We spend half our lives online…buying and selling stuff, creating social media pages, passwords, gaming personas…so what happens to our online life when we pass away in real life. Someone needs to manage and/or shut down all those accounts…and to do that, they will need access.  To solve this issue, online companies are setting up websites to help you manage your digital persona after you pass away as well as to create memorials for loved ones that have passed away.  The online world has become so important to people, that your digital life and digital memories of loved ones are now being preserved by a host of companies.

In case you haven’t thought about all of your personal data that is stored on the web, here are some examples of online information that could be/should be preserved and communicated to someone after you pass away… online banking/stock passwords and transactions, copies of wills, bank accounts, gaming personas such as Second life that will continue to live (at least a little while), eBay items that are sold and PayPal accounts, domains that are owned that must be managed…. the  list goes on and on… the list gets big in a hurry.

More and more people are beginning to recognize that your passwords and online info needs to be passed on to your wife or husband, but the offline solutions don’t really work in the online world.  For our real lives, we have safety deposit boxes and wills…but the online world that is full of passwords and logins that aren’t really written down anywhere.  And what is worse, think of the bind that we will leave for loved ones or friends in if they have to try to figure all of this information out after we are gone.

There are a number of companies that are working on solving this issue… here are just a few….www.legacylocker.com; www.assetlock.com, www.slightlymorbid.com, www.findagrave.com, www.deathswitch.com, www.eternalspace.com, …interesting names, huh.   More are available and they are easy to find on your favorite search engine.

A Legacy Locker account costs $29.99 a year. While setting up an account, you specify who gets access to your info should you no longer be in need of signing on…if you know what I mean!  Once you pass away, your designees contact Legacy Locker and once a verification process is completed, the information is turned over to you.

There is one very big risk to all of this… hacking.  While it is great that companies are working to solve this need, this creates a hacking bonanza or nightmare depending on how you look at it. Security is going to be critical for this information, and this means that you need to be familiar with the security policies of any company prior to hiring them.

So what are some of the services that you can hire these types of companies to do?  Well, everything from a secure online safe deposit box for digital copies of documents, wishes, letters and emails, to planning real life activities – the funeral, the memorial, the grave site, to virtual memorial pages for videos, pictures and tributes.

The interesting trend here is that as our online lives continue to become more important, the early adopters of online technology are beginning to think about their own mortality…this is a logical thought pattern to follow… when the internet was new, so were our accounts and online lives…now it is 15 years later, and the internet is much more important to us.

Be sure to do your due diligence should you consider hiring one of these firms.  I will continue to keep you posted as this develops.

This is why I love our developers.  I just got an email from one of our .Net wizards:

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Subject: “Blog Item”

http://css-tricks.com/web-nerd-terminology-explained/

Adam Fort
Developer

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That’s it.  The whole email. Clearly Adam realizes two things: 1. I can figure out what he meant, and 2. he’s too busy solving complex problems and coding sites to contribute to the blog.  No problem!

So, the bottom line is, the link that he sent me is a solid breakdown of much of the jargon being tossed around the IT industry today…

Not sure what a CMS is?  Confused about Kerning or Tracking?  Not sure what to do when someone asks you for a Vector image?  Well, then this link is a pretty handy resource!

Conspicuously missing are some of the hacking terms that are causing fear and confusion lately, like “SQL Injection” and “Cross Site Scripting (XSS)” – but don’t worry, we’ve got you covered on those, too.

Thanks, Adam!

Social media is a great way to share information quickly….that is the good news.  It is also the bad news! The popularity of sites like Facebook and Myspace make it easy for people to stay in touch and keep tabs on what’s new….but, what if people want to share details about you….that you don’t want everyone to know…..then what do you do?

People are discovering that they may be exposing too much information about themselves on social media sites.  In addition to issues related to the practice of YOU sharing too much info about YOU (someone I know recently posted that he was in the bathroom at Starbucks), is the large issue that you cannot control what your friends say about you and to each other. To make matters even worse, even if you block them, they can log on as someone else and continue to post comments for all to see or just post their comments on their own pages.

Think of social media as a big “room” where anyone can talk to anyone at anytime……..you can also jump from “room” to “room” to meet with any of your friends (and their friends). You can also access the conversations for total strangers that do not control their profile and access…..as we are finding out, this is good and bad all at the same time.

Here is a recent example I found of a man and woman that were getting divorced. The wife was posting angry comments on the husband’s Facebook wall. The husband was embarrassed and tried to block the wife from posting any future comments. Ever after the husband blocked her access; she continued to post comments by logging on as another friend.

