Happy 40th Birthday to the Internet!

Tomorrow is the 40th Birthday of the INTERNET

What a busy old year 1969 was.
When man wasn't landing on the moon, the Beatles were performing their last concert together, Led Zeppelin were releasing Led Zeppelin I and the Rolling Stones were playing Altamont. Say no more.
Meanwhile, on October 29, the first Arpanet network connection between remote computers was established.
Arpanet was the military precursor to what we now know as the internet (the term "internetting" would not be coined until 1977).
Anyway, at 10.30pm precisely, the first message was sent over the Arpanet between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute by student Charley Kline. The message itself was the word "login". The "l" and the "o" transmitted without problem but then the system crashed. So, trivia fans, the first message transmitted over the internet was "lo".

Oh and sorry Al Gore, but you did not invent the Internet.

Online Map to check your area for flu outbreaks

With all the talk of H1N1 (or as I like to call it, THE Swine Flu) and all the other viruses going around, I thought you would enjoy visiting this website which provides the latest information on flu outbreaks in the world. http://healthmap.org/en

HealthMap aggregates news feeds from the WHO, Google News, ProMED, and elsewhere to map out all of the disease outbreaks. It includes a heat index to understand how bad certain situations really are and the most recent health-related news items.

Tip: To check just for influenza-related news, check only the box that says “influenza” under “Diseases, last 30 days”.

Family Guy to air Windows 7 Episode!

Seth McFarlane, creator of Family Guy, confirmed that a Windows 7 themed, Microsoft sponsored episode of the irreverent TV show will air soon.

There will be no commercial ad time, no network promotions, and no commercial breaks--just a 30-minute Windows 7 trailer. It will feature original animation, live-action performances of Family Guy's most memorable musical numbers, comedy sketches, and surprise celebrity guests.

The show airs on Fox Sunday, November 8th at 8:30 PM EST/PST, 7:30 PM CST.

In my opinion it should be well worth watching but keep in mind that the "Family Guy", by nature, is meant for mature audiences.

Considerations Parents Should Make When Naming a Baby

Naming a baby 30 years ago was much easier. Parents just needed to pick a name they liked, say John or Michael, add the surname, and that was it.

Enter the Internet, and everything changes. Now you need to think twice before naming your kid or else he/she might have a lot of trouble on their digital interactions. Below are some new considerations parents should make when naming a baby these days.

1. Is NameSurname.com Still Available?
In the future it is very likely that every person will need to have an online presence, and having the namesurname.com domain is the best way to go. You can check this by going to any domain registration website such as http://www.godaddy.com/ and entering the first and last name that you are considering followed by .com in the lookup box.

2. Is NameSurname Still Available on Twitter and Facebook?
Another cornerstone of your child's online presence will be their Twitter and Facebook accounts. Make sure that the prospective name is still available on those websites by visiting http://www.twitter.com/ and http://www.facebook.com/ and starting the signup process.

3. Will the name trigger email spam filters?
Email will probably remain the digital communication channel of choice. Make sure that the name or surname of your kid will not trigger spam filters for sexual or common scamming content.

4. Will it be easy to rank in Google’s first position for “name surname”?
Evaluate whether or not it will be easy to get your kid’s website ranked in the first position of Google for the “name surname” search query. Virtually everyone will use a search engine to find information in the future, and you don’t want people who are searching for your kid (i.e. to make a job offer) ending in the website of some footbal player or rock star.

I am sure there are many more things to consider but this should get you thinking!

Want to be a Gyan?

Gyan is the Sanskrit word for knowledge. As Hindi borrows heavily from Sanskrit, the word has the same meaning in Hindi too.

Gyanis are knowledgeable people, those who are maestros in their fields.
Words like guru and gyanis, though are Sanskrit words, are now becoming more popular in English, especially to denote a person proficient in technology field.

Read this blog every day and you might become one!

“Woo-Hoo...Woo-Hoo-Hoo...”

Good morning! I have something that I want to share with you but I hope you don't take it the wrong way. I am not trying to sell you anything.

