• 5 Tools Everyone Working Online Should Have
  Productivity and collaboration tools for people working on-line, including, IM, screen sharing, a start page and a personal blog.
  (tags: productivity collaboration tools)

According to JenSense, the Google AdSense terms and conditions requires all AdSense publishers to have a privacy policy. Their current T&C state:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

To me it’s not clear that you have to publish your privacy policy on your Web site, but the privacy policy proposed by JenSense seems quite simple and clean so I will give it the benefit of the doubt. So without further a due, here’s Da Vinci Planet’s privacy policy.

• Avenue A Razorfish 2008 Digital Outlook Report
  Consumer behavior in the market place. Home pages not that important any more, every page is a home page. Great report worth reading.
  (tags: marketing research trends)

• Newsletters & promotional emails: Time to move the unsubscribe link?
  If you have a large newsletter or email offer subscriber list then you run the risk of users hitting the spam button to unsubscribe. Put the unsub link at the top.
  (tags: emailmarketing)
• WordPress 2.5 is out, it’s time to upgrade!
  WordPress 2.5 is a signifincant upgrade and they completely skipped 2.4. With mostly user requested updates, it makes a great product even greater.
  (tags: wordpress blogging)
• Google App Engine: Write Your Own Google Apps
  A developer tool that enables you to run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure. They are changing the way we think of webapps!
  (tags: google appengine programming)
• How Do They Track You? Let Us Count the Ways
  ComScore says that the big players are tracking our Internet behaviour at many more touch points than most users would expect.
  (tags: tracking)
• 13 Ways to Move Big Files on the Web
  YouSendIt.com, DropFIle.com and 11 other ways to send files.

As the domain name administrator for our company, I am often asked if we can “point” a certain domain name to some site or landing page. Webmasters know that “pointing” a domain name could have many meanings and implications, but to most people it means “if you type in this URL, it will take users here.” It occurred to me that there are three levels of control that you could have to point a domain name or URL somewhere. In most organizations they are performed by three different departments because they are very different functions, but they are interdependent and you need all three of them coordinated in order to “point” a domain name. More »

Almost everyone has a personal email address (or two or ten) and by far most of them are free accounts at AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail or Google. We all love our own email accounts at these providers because we can access them from anywhere, the user interfaces are great and we simply trust that our old email messages will always be there. Google Docs, Zoho and other applications like Basecamp have enabled us to move more applications to the Web. So it should be kind of expected that our own desktops, the place where we save our files, should be available to us any time we’re connected to the Internet. Desktoptwo is a virtual desktop with the goal of making you completely computer, OS and browser independent. Desktoptwo offers all the basic applications that one needs on a desktop like email, a notepad, an address book and an MP3 player. It has a desktop-like feel and gives you a taste of what our desktops could become.

Now, I think that I am actually ready to give up my desktop, but I’m not quite comfortable to do it the Deskktoptwo way. It’s an intriguing solution, but somehow it seems too old school and I don’t think it’s how we’re going to get rid of our desktops. But it worth checking out and knowing about.

• Microsoft Office Live Workspace Hands On
  Microsoft’s answer to Google Docs and Zoho, but they don’t offer Office apps on-line. It’s more focussed on collaboration, like Basecamp.
• Google Sites
  Google Sites, formerly JotSpot, combines wiki-style documentation with some blog-like features and office-like functionality to make a rich collaboration tool.
• Central Desktop – Project Collaboration for Teams
  Central Desktop provides simple project collaboration tools for business teams

Here are some interesting things to know about leap years.

* A troptical year is 365.242190 days long. A regular year has 365 days and a leap year 366.
* February 2008 has 5 Fridays, the last time that happened was in 1980.
* The Gregorian calendar was adopted to account for leap years. The Julian calendar had too many.

Read more interesting info about leap years at timeanddate.com

The Google Webmaster Central Blog has in recent weeks provided some clarity and best practices on a few of the current mainstream SEO issues that many enterprises are struggling with, including the value of friendly URLs and Sitemaps. While friendly URLs are almost inherent to modern Web applications like WordPress blogs, they can be very difficult to implement in complex enterprise Web applications and especially ones that integrate older apps. Sitemaps pose the same challenge. When is it worth converting to friendly URLs or to develop the functionality to create dynamic Sitemaps? More »

Keeping up with software updates is considered best practice, but it can be a pain. WordPress is no different. All my previous WordPress upgrades have been smooth, but I was reluctant to upgrade from 2.2 to 2.3 because I was using the Jerome’s Keywords plugin (which enables tagging) and feared that it would conflict with the native tagging support in WordPress 2.3. That was before I learnt that WordPress 2.3 has import support for plugins like Jerome’s Keywords, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag. The nagging knowledge that I should upgrade finally won me over this week, but my fears realized and it took me a few hours to get my site back up. Here’s what I have learned. More »

• Vanessa Fox Nude.
  No she’s not really nude, but she is and editor at SearchEngineLand and a this, her blog, offers great insight into SEO matters.
• IE7 is being deployed, ready or not!
  It looks like MS will be pushing IE7 out on Feb 12 as a Windows update. Currently, about half of IE users use IE7, 38% of browsers in total. Expect a big increase!

• 10 things that bloggers tend to forget
  Proofread, backup, approve comments etc. Here’s a useful reminder of 10 common sense things that we tend to forget.
• How to highlight author comments in WordPress
  A hands-on way to highlight your own comments in your WordPress blog’s comments list. Something I have been wanting to do as well.

• 25 ways to Add Quality Content to Your Web Site
  A list of good ideas for content, including expert Q&A, statistics and how-to guidelines.
  (tags: SEO content)
• Jailbreak for iPhone
  Jailbreak is an app that enables you to install software onto an iPhone or iPod touch. By default you can only install using iTunes

PDFCreator is a handy little application that installs as a printer and creates PDFs from any file that you are trying to print. To convert a document to PDF simply open the document up the usual way, select Print and choose PDFCreator as your printer. PDFCreator then opens up a window that allows you to enter meta data for the file like Document Title and Author and then you hit Save to save it as PDF.

Here’s a tip on how PDFCreator can be used to help with filing expense reports. When you’re making hotel reservations or airline bookings while working remotely and without access to a local printer, you can print your reservation confirmations to PDFCreator and save them as PDFs on your computer. Now you can email the PDF version of the confirmation to someone who can print it for you and you have easy access to your invoices when it’s time to file your expense report.

• “Stay-at-home” servers, the book
  This is pretty funny and a very clever advertising idea for the Windows Home Server. It’s trying to get people comfortable with the idea that servers have a place in homes.