One last “gotcha” is that HR folks and lawyers can make use of this data too. HR folks and recruiters routinely access social media sites looking for information regarding candidates. Exposing too much information to potential employers about our social lives can be an issue whether we like it or not. Attorneys are using data gathered from Social Media sites in divorce cases where people are posting information regarding boyfriends, girlfriends and gifts.

Why is this happening? The early users of Social Media are aging and employers are becoming more savvy. Social networking is great for connecting, but not so much for disconnecting, therefore resulting in a online tabloid where people are reduced to airing their dirty laundry in front of their friends and co-workers….it is real reality TV.

How did this all start? Well…..with Google. The popular search engine enabled all of us to become private eyes — we can look up anyone and anything on the Internet with the simple click of the mouse. Social media was just the next step to complete and open access to everyone’s “digital dirt” 24X7.

What can I do?

• Remember that once a pic or message is out on the internet, then it is generally out in the public domain for good….so the best thing to do is to not post questionable information.
• Be careful who you friend and make sure that your security settings are as tight as they can be……many profiles let anyone see anything….not good.
• Everyone should make a habit of searching yourself to see what comes up.  This is called Narcisurfing……be sure to go to multiple search engines and see what is out there.
• If you find something about you that is objectionable, you should try to remove it or contact the webmaster of the site and get them to remove it.
• Be sure to manage your profile regularly.

Can you turn the tables? Yes, of course you can. If you are a job seeker, use Google to learn something about your interviewer and potentially establish rapport during the interview. Social media can actually help you. LinkedIn is a great source for useful professional information.

Have fun being social….but don’t be too social….if you know what I mean!

When it comes to staffing, G.1440’s leading the way in Baltimore!

The Baltimore Business Journal just published their list of the Largest Professional Search Firms in the Baltimore Area, and guess who made the cut?  That’s right!  G.1440 was the top firm focused exclusively on IT Staffing!  Overall, G.1440 came in at 17 this year – and when you rank them by average salary, G.1440 jumps to number 5.

The Baltimore Sun’s Tech blog was just a twitter with the buzz of G.1440’s growth in Tech Staffing & Recruiting.

From our perspective, more and more companies are realizing that they can’t afford to waste time and money on a lengthy hiring process, and they certainly can’t afford the costs of hiring someone to find out that they’re not as good as they seemed.  G.1440’s staffing services go the extra mile to help companies cut through the clutter and get to work.

It’s nice to be recognized for excelling.  It’s nicer to be recognized when we help our clients excel.

Since its inception, web 2.0 has been all about giving users control and opening a two-way dialogue online. We’ve seen the popularity of sites that allow users to customize their experience, and now Coca-Cola is taking some of the same concepts that have made social networking popular and bringing them offline.

Starting this summer, in selected diners and fast-food chains, Coca-Cola will release its first software-driven drink dispenser. The Freestyle will be the first dispenser that allows customers to mix around with 30 different flavors and over 100 different drink combinations! In addition to all the loads of fun that customers can have with this dispenser, Coca-Cola has added some action packed high-tech features that will blow current business practices out of the market.

Each flavor cartridge is attached to a radio frequency ID chip which gathers data on how much and what kinds of drinks customers are consuming. At the end of each day, this data gets transmitted through a private network (provided by Verizon) to Coca-Cola’s headquarters in Atlanta.

In the past, Coca-Cola’s fast-food customers have struggled to keep their inventories stocked and balanced. Now with the Freestyle, Coca-Cola is able to efficiently track inventories and distribute beverage formulas to these customers.

The data also helps Coca-Cola and fast-food outlets decide what to serve and where to promote. Additionally, this data could help Coke recognize popular drink combinations, and in return Coke could opt to bottle those combinations through retail outlets, knowing that their investment will pay off.

In the world today, customization is a great way to appeal to customers and ultimately, Coke is looking to the Freestyle to help increase sales by giving customers more beverage choices. They are spending a pretty penny to track product interest, usage, habits and to give users more options and control. Almost every business can start doing the same sorts of things with a well executed web site and web marketing strategy. It’s cost effective and fast – and you’d get the same benefits.

Coca-Cola is raising the bar. Let’s just hope the lines aren’t too long while you wait to order your Peach Creamsicle Caffeine Free Diet Coke!

Surfing the internet is a part of our everyday life…..we turn to the “net” to get everything from information on our competitors to making dinner reservations……however, surfing has a new threat that you need to be aware of…..hackers are always looking for ways to wreak havoc on your computer and now they’ve found another strategy…..it’s called scareware and the things it could do to your computer should scare you.

