and in some cases they are so inexpensive and simple to implement so as to be a complete no-brainer. Integrating your existing legacy applications together rather than implement new software could yield some truly positive...

You are probably familiar with Flash™ and don't even know it. Flash™ is a multimedia authoring tool made by Adobe®. You've seen those fancy animations on web sites or maybe a rich interactive game online or even YouTube™. These applications are usually built with Adobe® Flash™. Microsoft® has released a very similar application called Silverlight™. This tool allows developers to create the ...

Cloud computing is quite a fluid term that means so many things to many people. The idea is pretty simple ... think of the Internet as your operating system or platform. Microsoft® released a new product called Azure™. The idea with this platform is to run your mission critical applications on a pay-as-you-grow basis using Microsoft's data centers. Instead of buying and supporting expensive servers and infrastructure with the anticipation ...