We are really trying to cut expenses around here so in reviewing our bills we found that we were paying over $160 for our 2 phone lines with MCI (one home, one business). I decided to take the leap and sign our home phone up for VOIP (voice over Internet protocol). I did a lot of research first and went with the company that had the best jingle. Just kidding. But I did chose Vonage because of their unbelievable $24.99/month plan that includes every feature under the sun including visual voice mails (they actually transcribe your voice mails and send them to you via e-mail) Very cool. All local toll and long distance calls are included in the price, even most internationally calls. You must have a high speed Internet connection (no dial-up) and you have to get used to the fact that your phone line is no longer a POTS line (Plain old telephone service). That means that your jacks do not have dial tone anymore. They send you an adapter that you connect to your cable or dsl modem. You will probably want to invest in a cordless phone system that has multiple handsets. I picked a nice VTECH system up at Walmart that has 3 handsets. It was only $59.99. You can plug the extra handsets in anywhere in the house so you won't miss a call and you don't have to have a RJ21 (telephone jack) in a room to have a phone in it.

My review so far is that I love it! You can log in to your account and configure your services the way you want them. Another cool feature that you can have is "call hunt." When someone calls your main number and you don't answer you can program it to ring on up to 2 different numbers (example.. cell phone). If there is still no answer the call will go to voice mail.

I like it so much that I switched my business line over too. So now I will be saving $110/month on phone bills!!!

If you have any questions or would like to learn more just send me an email at info@wizedezigns.com or call me at 715-377-0233. I am including a sign-up banner and link. If you click on it and put my telephone number 715-377-0233 in the "get it now and start saving box" we will both get 2 MONTHS FREE! That's all for now. More later of course...

Mid-week is here and before another week gets away from me I wanted to post another article. I spend an average of 10 hours a week updating myself on search engine optimization and submission. I thought it would be a good idea to let you know about the newest search engine on the scene, Microsoft's bing.

Bing is becoming the new Google. Who would have guessed that the yet-another-search-engine-attempt-from-microsoft-to-beat-google would really turn successful?
Well, it surely seems that Microsoft has finally worked its magic this time as Bing has become the 13th most visited site on the web. According to Compete, Bing’s traffic has overtaken that of other prominent sites like Digg, Twitter and CNN.
Now, for those people who would like to switch to Bing, but finds Google to be unavoidable, there is a solution.

http://www.AskBoth.com

AskBoth.com is a new Web 2.0 search engine that combines the results from Google and Bing and displays them side by side. Note that entire Bing page or Google page is not displayed, but just the results are displayed here.

Check it out if you get a chance and make sure that if you have a website that you contact your webmaster and request that your site be submitted to bing as a proactive measure.

Welcome to my NEW blog (I deleted the old one)

Welcome to my new blog. I deleted my old one because all of the information was out of date. This blog will try to take you through day to day uses of the Internet for your personal and business use.

This week I spent my usual amount of time on my favorite websites: http://www.facebook.com/ http://www.drudgereport.com/, http://www.rivertowns.net/, http://www.ebay.com/, http://www.wellsfargo.com/, http://www.searchenginewatch.com/, http://www.coburnsdelivers.com/, http://www.youtube.com/ and I could go on and on. The most unusual thing that I did on the Internet this week was to develop a Facebook Fan page. This is different from a regular Facebook profile page. Facebook fan pages are for businesses and allow you to custom program your pages. Please take a peek and become a fan here. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger etc.. are community websites that are part of what is collectively known as web 2.0 soon to be web 3.0. Easy to use programming interfaces that allow even a half way intelligent 8 year old to do advance tasks on the Internet such as posting photos, creating and joining discussion groups, posting multimedia, configuring design, etc.... Johnnie, my 12 year old son, has a pretty nice Facebook site and is proficient at using MSN messenger and developing applications on ROBLOX. Keri and Kristen, my teen daughters are active daily on Facebook. Kristen just landed a social media marketing insternship at St. Thomas University. I mention this because I intend to include them in my blogs from time to time as their Internet activity is the window to the future. (please note: I do not recommend letting any child go unsupervised on the Internet. Computers should always be in common areas of the home, usernames and passwords must be known to the parents for all sites and services and children should know that they have no privacy when it comes to the Internet.)

To wrap up now, this blog will hopefully keep you interested in the Internet without being too overwhelmed or bored. Hopefully you will come back and visit from time to time which is the whole purpose of blogs: driving traffic to your website. Feel free to email me with topic suggestions or comments.