STOP sopa

There are two pieces of legislation, currently being considered by Congress, that will seriously endanger the very freedoms America was built upon - specifically free speech.

"SOPA and the PROTECT IP Act propose massive new regulatory powers over the Internet that will seriously endanger free speech and the constitutionally upheld principal of Fair Use. These bills would create broad powers to remove entire web sites by manipulating the Domain Name System (DNS) and Internet search results, all without any action from a court of law. Blogs, status updates, consumer reviews and even links to other web sites may make web sites a target to be blacklisted. Smaller and independent ISPs will be particularly hard hit trying to police their users to avoid interruption of service.

These bills are not the way to address online piracy. SOPA and PROTECT IP are bad for TierraNet, bad for our customers, and bad for the Internet. Our favorite websites -- Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube -- even your own blog, and your favorite online store -- will all be permanently wounded.

I urge you to take a moment to let your representatives in Washington D.C. know your feelings. Please EDUCATE yourself about this proposed legislation, VOICE your opinions, and EXERCISE the right to free speech on the Internet that we take for granted." - Brian Scott, CEO of TierraNet

RESOURCES:
http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation - Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation

Marketing in a Down Economy

"In a slow economy the one thing to boost is sales and marketing" SmallBiz Technology

"It certainly makes sense to think about new ways to market a business right now – and the biggest growth of marketing will be online." Wall Street Journal

"In a sputtering economy, small businesses are often quick to rein in their marketing budgets. But that may be a shortsighted strategy. Glum economic times can be an opportunity for small companies to make inroads on their competitors' turf and re-energize their marketing efforts." WSJ Small Business Report

2012 Tax Trends for Small Business

Are Large Corporations skipping over taxes, while small & medium size businesses (SMB) carry the burden?

We found this article in Small Business Trends. It may be useful for small business owners to be aware of these potential trends:

http://smallbiztrends.com/2011/12/top-10-small-business-tax-trends-2012.html

The 10 main points highlighted in this article are:
1. Taxes will remain a political football.
2. Tax audits are on the rise.
3. Uncertainty about health care rules remains.
4. Some favorable business tax rules will be extended.
5. State and local governments scrounge for new sources of revenue.
6. Unemployment taxes will go up for some employers.
7. Estate planning for business owners remains challenging.
8. Filings will be almost exclusively online.
9. Low interest rates will have an impact.
10. The U.S. tax system will continue to become more and more complex.

Phone 'Rootkit' Maker Carrier IQ May Have Violated Wiretap Law In Millions Of Cases - Forbes

Phone 'Rootkit' Maker Carrier IQ May Have Violated Wiretap Law In Millions Of Cases - Forbes

Is the American Jobs Act good for Small Business?

This article was originally published in Small Business Trends, and written by Rohit Arora. He was named "Top Entrepreneur of 2011" by Crain's New York Business. Rohit is CEO of Biz2Credit.

While President Obama urged Congress to pass his $447 billion jobs bill combining tax cuts and new government spending, skepticism remains as to whether the package could kick-start the stalled economy and if it would indeed pay for itself as the President promised.

President Obama’s “American Jobs Act” proposals include a 50 percent cut in payroll taxes, incentives for businesses to hire returning veterans and people who have been unemployed for more than six months, and new spending on America’s infrastructure. The President said that the proposals would not increase the growing federal deficit, and that he has ambitions for long-term deficit reduction through spending cuts.

Although the President’s intentions are good, the plan is unlikely to have the intended effect and may not even pass Congress. The plan is well intentioned, but a little off the mark.

• The number-one issue right now is empowering entrepreneurs to start small businesses. To do that, they need capital. but banks simply aren’t lending. Many big banks have reserves on their books. President Obama should take a page out of Ronald Reagan’s 1987 playbook and vow to increase taxes on assets that are sitting idle if the banks do not reach certain small business lending plateaus.
• Although the President insisted that his proposals would pay for themselves, he did not say how. There is a high likelihood that the measures will add to the growing government deficit, which puts a burden on the economy and small businesses in particular.
• When government revenues don’t match its spending, it looks to increase revenue. My fear is that small business owners will suffer. Entrepreneurs don’t have lobbyists like big corporations do and thus are less likely to sway government leaders against taxing their businesses.
• Providing incentives for hiring returning soldiers is a worthy and sincere aspiration. However, the reality is that many veterans do not have the job skills to compete in today’s technology-driven economy. Any proposals should include some sort of training for veterans so that they can develop marketable skills – a 21st century G.I. Bill, so to speak. When people have skills they get hired. The same applies to long-time unemployed workers. Editor's Note: What are your thoughts? Is Rohit off base on this point? Is not the training our soldiers receive often technology-driven? Is it applicable to the civilian job market? That may be a legit question, but there is certainly not a lack of job skills such as dedication, hard work, discipline, and team work!

