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It’s our birthdays - but you’re getting the gift!

Categories: Announcements, Blogging, New Media News, Web 2.0 apps | January 17th, 2008 | by Tammy | one comments

Good friend Shannon Cherry and I have a lot in common: being entrepreneurs, having two daughters and being a bit geeky. We also share the same week for our birthdays - which are only a day apart. We both like a good party - and thought how can we celebrate with all our friends and colleagues when we’re thousands of miles apart?

Then we decided to use the Business & Learning webinar platform to host a birthday bash unlike any other - because we’re giving you the gifts!

That’s right. On January 23 at 9 PM (EST), join Shannon & I for a virtual cupcake, fun times, and some great door prizes. We’re hosting a f^ree-for-all publicity chat, where you can ask Shannon and me anything about offline or online marketing. From websites and blogs to direct mail and mastering the media, Shannon and I will share all our insider secrets - for f^ree.

And if you’re a virtual assistant, you really need to be on this chat, as Shannon & I are giving away a special press release for you to use to market your business.

So put on your party hat, come with your burning marketing and publicity questions, and join us for Shannon’s and Tammy’s Birthday Blowout! Simply log in at http://www.businessandlearning.com/expo on January 23 at 9 PM (EST).

To log into the conference room, enter your first and last name with the password:learning . It’s an audio conference room so make sure you have your mic and/or speakers plugged and turned on. It’s Mac and PC Friendly, so everyone can attend.

Hope to see you there!
Tammy

Tech Tuesday: New member of Macbook Family…MacBook Air

Categories: Mac, Tech Tuesday | January 15th, 2008 | by Tammy | no comments

My first reaction to the MacBook Air was man that thing is gorgeous! (Yes I’m a bit of a Geek Girl and I get giddy with new technology, especially when its a new Apple product) It is very sleek and from the looks of it, was something I needed to have.

Well not so much after really looking at it… its got several things that would make me move over to the MacBook or MacBook Pro. Simply the fact that it only weighs 3.5 lbs is a nice feature but wouldn’t convince me to buy it.

First of all its only got 1 USB port and well frankly I usually have at least 2 things that need to be plugged in. (hey Steve what’s up with that??) Secondly it has no firewire port at all. I think that the MacBook Airwould be a great for the road warriors, taking it to conferences/unconferences but not necessarily for new media makers. The other thing I didn’t really like was that it was only 80 GB. I have almost that on my iPod, so again not a real big selling point for me.

Now it does have some additional cool feature like the fact it only weighs 2 lbs, has a multi-touch screen and the monitor is 13″ inches. Not to forget… that it has the built-in iSight camera.

I’ll be following this to see what the general consensus and how the MacBook Air will do in sales. I’d love to hear your comments.

If you like this blog, you can subscribe (its free)!

Tammy

photo credit - Sydney Morning Herald

The wait is over…

Categories: Announcements, Mac, Messages from Tammy, Software | January 9th, 2008 | by Tammy | 2 comments

Yes to all the Mac owners out there, our very long wait for an upgrade to Office for Mac is finally over. Apple released today the brand new edition of Office for Mac 2008. I haven’t received my copy yet but once I do I’ll post a product review for all of you.

Click here to see the 3 options that Apple is providing

If you already have it, feel free to post your review in the comments section. I’d love to hear it.

Tuesday Tip of the Week- Hahlo.com

Categories: New Media News, Twitter, Web 2.0 apps | January 8th, 2008 | by Tammy | no comments

This is a cool nifty app for all you iPhone users out there…

Hahlo is an iPhone-styled interface for the great Twitter service, and it is built upon their simple API.

All you need to use Hahlo is a Twitter account. Your login details are not stored by hahlo.com, they are saved in a cookie to allow access to things such as your direct messages, and enable you to update your status directly from hahlo.

Blogger remains anoymous

Categories: New Media News | December 26th, 2007 | by Tammy | one comments

Submitted by MediaPost ~ Written by Wendy Davis
__________________________________________
IN A CASE CLOSELY WATCHED by the blogosphere, a judge in New Jersey has ruled that the township of Manalapan isn’t entitled to learn the identity of the anonymous blogger “daTruthSquad.” Judge Terence Flynn in Monmouth County late last week issued a two-page order quashing the town’s subpoena against Blogspot owner Google in the case.

