Today marks the last post of my blog-a-thon. It has been a learning and growing experience. I have blogged more time in the past 4 weeks as I did the prior 52. It was challenging and rewarding.

While it may not seem intuitive taking time out to selflessly help others will help you more than them. This week I haven’t had much time to blog largely because this week many opportunities arose to help others and I took them. Some at work, some outside of work. Helping others will endear them to …

Image via CrunchBase I was fortunate to be able to attend the Microsoft Launch Developer Preview meeting in NYC. Microsoft is holding these all over the country to prepare IT and developers for the upcoming launch. Overall it was a good meeting and Microsoft is delivering a great product. More importantly they have a really good …

Image via Wikipedia According to a study commissioned by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing company, 54 percent of U.S. companies say they’ve banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while at work. Source: 54% of Companies ban Facebook, Twitter…

Image via CrunchBase     As social media continues to emerge, many professionals are curious on what is the best way to manage these various networks. For posting updates I have found ping.fm an invaluable resource. I use it to manage updates across all my networks including Twitter, Facebook,LinkedIn, Flicker, FriendFeed and more. Here’s the skinny on how I utilize this …

Image via CrunchBase I’ve made the decision to take control of my feeds. I want to know how many users are reading my blog via sydication so I’ve decided to move to feedburner. The migration will be seemless for all readers. Additionally I’ll be able to provide syndication via email as well.

Social media will be the next innovation in the most unlikely of places, search ( leveraging the community to scale infinitely ). It’s not that people will all together stop searching, but the approach that they take to finding information will become increasingly social (rather than algorithmic) in nature.

Not surprisingly, given my semi random content, I arrive at my posts a few different ways. 1. I better write this down or I’ll never remember it These posts are the result of a rather frustrating night of problem solving. After reading tons of documentation and googling around, reading forums and discussing on IRC I …

Conversion is one of those core metrics that every business depends on and strives to improve. Improving your conversion rate (while maintaining a consistent traffic level) is the single most important goal any business should have. Not only will your sales increase without adding additional load but your marketing will be more efficient so you can …

Image by steve.francia via Flickr In business it’s common to use sales as a metric to determine success. Songs, albums, books and movies are all ranked on “best seller” charts. While this isn’t a perfect metric, it is largely useful due to the innate control built within. There is friction to a sale in that …