Well its that time again to tune up the computer, clutter your work space, and get ready for the 4th annual Thirty Day Challenge. This I would say is by far, one of the biggest free online training courses available for not only the beginner (newbie as we say) but also the more advanced marketer. You can’t help but learn some of the newest technics working today.

Scheduled to start August 1st 2008, the preseason warm up kicks off early this year mostly impart to saying goodby to an old friend. Yes it will be sad, but our trusty browser Firefox will be sitting on the sidelines this year.

Pre-Season starts June 1 2008 (Live from a new format)
Thirty Day Challenge TV

Hello to a new browser

This years 30 Day Challenge browser of choice will be Flock “the social web browser”.

I’ve been giving the flock browser a spin for about a week or so now and although I do see that allowing one to socialize and keep up to date with whats going down around the net, I’ll have to give it a little more trial time in the “work” department, mostly for the fact that the addons are not as numerous as for Firefox.

Also there is of course some new platforms to be added the the training, one of those being FriendFeed.
This is a great site to follow what your friends are doing around the web and share with them what you are up to at the sites you socialize.

So sharpen the pencils, go get acquainted with Flock, and take a click on over to friendFeed, joinup, and say Hi.
And be sure to be at the pre-season kickoff at the Thirty Day Challenge TV show June 1 2008 at 8pm EST

Are you using Flock yet? What do you think of it? Let me know your pros and cons.

If you had a chance to check out Swypefile than you probably found some pretty good information, if not than you may have saved yourself the bother.

What started out as a resource for marketers, to share Swypefiles (swipefiles) of ideas and information with the incentive of having your posts monetized by way of adsence sharing,
I suspect started getting out of hand.

As a result here is the greeting you’ll get if you go to the site:

“Unfortunately, swypefile has been shut down for the time being. Things weren’t going as planned, and we are re-thinking the swypefile concept. Thanks to everyone who supported what we were trying to do!”

Sadly what was possibly a good idea, but I suspect started becoming a spammers playground needs a little more planning

A widget is some what like a blog plugin, and I think most would say, its considered a standard implementation applied to a blog any more, mostly to arrange your sidebars in a simpler way.

They allow you to easily add such things as Categories, Archives, Recent Posts, and Recent Comments and of course various monetization methods, without having to do a days worth of coding, “But all may not be as it appears in widget land”.

Hiding behind the code

As with most things good, it seem there is always someone or something that will try to change or implement it in a unethical or sneaky way. Usually to game the system or scam the public for the sole purpose of profit.

Since websites, blog, videos, graphics, pretty much everything on the internet follows some kind of coding, it is the perfect way to sneak in some “not so nice of things” and because of that the little widget I have now had to…

Label with a warning

Ok I am by no means a pro blog designer (websites are built/designed a little differently) so I am always checking out the different plugins and widgets to help me put my blogs together they’re awesome. What I found the other day though has made me take a much closer look at them before they go on my blogs.

While at wordpress I came across this post that I thought I should pass on for those of you that may not have seen or heard of this sneaky widget yet.

The widget is called “Amazon showcase” (It is not made by amazon either) and as of this writing the code has not been changed. Heres what you will find

Note: the author states that the widget will insert their ID 10% of the time. but feel free to disable it. “But they state it in the code”

Unless you make a habit of proofing your chosen widget code, or worst yet you don’t even no how to open a php file to see the code, then you won’t even know about this.

Here’s the part that makes it happen:

A commenter on the post I mention above offers this solution

[I just set the code to "(rand(1, 10) == 0)". This should never select the author's ID.]

Or you could just disable or delete it

Do you have a widget to monetize your blog?
Is this a task (proofing code) we’ll have to start doing?

Alexa toolbar is a no-no, Alexa toolbar serves no purpose, Alexa toolbar is spyware.

With so much negative feedback about the Alexa toolbar all over, why on earth would anyone want to install it on their browser? This is a question I pondered and why I installed it anyway.

There is no question to the fact that nobody wants spyware on their computer, those tiny little bits of script that follow and log your surfing habits like a P.I. investigating a cheating spouse, and these days that is something that is not hard to prevent with the multitude of programs available for combating just that.

A great one that I use is by safer-networking .org called Spybot Search and Destroy . It is available for free and has kept my computer absolutely spyware free.

The Good Side Of Spyware

There are a lot of quotes that I could use here but the one that comes to mind first is “every thing has a good side”
Read the rest…