There are three things the President should have suggested, but did not:

1. Provide incentives for small business lending. Tax incentives for hiring are nice, but if you don’t have capital to launch the business, they do no good.
2. Encourage foreign direct investment into new businesses. China has been very good at this. New companies create jobs. Editor's Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Rohit and do not necessarily represent the views of us or small business.
3. Focus on reducing the deficit, which is a time bomb. Who will be most likely to pay the piper? Small business owners, who don’t have lobbyists and are an easy target for higher taxes and increased fees. (It won’t be the poor or the big corporations that pay.) A large government deficit limits access to capital for the private sector in general and small businesses in particular, as they do not have access to public markets. The deficit is exactly the opposite of what small businesses need to help bring America out of its stagnant economy.

President Obama is correct in saying, “Ultimately, our recovery will be driven not by Washington, but by our businesses and our workers.” In order to do that, small businesses need an environment in which they can grow. He also was right when he admitted that people cannot wait 14 months until the next Presidential election for the economy to turn around. While the new measures would likely spur employment (currently at 9.1 percent) and some growth, they are not enough to solve the country’s economic woes.

Mile from Molly

We support The Molly Thompson Memorial, a benefit for the Children's Hospital at Legacy Emanuel. A week from this Monday, you can too, simply by going out to dinner! Learn more on how you can help at http://www.milesfrommolly.org/Mollys-Events.htm

 

Word Web Design on Facebook

Visit us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/WordWebDesign
Click the "Like" button to keep up-to-date on important marketing news for small business, and to see our latest designs.

Facebook Tip

Freaked out by all the new changes to Facebook? There will be more!
Here's a guide to the most recent ones:
Gizmodo's color coded cheat sheet to facebooks redesign

Outlook FAQ

Q. Microsoft Outlook is trying to send the same e-mail over and over.

A. There are multiple issues that can cause this, but we've found the most common to be one of two things. One, the hard drive is nearly full, and doesn't have enough room to cache attachments. Or two, your Outlook file has reached it's maximum capacity. The solution is to delete any large e-mails, especially ones with large attachments, from your inbox, outbox, and trash - to free up space.

WEB TRIVIA!

Interesting Internet Statistics

Have you ever wondered how much data is out there on websites?  According to one source it was nearly 1/2 trillion gigabytes of info in 2005, and grew to over 1 trillion gigabytes in 2010.  Growth is projected to increase exponentially to over 8 trillion gigabytes in 2015.

One of the biggest users of internet bandwidth is Email!  90 trillion emails were sent in 2009.  The number grew to 107 trillion emails in 2010!  Even with the increasing popularity of texting, email use continues to grow.

Here at WORD Web Design we use Apache for hosting domains - so does 62% of the internet, with 203,609,890 domains currently hosted on Apache.

Browser Use:

• Internet Explorer - 46.9%
• Firefox - 30.8%
• Chrome - 14.9%
• Safari and Others - 7.4%

Which is best?  It depends on the content viewed, but in most studies Chrome came out on top for speed and also did quite well for security.  The downside?  Chrome will not run some types of code (will not display some pages correctly), and especially struggles with online PDF forms, not allowing the forms to be sent from your desktop.

Over 50% of 'large' websites use Google Analytics.  However, a side note on this particular stat, we do not recommend using Google Analytics.  It will slow down the entry speed to your website, and sometimes completely stop pages from loading (if the page won't load quickly, customers will go elsewhere).  We provide free detailed web stats with all the sites we host, and it runs off the log files so load speeds are not affected in any way.

We all know video uses the most bandwidth, but how much?  Well, YouTube uses 11.93% of all bandwidth, but in the USA alone, Netflix accounts for 29.7% of peak downstream traffic.

What's the fastest internet connection speed?  Experimental fiber networks are reportedly capable of delivering 1 gigabit connection speeds.  Fast enough to download an hour long video in 15 seconds!  But even at that speed, it would take 10000000000000 years to download all the information in just one human!!  And, that's assuming each atom in the human body can be transmitted in one bit.  The Star Trek teleportation machine is probably still a ways off in the future!


*Many of the above stats were taken from a study done on less than 17,000 websites.  That is a fairly small control number, so the stats have to be taken with a grain of salt, but they're still quite interesting.  The information was compiled by Broadband Choices in the UK, who got their information from several sources.

Google +1 Social Media

Interesting article regarding Google +1:

Google +1: Another irritating social media button?

What are your thoughts?

SEO Wisdom from Dilbert!

Not.Coms

ICANN, the organization that administers the Internet’s domain name system, is meeting this weekend.  *They are voting to possibly approve hundreds of new domain extensions.  Do you think this will open a whole new can of worms, and added expense for small business?

KATU has an informational take on it:
http://www.katu.com/news/tech/124110019.html

Forbes has an argument against it:
http://blogs.forbes.com/ciocentral/2011/06/17/should-icann-be-adding-more-generic-top-level-domains/

*UPDATE 6/20/11 - ‎ICANN's Board of Directors approved a plan to usher in one of the biggest changes to the Internet's Domain Name System. The Board vote was 13 approving, 1 opposed, and 2 abstaining. Not surprising, as it means more money and control for ICANN.

Welcome

Welcome to our new blog page. We will post useful tips here, mostly aimed at small business owners and managers. The focus will be on marketing, technology, and business operations. Talk with you soon!