“We’re grateful that Judge Flynn upheld the First Amendment rights of our client and recognized that anonymous speakers should not be intimidated into silence through the discovery process,” Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Matt Zimmerman, who represents daTruthSquad, said in a statement.

The subpoena in the Manalapan matter was issued in the course of a malpractice lawsuit against former city attorney Stuart Moskowitz stemming from the township’s 2005 purchase of contaminated land.

DaTruthSquad had written posts criticizing the township, prompting officials to speculate in court that daTruthSquad was Moskowitz’s pseudonym. Moskowitz denied that allegation in court. The township then subpoenaed Google, demanding that the company disclose all information connected with daTruthSquad’s blog, including drafts of posts, emails and other contact information.

The digital civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation got involved in the matter, arguing that the identity of the blogger was irrelevant to the malpractice case. “The townships seeks to improperly interfere with the First Amendment rights of a pseudonymous critic for reasons separate from any legitimate need for discovery,” the group argued in its motion advocating that the court let daTruthSquad remain anonymous.

The case isn’t the only time a court has ruled that bloggers are entitled to the same legal protections as writers whose criticism appears in more traditional media. Last year, an appellate court in California rejected an attempt by Apple Computer to learn the identity of sources who leaked information to bloggers. The appeals court in that state ruled that its shield law, protecting the identity of confidential sources, applied to material published by bloggers as well as the mainstream media.

Blogging for Beginners

Categories: Blogging | December 24th, 2007 | by Tammy | no comments

What is a blog? I can’t tell you how many times someone has asked me this with a look of sheer confusion on their face. Maybe it is a strange word but it is actually a neat concept loved by many people out there today. Blogs are becoming increasingly popular.

A blog is actually a short term for the concept of a web log. An easy way to think of a blog is as an online journal. It is a place to share information with others, or to privately keep information online for your eyes only. Blogs can be shared with the public or password protected if one so chooses. There are blogs out there on millions of topics both personal, political, technical, and otherwise.

The information put into a blog is instantly published online to a web site. Most blogs are updated frequently either by one person or a group of people as group blogs are growing in popularity as well.

For someone to set up a blog there are a few steps that need to be taken and a few decisions that will need to be made. One of the first decisions is would you like to go with a free, less personalized service to host your blog or would you like to have something that is more personalized and that can be made your own, though you will have to pay a small fee to do so.

If you choose to go with the free service, you can choose from several free online services including wordpress.com, blogger.com or typepad.com. The disadvantage to using these services is that you cannot have a personal URL such as myblog.com but will rather have a URL that looks more like this myblog.wordpress.com . This is simply a matter of preference. However, there will be more options for personalizing and updating a blog that you yourself host on your own website. The advantage to the free services is one, it’s free, two, it is usually much easier and more step-by-step, where you just follow a few quick and easy steps and within minutes have a blog set up.

On the other hand, hosting your own blog on your own URL has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. The advantages include obviously the fact that you have your own URL, and you can personalize it in many more ways, with themes, customized logos, and more. The disadvantages include the added cost to purchase the URL and the hosting for the website, as well as the fact that you will have to install a blog on the website, which takes a little more time than the free blog sites. Wordpress.org offers a free version of wordpress that can be installed but this is more complicated and if you’re not familiar with it, you might have to hire a web pro to do this for you.

After making these decisions, you will then need to decide what you would like your blog to be about, will it be for personal or business use and what will be the focus of the blog. This will also aid you in deciding on a name for the blog and help you begin the process of actually blogging. It is important to blog on a regular basis so be sure to choose a topic that you could compose blogs about often.

Once you have your blog set up and ready to go it is just a matter of blogging on a regular basis and keeping it up to date. You might also tweak the blogs theme and sidebars to make your place on the web more personal. There is much more you can do, but this is definitely a good start for someone who is just beginning to blog.

Best of luck with beginning your adventure!

Podcasting - What’s all the hype?

Categories: Podcasting | December 17th, 2007 | by Tammy | no comments

Podcasting . . . . What’s all the hype? Well, podcasting can get confusing easily, that’s for sure. However, really it’s a lot simpler than one thinks in the beginning. Podcasting is simply a means by which to distribute audio or video files. Podcasting actually came from the words broadcast and Ipod because of the popularity of the Ipod and this being a new way that information and music was being broadcast to the world.

