Libraries Key Resource For Internet Access
Some 77 million Americans used a public library computer to access the Internet in the past year, according to a new report by the University of Washington Information School and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Low-income adults are more likely to rely on the public library as their main resource to access computers and the Internet than any other income group. Over all, 44 percent of people living below the federal poverty line used computers and the Internet at their public libraries.
Americans across all age groups reported they used library computers for Internet access. Teens are the most active users. Half of 14- to 18-year-olds reported they used a library computer during the past year, usually to do school homework.
"People from all walks of life use library computers to perform routine and life-changing tasks, from emailing friends to finding jobs," said Michael Crandall, senior lecturer and chair of the Master of Science in Information Management at the University of Washington Information School.
"More than three-quarters of those who used the library Internet connections had access at home, work, or elsewhere. Oftentimes, they needed a faster connection, assistance from a librarian, or temporary access in an emergency."
In the last 12 months forty percent of library computer users received help with career needs. Among these users, 75 percent searched for a job online. Half of these users filled out an online application or submitted a resume.
Other highlights from the report include:
*37 percent focused on health issues. The vast maj/> [...]
Thu Mar 25, 2010 15:25 pm
How does a company use its Twitter identity?
Image via Wikipedia
Friday, I presented at a private event for IBM's marketing teams worldwide, on the subject of the Digital Marketing Challenge, where I explained how to make the case for more investment in digital marketing by showing how to track the return on that investment. It was a fun event, marked with good speakers, but also a good audience. By far the most burning question of the day, asked of multiple speakers, was, "Should a company use a single corporate Twitter handle or allow individual handles for different employees?" And the answer to that question is, "Yes."
Clearly, the questioner wanted to know the answer for IBM, but the question is applicable to any size firm, and my tongue-in-cheek "yes" answer is really a challenge to each company to figure out what makes sense for them.
Almost any company can benefit from having a corporate Twitter presence that is impersonal, which can be used for impersonal things, such as making announcements, talking about news and events, and serving as the punching bag for irate customers that don't know any other Twitter handle at which to direct their ire. For large companies such as IBM, it makes sense to have such impersonal handles for IBM divisions, IBM countries, IBM product families, and even individual IBM products.
But don't stop there. If you have a small company, it might be fine for one person to /> [...]
Tue May 04, 2010 10:50 am
Linkfromdomain - a linkbuilding tip for use at Bing.com
Posted by willcritchlow
Bing recently came out of beta in the UK and we are seeing the beginnings of the advertising campaign to promote it.
For SEOs, however, there is a more immediate opportunity with Bing than hoping it gathers some market share from Google(*). Linkfromdomain is a search operator that is unique to Bing. It returns the pages that are linked-to from a domain. There are obviously other ways of getting this information in raw form (maybe including Linkscape one day, but certainly including Xenu for mid-sized sites), but for large sites especially, it can be really hard to gather it in any kind of usable form.
The usage of linkfromdomain is to search on Bing for something like:
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk (returns pages linked from the Oxford University site - more on this below)
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk intitle:broadband (filters to broadband in the title)
- linkfromdomain:ox.ac.uk wimax (searches for wimax anywhere on the linked-to page)
The set of results is generally returned in a similar ordering to a regular search query - with a combination of highly relevant and more powerful results first. Unfortunately linkfromdomain does not support searches for sub-domains (even www.) you have do search for linkfromdomain:exampledomain.com.
How do you use this for SEO?
This is a linkbuilding tip post - the idea being two-fold:
- suppose you have a powerful target website (such as an educational institution) and you are seeking ways of getting links from them, this gives you tools for finding techniques, content types and targets for those/> [...]
Mon Dec 07, 2009 02:45 am
Facebook Sends Cease And Desist To Friend-Seller
uSocial is a controversial advertising company that specializes in social media. For a fee, it promises to get stories on the front page of Digg, direct followers to a Twitter account, and/or find someone Facebook fans (among other things). But Facebook's put at least a temporary stop to the sale of friends.
The BBC reported this afternoon, "Facebook sent Cease and Desist letters to USocial claiming that the way the marketing firm operates violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm."
As a result, "USocial defended itself against Facebook's claims, saying that it did not spam users or use web tools to gather information about profiles. . . . However, in response to the legal letters, USocial said it would delete the login information it had collected and broadly stop offering to sell Facebook friends."
This is an interesting development insofar as, three months ago, Twitter also tried to crack down on uSocial. Its back-channel methods apparently didn't succeed, but now that Facebook's established a precedent, we might see another attempt. Delicious, Digg, and Reddit could well join the fight, too.
Of course, the hubbub around such a scuffle would act as free advertising for uSocial and might spread the notion that these social media sites can be gamed, so it's also possible that absolutely nothing will occur.
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> [...]
Fri Nov 20, 2009 22:35 pm