Hackers are creating booby traps on the internet to infect your computer and then sell you bogus software to supposedly fix the infection. You will be stuck in a never ending series of pop-ups until you eventually click and buy the software they want you to buy. The software they sell you will not fix the problem, so you end up spending $40 to $80 dollars and end up with an infected pc. In many cases, clicking and buying just makes the pop-ups increase.

By late last year, more than 9,200 different types of scareware programs were circulating on the Internet, up from 2,800 at midyear, according to The Anti-Phishing Working Group.

You can pick up some scareware in many locations……on YouTube the bad guys are signing up and posting comments on videos with enticing links. You watch a video you like, click on the link to another video and bam….you have a bad case of scareware.

In a variation, the bad guys create Twitter accounts and begin broadcasting tweets with enticing links and when you click on the link, you get the same result.

To set a trap in search engines, the hackers post web pages that are optimized with popular key words. This is caused by websites that don’t do a good job of keeping their www sites safe. 91% of websites have vulnerabilities that can be exploited and only 1% have a prevention plan.

Last but not least, hackers buy ad space on popular websites. Generally, they will use an intermediary such as an agency. They mix booby trapped ads with clean ads.

Many of these schemes are originating overseas, however some start right here in the US. In 2008, Microsoft and Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna filed civil lawsuits against Branch Software and Alpha Red, both US companies, charging that they were marketing scareware.
The top-level suppliers, however, continue to operate with impunity, mainly based in Russia. And new affiliates crop up every day, full of fresh ideas to spread increasingly invasive promotions…

So what can you do? AVG’s free LinkScanner tool will help to prevent you from clicking on malicious Web links. AVG has a quality product and it is free.

What should businesses do? They need their www sites to be scanned to find the traps that have been set. Visit G.1440 to learn more about how to protect your business.

Lately there’ve been a lot of questions about Search Engine Optimization for Microsoft’s new search engine Bing.com.  Microsoft is heavily promoting Bing as a “decision engine” (as opposed to a search engine) that can help users cut through “search overload” to find what they’re looking for, and organizations want to make sure that they’re listed among the top results when users search for the products they’re selling or the services they offer.

The good news is that SEO for Bing is nothing new.  The majority of Microsoft’s magic is actually in how results are displayed and organized, rather than how information is found and ranked.  The basic theory is the same: a ‘bot’ crawls the web reading and cataloging millions of pages.  When a user performs a search, Bing serves up sites that are deemed ‘more relevant’ based on a mathematical algorithm.  Bing.com is new, but its algorithm is actually a tweaked version of Microsoft’s old search tool “Live.com,” and optimizing a page for Bing isn’t much different than optimizing for Google and other search engines.

Microsoft’s thoughts on Bing SEO

Microsoft actually answers the question of Bing’s SEO impact head on in a it’s white paper, “Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters white paper“.  According to the Bing team, “Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content and website design… Best of all, the type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing haven’t changed—all of the skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously applies fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in Google and Yahoo! as well.”

Microsoft does highlight some of the differences that might change how sites rank – and consequently how SEO experts will have to work with sites:

• Bing makes it easier to compete for broad terms, because it surfaces more categories automatically, increasing the number of results on the page.
• Keyword searches are presented with Quick Tabs that present branches of the parent keyword. This surfaces many websites that rank highly for those keyword combinations.
• Multi-threaded [search engine results page] design surfaces many more pages that will be associated with the searcher’s primary keywords than would have surfaced in a single-threaded [search engine results page] list.
• Bing removes duplicate results from categorized results lists, which allows other, lower ranked pages to be shown in the categorized results on its [search engine results page].

Essentially, according to Microsoft, the category listings should enable more pages to make it to the top.  Sorting out duplicates, for example, and suggesting related search terms or more specific variations of a search term should help niched sites rise to the top.

SEO Process

This actually highlights one of the best parts of G.1440’s SEO process – research!  Search Engines keep their algorithms under tighter security than the Colonol’s 12 herbs and spices, and rather than guessing what factors might impact search ranking, we specifically compare hundreds of characteristics of your site to the sites that are currently getting top results for the terms you want.  By evaluating the sites that are currently positioned where you want to be, we’re able to identify the SEO factors that actually have an impact for any given search term on any given search engine – Bing included.

Everyone’s had their share of bad experiences when going to the store. Whether it’s a trip to a fast food restaurant, the bank, or even when speaking with a store representative over the phone, you never know when you might encounter an employee with a bad attitude, get stuck waiting in long lines, or find out that the item you’re looking for is out of stock.