Podcasts are dispensed over the Internet. These can be radio shows or video productions. The podcasts are placed online where they can be downloaded or listened to via a virtual player such as a multimedia player either on the website itself or on a person’s personal computer. Many people also download the files and then transfer them to a MP3 player such as an Ipod. It is really quite easy and can be done without your having to do much of anything the computer and the Ipod recognize each other and actually sync up on their own.

Podcasts also give you the ability to subscribe to them and in some cases can even be downloaded automatically on a schedule through a podcast feed. One of the ways to do this is with a program such as Itunes. Itunes gives you the ability to search their database of podcasts and find something in your area of interest to download. You then subscribe to the feed and automatically get a new file when the podcast feed is updated. There are podcasts out there on virtually every topic from parenting to car repair. Most podcast are done by ordinary people on topics that they are passionate about, many podcast are talk show style but there are also music podcasts out there as well. Many well-known people are now also using podcasts to advertise and promote themselves, their platform or even their products or services.

It is much easier than one might think to record and create your own audio podcast. If you have a low end, inexpensive microphone you can easily record digital audio via your personal computer. A recording software is also useful, and there are free versions such as Audacity available online for download. This software allows you to quite easily edit the audio and then to save it and export it as an MP3 file for use elsewhere. If you already have a website you might also already have server space available or you can purchase space to house your audio files on a website such as Audio Acrobat. Finally, an RSS feed is created for the files and a download link is made available where others can download and/or listen to the audio online.

Podcasting a fast growing phenomenon that almost anyone can take advantage of…and that’s what all the hype is about!

Facebook apologizes for major faux pas

Categories: Facebook, New Media News | December 6th, 2007 | by Tammy | no comments

Written by Wendy Davis of MediaPost Publications

After weeks of criticism, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Wednesday finally apologized for the controversial Beacon program, which publishes information about members’ off-site purchases to their friends. The company also changed the program so that people can now opt-out once and for all.

But yesterday’s developments might prove to be too little, too late to satisfy privacy advocates and/or disgruntled users of the site.

At launch, the program publicized information about people’s purchases unless they specifically told Facebook not to do so. In other words, the program shared information by default.

This idea is so staggeringly bad that even now, four weeks later, it’s still astounding that Facebook ever went ahead with it.

And now that Facebook seems to have realized the mistake, it’s not clear what the long-term effects will be. While Facebook’s members show no signs of abandoning the site, the company clearly has squandered at least some goodwill.

What’s more, Facebook’s timing with the original launch also couldn’t have been worse, given that the Federal Trade Commission only days before held meetings about whether some current ad strategies endanger people’s privacy. In fact, Facebook’s original envelope-pushing program clearly illustrates how online ad techniques can result in private information becoming public.

Even now that the program has been changed, advocates, regulators and legislators are likely to remember how quickly privacy can disappear online.

Female Radio Star Contest at MarketingAntics LIVE

Categories: Announcements | December 6th, 2007 | by Tammy | no comments

Who?
Female (girl-type) Marketing Antics LIVE, radio co-host.

Attitude?
A teeny bit twisted, cleverly witty, brilliantly quick-mind and downright magical and delightful!

Auditions?
Auditions will be held on the air… LIVE!

Over the schedule of the next few installments of Marketing Antics LIVE, we will take live calls from all nominees.

If you want the gig, you must audition on the show LIVE!

Call-In Audition Details?
Saturday, December 8, 2007
9:00AM Pacific
http://www.BlogTalkRadio.com/netcoach
Telephone: (646) 716-7935

Wednesday, December 12, 2007
3:00PM Pacific
http://www.BlogTalkRadio.com/netcoach
Telephone: (646) 716-7935

So if you are ready to come get global, hosts Dr. Tony Marino & Ralph Hughes are on-point and ready to hear you at your best.

Are you the next Marketing Antics LIVE Radio Fun Girl?

Bridging the Gap of New Media

Categories: Blogging, New Media News, Podcasting, Web 2.0 apps | November 26th, 2007 | by Tammy | 2 comments

PodCampNYC2 (www.podcampnyc.org) is coming Feb 29-March 1st. Please sign up to attend (it’s free) or to speak (anyone can speak on new media subjects). This year John C Havens and the rest of the team (yes I’m on it too) are working toward supporting teachers.

PodcampNYC 1.0 was my first podcamp experience and I loved every minute of it. It is definitely something that you want to attend if you are able to.

So….Who Spoke at PodCamp NYC 1.0?