Some consumers have resorted to venting their frustrations on a variety of internet sites, dedicated to providing a place for multitudes of consumers to share their unfavorable experiences. In the June 1^st edition of Information Week, John Soat discusses the effect of blogs and social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube on the reputations of companies such as Home Depot, Southwest Airlines and more. Generally speaking, companies have learned to ignore the IHateYourCompany.com sites…but should they?

Do these sites have any real affect on the company? Mike Paul, also known as the “Reputation Doctor” at MPG & Associates, points out the fact that social media is not only a way to stay connected with friends and associates. “It’s the next step, generationally, of word of mouth.” Therefore, if there are negative perceptions of your business being spread throughout the internet, it’s just like regular gossip that spreads from one person to another – it grows and festers into a big can of worms. What’s worst is that the information spread is not entirely truthful.

Solutions anyone? Soat suggests that companies stay aware and prepared for the conversations that are taking place in different places over the internet. When necessary, a response should be made to counteract the offenses. The response should be genuine and informative. Above all, companies shouldn’t overact, especially since a lot of the comments made tend to be blown out of proportion and don’t accurately reflect the issue.

The bottom line is that with any company of substantial size, there are bound to be bad experiences out there, and what used to get talked about at the water cooler now gets tweeted and retweeted. In today’s world, every time you can turn a bad story into a good one, it’s a win that’s multiplied through social media.

G.1440 is currently working with US Lacrosse, the national governing body for Lacrosse in the US, on a full overhaul of their websites and use of technology in general.  US Lacrosse has many key stakeholder groups that each have different needs online, and they house a tremendous amount of data on the site, which makes site usability the ultimate challenge.

How do we get the information that people need to the people that need it?

Luckily, G.1440’s team are experts at designing web usability.  Our process is thorough and starts with research – after all, we can’t deliver important information until we know what information is important!

As an online marketer, it’s exciting whenever we’re able to help improve the user experience on a site.  A great user experience is the key to long customer relationships and referrals.

But creating a great experience starts with users, and in this case you can help, too!

If you’re familiar with US Lacrosse, take a few moments to fill out our brief 9 question survey, or participate in a card sort:

http://www.uslacrosse.org/enews/websurvey.phtml

Get off the couch……Bruce Lee needs a sparring partner!

Last week, Microsoft unveiled a completely new way to play a video game – interacting with a game without any controllers to hold. Nothing to do, but get up and play…the game responds to your movements and immerses you in to the game. The days of being a couch potato playing video games all day is over. You can still play the games, but now you’ll have to get up and actually participate to make them work. Think about being able to crouch down to hide from a sniper or spar against Bruce Lee? This gaming interface is another big step towards that virtual reality environment that has been talked about for a long time – think about the Holo-deck in Star Trek. We are not there yet, but it is coming.

The new system is called Natal (pronounced nuh-tal). Microsoft partnered with Steven Spielberg to make the announcement. “The vast majority of people are just too intimidated to pick up a game controller. Still 60% of households don’t own a console.” The only way to entice non-gamers is to “make the technology invisible”. The bottom line for you and me is that Microsoft sees growth in the gaming market and wants more and more people to adopt this technology. Needing to be able to be proficient at a controller is getting in the way of that growth. Eliminate the controller and you open up a whole new market of gamers.

The first big step towards this virtual world was taken by Nintendo when they turned the game controller into a simple two button device and therefore offered more people the ability to do yoga or golf or box; all while the Wii gaming system monitored and responded to your movements.

Now Natal takes this a step farther, by removing the controller. A separate device comprising a camera, microphone and software will need to be plugged in/installed to the Xbox 360 system. This is similar to the same method that the Wii uses a gaming bar that sits on top of your TV.

Everything from painting, to pong to racing to Godzilla vs. Pokémon are being demoed. Microsoft is releasing the development tool kit now so that gamers can start building new Natal games, even though the consumer version of Natal won’t be released for some time. No date has been given.

One of the big questions is “Will Natal be backwards compatible with current games? “ No one knows right now. Natal may be so advanced that backwards compatibility with older games could be impossible. We will have to wait and see.

I can’t wait to see this interface and will keep you posted when I see it come out.

UPDATE: The early Natal tests were done by Microsoft in a controlled environment, and the early hands on testing was not permitted to be filmed. Perhaps the first hands-on, non-Microsoft test was live on NBC’s late night TV show with Jimmy Fallon. Hulu video below: