How can my users upload a video to my site - what should I use?

Hi there,

I run a marketplace and I'd like my users to upload a video upon creating a listing which then displays on their listing page to the public.

What's the best way to do this? I tried Uploadify but it doesn't seem to be working for videos larger than 10MB, I need a 50MB limit.

Also, is there a way to allow users to OPTIONALLY upload video using their YouTube video link, for example, they fill in their YouTube video URL which then displays the video on the public listing page?

Thank you so much, I'm at wits end with this!

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Pictures in a Blog - What should I know? What is aloud?

Hi there,

I know that I should use pictures I took by myself or Free Stock Images for my Blog, but I have some questions.

1. What about the other pictures? Am I aloud to use pictures I found on Google, if I name the source?

2. If I take screenshots from a movie for example and edit them, are they treated like "my pictures"?

3. Could it be a problem with such content, if the Blog (blogspot) is monetized?

Thanks a lot!

View the original article here

Which social network should I invest in?

Advertise virtually anything here, with CPM banner ads, CPM email ads and CPC contextual links. You can target relevant areas of the site and show ads based on geographical location of the user if you wish.

Starts at just $1 per CPM or $0.10 per CPC.

View the original article here

Things You Should Do After Installing WordPress

After you have installed WordPress, you may tweak a few settings to further optimize the performance and security of your WordPress website. Here’s a complete guide to optimizing your WordPress installation.

It takes two easy steps to install WordPress but you may tweaking some of the default settings to further optimize the performance and also improve the security of your WordPress website.

These suggestions are only applicable to self-hosted WordPress.org sites and not blogs that are hosted on WordPress.com. Also, I assume that you are running WordPress on Apache. Let’s get started:

The default installation of WordPress will store all your images, documents and other uploads inside the wp-content/uploads folder.

It is always a good idea to store your images outside the WordPress folder, preferably on a sub-domain. This offers a few advantages. Your image URLs will be relatively shorter, your daily WordPress backups will be more manageable and, most important, serving images from a different domain will allow parallel downloads and thus improve the page loading time (see Yahoo Performance Rules).

WordPress 3.5 (or later) does not offer an option to change the default media upload folder but there’s a plugin to bring those settings back. Also deselect the option – “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders.”

If you look at the HTML source code of your WordPress site, you will find a couple of meta tags that aren’t really required. For instance, the version of WordPress software running on your server can be easily retrieved by looking at your source header.

This information is like a good hint to WordPress hackers who are looking to target blogs that are using the older and less secure versions of WordPress software. To completely remove the version number and other non-essential meta-data from your WordPress header, add this snippet to your functions.php file found in the WordPress themes folder.

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wp_generator' ) ; remove_action( 'wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link' ) ; remove_action( 'wp_head', 'rsd_link' ) ;

The WLW-Manifest function (line #2) is used by Windows Live Writer to download the styles / themes used in your WordPress blog. Windows Live Writer users who do not use the live preview feature may turn off this function.

Since you would not like anyone to browse your WordPress files and folders using the explorer view in web browsers, add the following line to your .htaccess file that exists in your WordPress installation directory.

Options All -Indexes

Also make sure that there’s a blank index.php in the wp-content/themes and wp-content/plugins folder of your WordPress directory.

The comment box is WordPress is a mini HTML editor and commenters can use standing HTML tags like , , , to format their comments. They can even add hyperlinks in their comment. If you would like to disallow HTML in WordPress comments, add this snippet to your functions.php file.

add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_specialchars' );

WordPress includes a helpful document revisions feature to help you track changes and you can also revert to any previous version of your blog posts. Post revisions do however increase the size of WordPress wp_posts table as each revision means an additional row.

To disable post revisions in WordPress, open the wp-config.php file in your WordPress directory and add the following line:

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Alternatively, if you would like to retain the Post Revisions functionality, you may just limit the number of posts revisions that WordPress stores in the MySQL database. Add this line to the wp-config file.

define( 'WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

Reference: Editing wp-config.php (WordPress Codex)

When you are editing a blog post inside the WordPress editor, it will auto-save your drafts as-you-type and this will help in recovering your work in case the browser crashes. The drafts are saved every minute but you can change the default duration to say 120 seconds (or 2 minutes) by adding a line to your wp-config.php file.

define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 120 );

Your WordPress syndicates multiple RSS Feeds – the blog feed, article feeds, comments feed, category feeds, archive feeds, etc. – and these are auto-discoverable as they are included in the HTML header of your blog pages using the meta tag.

If you just want to publicize your main feeds, add these line to your functions.php file:

remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links', 2 ); remove_action( 'wp_head', 'feed_links_extra', 3 );

In the previous step, we simply removed the RSS feeds from printing inside the header but the RSS feeds still exists. If you would like to have one RSS feed served through FeedBurner and disable all the other feeds, add this to your .htaccess file. Do remember to replace the feed URL with your own.

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^.*(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC] RewriteRule ^feed/?.*$ http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol [L,NC,R=301]When you type a non-existent username or an incorrect password while logging into WordPress, it will provide a very detailed error message telling you exactly whether your username is wrong or the password doesn’t match. That’s bad.

Add this to your functions.php file to hide all the login-related warnings from displaying on the screen.

function no_errors_please(){ return 'GET OFF MY LAWN !! RIGHT NOW !!';}add_filter( 'login_errors', 'no_errors_please' );

This is highly recommended. If someone gets hold of your WordPress credentials, they will still need your mobile phone to get into your WordPress dashboard.

Unlike Dropbox or Google, 2-step authentication isn’t part of WordPress yet but you can always use plugins. Authy is popular for enabling 2-factor authentication though I prefer Authenticator since it can be used with the official Google Authenticator app.

Do not use the default Permalink structure of WordPress since it is bad for SEO.

Go to Options -> Permalinks inside your WordPress dashboard and change your WordPress Permalink structure. The recommended structure, from the SEO and performance perspective, is:

/%post_id%/%postname%

Your WordPress theme may not even include references to the favicon (favicon.ico) or the Apple touch icons but web browsers and feed readers may still request them from your server. It’s always better to serve a file than returning a 404.

Put a 16×16 favicon.ico and a 144×144 apple-touch.png file in the home directory of your blog. Then add this line to your .htaccess to redirect all apple touch icon requests to that particular file.

RedirectMatch 301 /apple-touch-icon(.*)?.png http://example.com/apple-touch.png

You want Google and other search engines to crawl and index your blog pages but not the various PHP scripts that have been used by WordPress or the various plugins and themes.

Open the robots.txt file in your WordPress home directory and add these lines to block the bots from indexing the backend stuff of WordPress.

User-agent: *Disallow: /wp-admin/Disallow: /wp-includes/Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/Disallow: /wp-content/themes/Disallow: /feed/Disallow: */feed/

If your WordPress username is “admin,” create a new user and grant them administrator privileges. Now logout out of WordPress, log in as the new user and change the privilege of the user “admin” from Administrator to Subscriber.

You may even consider deleting the user “admin” and transfer any existing posts /pages to the new user. This is important for security reasons because we don’t people to guess the username that has administrator privileges to our WordPress installation.

XML Sitemaps will help search engines better crawl your site but you don’t want to search engines to actually show your sitemap in search results pages.

Add the following line to your .htaccess to prevent indexing of XML sitemaps.

Header set X-Robots-Tag "noindex"

Make sure your site search is powered by Google Custom Search and do not use the built-in search feature of WordPress.

WordPress search returns less relevant results and the other advantage is that it will reduce strain on your WordPress server /database since the search queries will be handled through Google.

Alternatively, if you plan to continue with WordPress built-in search, use the Nice Search plugin. It creates better permalinks for your WordPress search pages (/search/tutorials vs /?s=tutorials).

You can easily add another layer of security to your WordPress installation by password protecting the wp-admin directory. You’ll thus have to remember two sets of credentials for logging into WordPress – your WordPress password and the password that is protecting the wp-admin directory.

404 errors are a missed opportunity. You can use events in Google Analytics to log your 404 errors including details about the referring site that is pointing to that 404 page of your site.

Add this block inside your Google Analytics tracking code after the _gaq.push function.

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', '404', document.location.pathname + document.location.search, document.referrer, 0, true]);The unused plugins and themes won’t affect the performance of your WordPress website but the aim should be to have as little executable code as possible on our server. Thus deactivate and delete the stuff that you no longer need.

WordPress has a strange habit of guessing URLs and it does make mistakes in most cases. Let me explain. If a user request labnol.org/hello URL but if that page doesn’t exist, WordPress may redirect that user to labnol.org/hello-world just because the URLs have some common words.

If you would like WordPress to stop guessing URLs and instead issue a 404 Not Found error for missing pages, put this snippet in the functions.php file:

add_filter('redirect_canonical', 'stop_guessing');function stop_guessing($url) { if (is_404()) { return false; } return $url;}

The static files hosted on your WordPress website – like images, CSS, JavaScript, .txt, etc. – won’t change often and thus you may set Expire Headers against them so that the files get cached on the user’s browser. Thus, on subsequent visits, your site will load relatively faster as the JS and CSS files would be used from the local cache.

Refer to the .htaccess file of the HTML5 boilerplate template for details on setting up expiry headers. If you are using a caching plugin like W3 Total Cache, the cache control is managed by the plugin itself.

ExpiresActive OnExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 30 days"ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 30 days"ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 30 days"ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 week"ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 week"

I have discussed WordPress security in detail earlier. The gist is that you should add secret keys to your wp_config.php file, install a file monitoring plugin and also Limit Login to prevent brute force attacks.

When you are logged into your WordPress dashboard as an admin, you can easily edit any of the PHP files associated with your WordPress plugins and themes. If you would like to remove the file editing functionality (one missing semicolon can take down your WordPress site), add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define( 'DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT', true );

If the web address of your WordPress site is abc.com, people can still reach your site if they add a few query parameters to the URL. For instance, abc.com/?utm=ga or abc.com/?ref=feedly are, technically speaking, completely different URLs but will work just fine.

This is bad because it dilutes your link equity (SEO) and, in an ideal situation, you would like all URLs to point to the canonical version. Add this little snippet to your .htaccess file and it will strip the unnecessary query parameters from all incoming requests.

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !="" RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^p=.* RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !^s=.* RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-admin.* RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /$1? [R=301,L]

Want more? Here’s a comprehensive list of WordPress plugins that I use and recommend. It would also help if you can master these essential Linux commands to better manage your WordPress installation from the shell.

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Which web hosting should I use?

40$-60$ for shared hosting is a lot! You can get a VPS or even dedicated server for it.

Do you know what you need, regarding technical aspects (like how much disk space, traffic, etc.)?

View the original article here

7 Reasons You Should NOT Start a Podcast

Podcasting is not for everyone. Despite the many experts, gurus, rockstars and ninjas within the content marketing space moving their voice to the podcast format, podcasting will NOT work for everyone.

I don’t want you to waste time creating iTunes podcasts if they’re not going to work…

…because it does take hard work to create podcasts.  Launching a successful podcast isn’t as easy to purchasing a domain name and hitting the one-click install button for WordPress. {Ms. Ileane shares the basics of “How to Make a Podcast” here}

Creating a successful blog doesn’t guarantee success in the podcast format either.

Podcasting is long-format content marketing, which means the audience expects you to dive deeper into your area of expertise.

Ms. Ileane does this well with her Ms. Ileane Speaks Podcast.

My own Content Warfare {view the episode index} addresses How to Win the Battle for Attention Online.

Both shows run 15, 30, even 45 minutes in length depending on the topic being addressed.

Here’s the deal, podcasting is not for everyone, so I outlined seven reasons you should NOT start podcasting. This serves as a guide to excuse yourself from moving into the audio format of content marketing.

Podcasting allows you to dig deep into a topic. It also allows you to use words apply inflexion to certain words that delivers your message with a cadence that a text-based blog post is not able to do. Podcasting puts you on display as an expert. There is something about delivering your message in audio that adds a level of authority to what you’re saying.

See anybody can copy and paste thoughts from another blogger. But it takes a true authority, a true expert in an industry to deliver a podcast and talk for 30 minutes on a topic.

The psychology behind your audience applying authority to you from hearing you talk about a topic is incredible powerful.

Think about the amount time that the average person spends on your website. Go to your Google Analytics reports and look at the time spent on your website right now. It most likely is somewhere between 45 seconds and two minutes.

Contrast this with the fact that with the Content Warfare Podcast where the average show length is 30 minutes,  the average listener stays on the line for 24 minutes. In which form of content marketing do you think I am building a deeper relationship with my audience? The three minutes that my audience spends reading one of my blog posts or the 24 minutes that they spend listening to my podcast.

There are many people who are not interested in reading text-based blog posts. This is the built in podcast audience. These are people who want to consume the content you in audio and podcasts. Services like Stitcher, Blackberry, iTunes and Zune provide you with a way to reach a group of people who could become potential clients that you would never be able to reach with a text-based blog post.

Podcasting allows you to expand your audience and reach a whole new market of consumers.

As discussed above, people who come and listen to your podcast see you as an authority, consume your content for a long period of time and become deeply invested in you as a content creator.  This provides the ideal opportunity to create leads and sales. Podcast listeners interested in your product or service become very qualified leads as they’ll have listened to you for a long time and made up their mind to buy.

This is very different from the text-based funnels and squeeze pages used to capitalize on a consumers compulsion to buy.  Add in the fact that services such as iTunes and Stitcher and Zune and Blackberry have a built in audience that you’re not currently reaching and you have now increased the pool people who could potentially buy from you.

Whether you’re Shakespeare or John Grisham or just the average blogger there’s a decent chance that the people who read your text-based posts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis would be interested in consuming your content in a different form or fashion. Podcasting allows you to add variety to your content marketing strategy and subsequently a deeper relationship with your audience. Once people begin listening to the sound of your voice they will remember hearing the words in the way that you speak.

Depending on who’s figures you read there are somewhere in the vicinity of 156 million blogs between WordPress and Tumblr.

This number does not include all the blogs from other platforms like Blogger, Joomla, Drupal and HTML blogs.

There are only a couple hundred thousand podcasts.

So if you’re trying to stand out from the crowd… if you’re trying to have your voice heard above all the other voices online do you think you have a better chance of doing that with a simple text-based blog post or on a podcast where you only have a couple hundred thousand competitors?

One of my personal favorite features of the podcast format is interviewing other experts in the marketing industry.  You can certainly interview people using text-based posts as well, but it’s harder to get a feel for the guest with simple text.  The audience also doesn’t get that personal feel of back and forth between interviewer and guest.

Plus, the relationship building aspect of having another professional come on your show and deliver their own value to your audience. You’re giving them an opportunity to increase the size of their own audience and in the long game that pays dividends.  I’ve had the opportunity to interview the likes of Mark Schaefer, Danny Brown and Marcus Sheridan just to name drop a few (and hopefully Ms. Ileane soon).

When I started the Content Warfare Podcast as format to explore how to win the battle for attention online, I honestly had no idea what to expect from the experience. I saw some of the elite content marketers joining the podcast bandwagon, names such as Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, Mike Stelzner from Social Media Examiner and even Ms. Ileane and I saw power in the breadth and depth of information that they were able to deliver to a podcast. After eight months of podcasting, producing over 20 episodes, I can honestly say that creating the Content Warfare Podcast has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for my business.

The only real reason you have for not moving forward with a podcast is if you don’t believe you have the fortitude to stick with it for the long term.

But I know you do. I highly encourage you to look into Ms. Ileane and her Ms. Ileane Speaks as she is a content marketer at the top of her game. If you’d like to learn more about my show, you can find it at Content Warfare Podcast | Win the Battle for Attention Online

Thank you and good luck,

Ryan Hanley

Tagged as: content marketing, Content Warfare, Mike Stelzner of Social Media Examiner, Ms. Ileane Speaks Podcast, Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income, Podcastting

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Why You Should Make Your Blog a Business Blog Today!

Hey, it’s Ivin here, talking about my business blog, and I’ve been ‘absent’  for a while. This post is not going to talk about how I’m back and how I rock, because that’ll be kind of vain, won’t it?

I am actually here to tell you what I’ve been struggling with a bit lately in my internet business blog.

Competition is so fierce and even though people know me for having hustling (hard work) as my creed, I realized lately that I’ve been working hard, but more like a chicken running around with his head cut off.

Aimless and directionless.

I have recently started making my business a blog business. Sure, I have a couple corporate clients I build and manage a digital platform for. Sure, I own my own media company where we are ‘testing’ a lot of things right now. But what I’m really passionate about is this, typing this post and providing value to other bloggers’ experiences online by sharing my struggles  failures experiences. Building a business blog.

What I started doing lately, is saying,

Sure, I have a couple big contracts that pay the bills and cover the bottom line, but when I look at it, I’m still working for someone else, I’m not really free.

I would love to write a post and make money, send an email to my ‘herd’  and pay for a new computer, build a pool etc.  These are things that most of us dream of being able to do, but we’re not really doing it. Be honest. Look at some of the income reports of the biggest names among us. And it’s not so flattering. They’ll tell you so themselves. The Pareto Principle will always be in place and I strive to be in the 20% margin.

So, I told myself this year that I’m blessed to have a couple big contracts, but I’m unhappy, I’m unsatisfied… Because I want to blog for a living, for myself. I don’t want to blog on behalf of a company or a celeb, because that’s not my voice. I told myself that I am going to make my blog my main business. My personal blog and my publishing blog. Here are the steps I’m going to take and this is how you, can start to focus on your business blog too:

Set an income goal – Look at your current income (from whatever, your other income streams, your J-O-B) and add to that 15%. Then make it your goal to make that each month. The goal here is to substitute your other income with blog income, freeing yourself to do what you love.Stop working for pennies – I have never written a blog article for 1$ or even $5. I didn’t bid on an article unless it’s $10 – $50. You have to look at yourself as being worth that. And if you’re not getting work at that rate, get better as a writer and a blogger. Find a platform that pays well, great commissions – or find a product that pays well. I once sent an email to close to 200 email subscribers. I got paid for every lead and commission for sales. From that one email (and a blog post) I made a cool $300. Not bad right? I put the product I’m promoting on my publishing blog and my entire funnel is shifting that way.  If you don’t find a golden product like I did, make your own product, even if it’s $27 and build your funnel that way.Work hard for traffic – Study the gurus like Ana Hoffman, John Chow and Zac Johnson. Not how they make money, but how do they get traffic.If you know how to get traffic you are 80% there. After that you need to learn to target better, capture leads, rule social media and split test. I am focusing ONLY on traffic right now for my business blog, but my experience with building eCommerce sites and products helped me set up all that first before I started working furiously on traffic.Target your efforts – I realized lately that it’s futile to go for the Basic Blog Tips audience, or the Traffic Generation Cafe audience. These are two of the best business blogs and they already have a guru, someone they trust. So instead, I am focusing on building a system to help South Africans start their own home businesses. There’s lots of unemployment and poverty here and it would be awesome to help people alleviate that. So, my goal is to become the guru or go-to guy in South Africa for this. Why? I can speak their language and you can’t. You can’t play in my sandpit, because I know them, and they can become my herd.  So, instead of dunking your bucket into the Pacific ocean, hoping to catch some fish, rather put your bucket in a bath, and your bound to catch a few. You getting this?

I my case my personal blog has become my home. Nobody can take that way from me. I blog there and I’m very particular about what I write there, the quality of the comments and who guest posts there. Because, for me, it’s not only if you are the right fit, but is your content the right fit.

My blog(s) has become my brand. My publishing blog, Authopublisher, not only paved the way for internet marketers to make money from publishing, but also broke the way bloggers label themselves as experts and sold them the dream and possibility of becoming a published author. It also sold them on making publishing part of their income model. It was one of the few blogs that pioneered this movement. It got great metrics and became a multi-author blog 10 months into its existence and won an award after one year of it’s existence. That’s a brand to be proud of.

My personal blog is also a brand, a personal brand. Kinda like JohnChow.com is his personal brand synonymous with blogging and the DotCom lifestyle, like Amy Porterfield is synonymous with Facebook. Mine, I strive to, will be about starting a home businesses. So what do I do? I blog about it and publish books about it, establishing myself as an expert.

The blog is the home base. It’s your brand and base of operations. So, let’s say you don’t get invited to BlogWorldExpo to do a presentation, or to the Affiliate Summit to talk about the latest trends, or to ePub LA to talk about self publishing. So what? Have your own events.

In 2006 I attended a Blog MOB (Meeting of Bloggers) and because of my success with my blog back then, I was someone, important (to them). Why? Because it was local. I was someone because I was approachable, could be touched and who people could shake hands with.  Because of that blog platform and what I managed to do there, I just signed 2 new writers to my publishing blog, because local is better.

So, go out and build your brand locally by doing seminars with local businesses, show them what’s possible and sell them services, set up costs etc. But stay true to your goal – to blog full time and focus on that alone. Have events locally teaching people your blogging skills. You may not look like a guru to the followers of Seth Godin, because they have their mentor. But, I bet if you start doing the rounds locally, you’ll be surprised at how in awe people are at what you can do and teach them.

I actually just finished research of schools I plan to canvas for leads. Not even in my entire province, just my town and the adjacent one. We’re looking at close to 500 schools I am planning to do free blogging courses at and my target is making $2/3000 just from the hosting they will need to get to set it up. I can spend three hours each week for four weeks and it’ll still be worth my time. And the cool thing is, you can’t do it where I am, you’re not from here. I carve out a niche where I CAN be successful and eliminate my competition through locality.

So, I want to take a quick moment just to sum up some thoughts into actionable bullet points.

If you are doing work for someone else, you are not working for yourself. Even though freelancing is a great way to start a small business blog, you will always be answerable to someone else. Get to where you free yourself so that if you fail, it’s your fault and no-one’s going to razz you about it. You just write your next post on your business blog and do whatever you sucked at better.Carve your own space for you in the (local) world. I am not reserved in mentioning awards I’ve won and accolades I may have achieved, because they separate me from the pack. Any professional and guru would do the same, because it makes them stand out and gives them credibility.  Claim your territory and own (work) it.Think outside the box. Why do you need to do sponsored posts (which pays you peanuts)? Why do you have to do affiliate marketing (and get low commissions)? Be creative in how you’re going to earn from your blog (I am also planning to cover local events by blogging live from the premises).

Let me share with you my simple plan to make lots of money with my business blog and be successful.

Target a local need.Write a couple posts reporting on my observations and how it could be solved.Place the posts I wrote on the topic into an eBook and make a report available with which I capture leads.Get social with my leads by sending them autoresponder messages, but also being available for them (at no cost) through a support desk, Facebook, Skype groups etc .Build a product through compiling information in blog posts and making videos of them.Build a proper funnel with one time offers, upsells and downsell for a low priced, high value item. Once people bought from me once, they’re very likely to buy again and I can look at building a bigger, better product down the line.

Did I inspire you? Did I make you angry with my arrogance? Good. Go and do something about it and hustle to make your dreams happen, because I’m tired of reading about how ‘other’ people make money from their business blog. Share any thoughts you may have about your business blog, I’d love to hear them.

Tagged as: blogging for money, Business Blog, home business, Make Money Blogging

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Why YOU Should Quit Your Job NOW!

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Apple Should Create Stolen iPhone 'Kill Switch,' Says Top City Prosecutor

The top prosecutor in San Francisco wants Apple to design a "kill switch" for iPhones that would render devices useless after they are stolen.

San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon said he pressed an Apple representative last week to embed such technology in every iPhone to diminish the product's value on the thriving black market for stolen mobile devices.

Gascon described the meeting as “very underwhelming," and said he now wants to meet with Apple chief executive Tim Cook to discuss development of an iPhone "kill switch."

“Given how nimble our technology companies are and how they can develop so many new features, I strongly believe that is a very doable thing,” Gascon said in an interview with The Huffington Post.

An Apple spokesman did not return a request for comment.

Across the country, police have reported a surge in thefts of smartphones and tablet computers -- iPhones and iPads in particular -- as criminals snatch mobile devices and resell them on the Internet, on street corners and inside local convenience stores. Of the 3,190 robberies in San Francisco last year, nearly half, or 1,470, were smartphone-related, according to police figures provided to HuffPost.

The spike in thefts has forced police departments to create special undercover units aimed at catching phone thieves. The human toll of phone robberies is also rising, as some victims lose not just their phones, but also their lives.

Last April, AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile agreed to begin sharing a list of serial numbers linked to stolen phones. Once the policy goes into effect by the end of this year, a phone reported stolen will no longer work on any major U.S. wireless network.

Gascon, however, said the stolen phone database “looks good but is nothing more than smoke and mirrors."

A similar stolen phone blacklist launched in the United Kingdom a decade ago has not stopped phone thefts. Instead, it drove the black market overseas, because foreign wireless carriers don’t participate in the database.

Even if an iPhone is blacklisted, it can still connect to Wi-Fi hotspots to download games and music, browse the Web, make Skype calls and send text messages using WhatsApp, a popular Internet-based texting application.

“I’m very disturbed by the fact that the mobile communication industry, both at the carrier level and the manufacturer level, is so slow to respond to a problem that has been emerging for easily the last four or five years,” Gascon said.

“There are not a lot of times when we can create technological solutions to a problem,” he added. “This is one we can.”

View the original article here

7 Reasons You Should NOT Start a Podcast

Podcasting is not for everyone. Despite the many experts, gurus, rockstars and ninjas within the content marketing space moving their voice to the podcast format, podcasting will NOT work for everyone.

I don’t want you to waste time creating iTunes podcasts if they’re not going to work…

…because it does take hard work to create podcasts.  Launching a successful podcast isn’t as easy to purchasing a domain name and hitting the one-click install button for WordPress. {Ms. Ileane shares the basics of “How to Make a Podcast” here}

Creating a successful blog doesn’t guarantee success in the podcast format either.

Podcasting is long-format content marketing, which means the audience expects you to dive deeper into your area of expertise.

Ms. Ileane does this well with her Ms. Ileane Speaks Podcast.

My own Content Warfare Podcast {view podcast episode index} addresses How to Win the Battle for Attention Online.

Both shows run 15, 30, even 45 minutes in length depending on the topic being addressed.

Here’s the deal, podcasting is not for everyone, so I outlined seven reasons you should NOT start podcasting. This serves as a guide to excuse yourself from moving into the podcast format of content marketing.

Podcasting allows you to dig deep into a topic. It also allows you to use words apply inflexion to certain words that delivers your message with a cadence that a text-based blog post is not able to do. Podcasting puts you on display as an expert. There is something about delivering your message in audio that adds a level of authority to what you’re saying.

See anybody can copy and paste thoughts from another blogger. But it takes a true authority, a true expert in an industry to deliver a podcast and talk for 30 minutes on a topic.

The psychology behind your audience applying authority to you from hearing you talk about a topic is incredible powerful.

Think about the amount time that the average person spends on your website. Go to your Google Analytics reports and look at the time spent on your website right now. It most likely is somewhere between 45 seconds and two minutes.

Contrast this with the fact that with the Content Warfare Podcast where the average show length is 30 minutes,  the average listener stays on the line for 24 minutes. In which form of content marketing do you think I am building a deeper relationship with my audience? The three minutes that my audience spends reading one of my blog posts or the 24 minutes that they spend listening to my podcast.

There are many people who are not interested in reading text-based blog posts. This is the built in podcast audience. These are people who want to consume the content you in audio and podcasts. Services like Stitcher, Blackberry, iTunes and Zune provide you with a way to reach a group of people who could become potential clients that you would never be able to reach with a text-based blog post.

Podcasting allows you to expand your audience and reach a whole new market of consumers.

As discussed above, people who come and listen to your podcast see you as an authority, consume your content for a long period of time and become deeply invested in you as a content creator.  This provides the ideal opportunity to create leads and sales. Podcast listeners interested in your product or service become very qualified leads as they’ll have listened to you for a long time and made up their mind to buy.

This is very different from the text-based funnels and squeeze pages used to capitalize on a consumers compulsion to buy.  Add in the fact that services such as iTunes and Stitcher and Zune and Blackberry have a built in audience that you’re not currently reaching and you have now increased the pool people who could potentially buy from you.

Whether you’re Shakespeare or John Grisham or just the average blogger there’s a decent chance that the people who read your text-based posts on a daily, weekly or monthly basis would be interested in consuming your content in a different form or fashion. Podcasting allows you to add variety to your content marketing strategy and subsequently a deeper relationship with your audience. Once people begin listening to the sound of your voice they will remember hearing the words in the way that you speak.

Depending on who’s figures you read there are somewhere in the vicinity of 156 million blogs between WordPress and Tumblr.

This number does not include all the blogs from other platforms like Blogger, Joomla, Drupal and HTML blogs.

There are only a couple hundred thousand podcasts.

So if you’re trying to stand out from the crowd… if you’re trying to have your voice heard above all the other voices online do you think you have a better chance of doing that with a simple text-based blog post or on a podcast where you only have a couple hundred thousand competitors?

One of my personal favorite features of the podcast format is interviewing other experts in the marketing industry.  You can certainly interview people using text-based posts as well, but it’s harder to get a feel for the guest with simple text.  The audience also doesn’t get that personal feel of back and forth between interviewer and guest.

Plus, the relationship building aspect of having another professional come on your podcast and deliver their own value to your audience. You’re giving them an opportunity to increase the size of their own audience and in the long game that pays dividends.  I’ve had the opportunity to interview the likes of Mark Schaefer, Danny Brown and Marcus Sheridan just to name drop a few (and hopefully Ms. Ileane soon).

When I started the Content Warfare Podcast as format to explore how to win the battle for attention online, I honestly had no idea what to expect from the experience. I saw some of the elite content marketers joining the podcast bandwagon, names such as Pat Flynn, Michael Stelzner and even Ms Ileane and I saw power in the breadth and depth of information that they were able to deliver to a podcast. After eight months of podcasting, producing over 20 episodes, I can honestly say that creating the Content Warfare Podcast has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made for my business.

The only real reason you have for not moving forward with a podcast is if you don’t believe you have the fortitude to stick with it for the long term.

But I know you do. I highly encourage you to look into Ms. Ileane and her podcast as she is a content marketer at the top of her game. If you’d like to learn more about my podcast, you can do so here.

Thank you and good luck,

Ryan Hanley

Tagged as: content marketing, Podcastting

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which should i start( php OR asp.net)?

.NET is more object-oriented than PHP (so, in programming paradigm .NET is better), but if you are going to spread your web-application on your own web-farms you have to buy licenses for all machines with Windows Server. Nevertheless, with clouds coming up, these problem partially will be solved.

I agree.

PHP was more popular because every webhoster supported php (IMO the main reason is/was => it's free)

c# is OOP
php CAN but isn't required to be OOP, so it's IMO easier to learn it.

I learned c#, visual basic in the school and in my job, but i prefered php because forums became my hobby and i had to learn it.

Now i'm sticking with php because i'm much more familiar with it.
Sometimes i miss the good old days, because the .net framework has provide many great things (e.g. classes) which aren't available in php. You need to code it yourself or choose one of the many available frameworks.

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help with my wp theme (should be a simple fix)

Advertise virtually anything here, with CPM banner ads, CPM email ads and CPC contextual links. You can target relevant areas of the site and show ads based on geographical location of the user if you wish.

Starts at just $1 per CPM or $0.10 per CPC.

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Mitchell Weiss: What Government Should Relearn From Business -- (And It's Not Efficiency)

Chief of Staff, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino

When, eventually, sequestration has passed and Washington and its watchers have moved on to the next big debate, alongside all the recriminations there will be this: the familiar calls for government to demonstrate more of the effectiveness that we see in the most successful private sector companies.

The clamor won't be altogether misguided. After all, the best-run companies might have a thing or two to teach this D.C. drama's main players about leadership, negotiation, and protecting our (national) brand.

Of course, government has long looked to business for new ways of managing. Benchmarking was a key feature of President Clinton's effort at Reinventing Government. Public variants of outsourcing were pushed as part of George W. Bush's President's Management Agenda, and President Obama appointed the country's first Chief Performance Officer.

So it's a fair bet that when the sequester's dust has settled, government may once again turn to (or have thrust on them) the latest business bestsellers as "how-to" guides for avoiding the next crisis. Though positive results cannot be guaranteed, it is good when private sector ingenuity is offered up -- amidst other solutions -- for consideration by the public sector. American business remains the country's most vibrant source of innovation.

Problem is, where government is now most likely to look -- and where the private sector seems most poised to push -- is in the wrong place. Government has traditionally looked to business for tools and techniques to help improve productivity and cut costs through greater efficiency. Lean Six Sigma, which even made its way into a candidate pledge in the last presidential campaign, is one in a series of such business-to-government waves. Big data is rolling in after it. But these are the wrong tools for the job that now needs doing. What government needs most right now -- what it will need especially after the sequestration debacle -- are tools that build trust.

Pew's January 2013 poll drives this point home -- their survey found that a mere 26 percent of Americans trust the government in Washington to do the right thing just about always or most of the time. Post-sequestration, the only thing harder to envision than trust numbers climbing rapidly is that government officials can lead without it.

The failed deficit dialogue over the last year has shown us that staggering budget deficits at the federal level and huge unfunded pension and health liabilities in states and cities can't be bridged by squeezing the next nickel (or even 10 trillion of them) out of government operations. Addressing these challenges will require reasonable dialogue, debate, and, ultimately, decision-making about the scope of what we want as a country and how we want to pay for it. Business strategies focused on process and efficiency won't help the country manage that.

There is, however, a new wave of business techniques more suited to the job. In Boston, Mayor Thomas Menino has embraced these lessons with an engagement-driven strategy dubbed New Urban Mechanics. Companies that have learned how to foster community, cultivate trust and engender participation -- they hold the real lessons government needs now.

There is, of course, a certain irony here. After all, community, trust, and participation are (or were) the tools of the trade of government in the first place. Cities and towns -- with their squares, community groups, and network of relationships -- knew the value of "social" centuries before Facebook figured it out. It turns out that what the public sector can learn from the private sector, the private sector actually learned from the public sector.

Government would do well to look at businesses that are innovating best and fastest in the area of engagement. And as they do, business managers should take note. Millions are being invested by Cisco, IBM, Phillips, and other global companies to help cities and countries operate efficiently. Some of these efforts look too tech- and operations-laden to solve the biggest challenges. The next wave of successful public-private partnerships won't be top down, process-driven and systems-heavy. Businesses that learn to help government cultivate and harness its own strength -- in community -- will serve our democracy best and succeed for their own stakeholders.

This article originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review.

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Why You Should Make Your Blog a Business Blog Today!

Hey, it’s Ivin here, talking about my business blog, and I’ve been ‘absent’  for a while. This post is not going to talk about how I’m back and how I rock, because that’ll be kind of vain, won’t it?

I am actually here to tell you what I’ve been struggling with a bit lately in my internet business blog.

Competition is so fierce and even though people know me for having hustling (hard work) as my creed, I realized lately that I’ve been working hard, but more like a chicken running around with his head cut off.

Aimless and directionless.

I have recently started making my business a blog business. Sure, I have a couple corporate clients I build and manage a digital platform for. Sure, I own my own media company where we are ‘testing’ a lot of things right now. But what I’m really passionate about is this, typing this post and providing value to other bloggers’ experiences online by sharing my struggles  failures experiences. Building a business blog.

What I started doing lately, is saying,

Sure, I have a couple big contracts that pay the bills and cover the bottom line, but when I look at it, I’m still working for someone else, I’m not really free.

I would love to write a post and make money, send an email to my ‘herd’  and pay for a new computer, build a pool etc.  These are things that most of us dream of being able to do, but we’re not really doing it. Be honest. Look at some of the income reports of the biggest names among us. And it’s not so flattering. They’ll tell you so themselves. The Pareto Principle will always be in place and I strive to be in the 20% margin.

So, I told myself this year that I’m blessed to have a couple big contracts, but I’m unhappy, I’m unsatisfied… Because I want to blog for a living, for myself. I don’t want to blog on behalf of a company or a celeb, because that’s not my voice. I told myself that I am going to make my blog my main business. My personal blog and my publishing blog. Here are the steps I’m going to take and this is how you, can start to focus on your business blog too:

Set an income goal – Look at your current income (from whatever, your other income streams, your J-O-B) and add to that 15%. Then make it your goal to make that each month. The goal here is to substitute your other income with blog income, freeing yourself to do what you love.Stop working for pennies – I have never written a blog article for 1$ or even $5. I didn’t bid on an article unless it’s $10 – $50. You have to look at yourself as being worth that. And if you’re not getting work at that rate, get better as a writer and a blogger. Find a platform that pays well, great commissions – or find a product that pays well. I once sent an email to close to 200 email subscribers. I got paid for every lead and commission for sales. From that one email (and a blog post) I made a cool $300. Not bad right? I put the product I’m promoting on my publishing blog and my entire funnel is shifting that way.  If you don’t find a golden product like I did, make your own product, even if it’s $27 and build your funnel that way.Work hard for traffic – Study the gurus like Ana Hoffman, John Chow and Zac Johnson. Not how they make money, but how do they get traffic.If you know how to get traffic you are 80% there. After that you need to learn to target better, capture leads, rule social media and split test. I am focusing ONLY on traffic right now for my business blog, but my experience with building eCommerce sites and products helped me set up all that first before I started working furiously on traffic.Target your efforts – I realized lately that it’s futile to go for the Basic Blog Tips audience, or the Traffic Generation Cafe audience. These are two of the best business blogs and they already have a guru, someone they trust. So instead, I am focusing on building a system to help South Africans start their own home businesses. There’s lots of unemployment and poverty here and it would be awesome to help people alleviate that. So, my goal is to become the guru or go-to guy in South Africa for this. Why? I can speak their language and you can’t. You can’t play in my sandpit, because I know them, and they can become my herd.  So, instead of dunking your bucket into the Pacific ocean, hoping to catch some fish, rather put your bucket in a bath, and your bound to catch a few. You getting this?

I my case my personal blog has become my home. Nobody can take that way from me. I blog there and I’m very particular about what I write there, the quality of the comments and who guest posts there. Because, for me, it’s not only if you are the right fit, but is your content the right fit.

My blog(s) has become my brand. My publishing blog, Authopublisher, not only paved the way for internet marketers to make money from publishing, but also broke the way bloggers label themselves as experts and sold them the dream and possibility of becoming a published author. It also sold them on making publishing part of their income model. It was one of the few blogs that pioneered this movement. It got great metrics and became a multi-author blog 10 months into its existence and won an award after one year of it’s existence. That’s a brand to be proud of.

My personal blog is also a brand, a personal brand. Kinda like JohnChow.com is his personal brand synonymous with blogging and the DotCom lifestyle, like Amy Porterfield is synonymous with Facebook. Mine, I strive to, will be about starting a home businesses. So what do I do? I blog about it and publish books about it, establishing myself as an expert.

The blog is the home base. It’s your brand and base of operations. So, let’s say you don’t get invited to BlogWorldExpo to do a presentation, or to the Affiliate Summit to talk about the latest trends, or to ePub LA to talk about self publishing. So what? Have your own events.

In 2006 I attended a Blog MOB (Meeting of Bloggers) and because of my success with my blog back then, I was someone, important (to them). Why? Because it was local. I was someone because I was approachable, could be touched and who people could shake hands with.  Because of that blog platform and what I managed to do there, I just signed 2 new writers to my publishing blog, because local is better.

So, go out and build your brand locally by doing seminars with local businesses, show them what’s possible and sell them services, set up costs etc. But stay true to your goal – to blog full time and focus on that alone. Have events locally teaching people your blogging skills. You may not look like a guru to the followers of Seth Godin, because they have their mentor. But, I bet if you start doing the rounds locally, you’ll be surprised at how in awe people are at what you can do and teach them.

I actually just finished research of schools I plan to canvas for leads. Not even in my entire province, just my town and the adjacent one. We’re looking at close to 500 schools I am planning to do free blogging courses at and my target is making $2/3000 just from the hosting they will need to get to set it up. I can spend three hours each week for four weeks and it’ll still be worth my time. And the cool thing is, you can’t do it where I am, you’re not from here. I carve out a niche where I CAN be successful and eliminate my competition through locality.

So, I want to take a quick moment just to sum up some thoughts into actionable bullet points.

If you are doing work for someone else, you are not working for yourself. Even though freelancing is a great way to start a small business blog, you will always be answerable to someone else. Get to where you free yourself so that if you fail, it’s your fault and no-one’s going to razz you about it. You just write your next post on your business blog and do whatever you sucked at better.Carve your own space for you in the (local) world. I am not reserved in mentioning awards I’ve won and accolades I may have achieved, because they separate me from the pack. Any professional and guru would do the same, because it makes them stand out and gives them credibility.  Claim your territory and own (work) it.Think outside the box. Why do you need to do sponsored posts (which pays you peanuts)? Why do you have to do affiliate marketing (and get low commissions)? Be creative in how you’re going to earn from your blog (I am also planning to cover local events by blogging live from the premises).

Let me share with you my simple plan to make lots of money with my business blog and be successful.

Target a local need.Write a couple posts reporting on my observations and how it could be solved.Place the posts I wrote on the topic into an eBook and make a report available with which I capture leads.Get social with my leads by sending them autoresponder messages, but also being available for them (at no cost) through a support desk, Facebook, Skype groups etc .Build a product through compiling information in blog posts and making videos of them.Build a proper funnel with one time offers, upsells and downsell for a low priced, high value item. Once people bought from me once, they’re very likely to buy again and I can look at building a bigger, better product down the line.

Did I inspire you? Did I make you angry with my arrogance? Good. Go and do something about it and hustle to make your dreams happen, because I’m tired of reading about how ‘other’ people make money from their business blog. Share any thoughts you may have about your business blog, I’d love to hear them.

Tagged as: blogging for money, Business Blog, home business, Make Money Blogging

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Collin Brewer, British Councillor, Condemned For Saying Disabled Children Should Be 'Put Down'

A local politician in Britain has found himself at the center of an angry controversy in his district, after inflammatory comments he made about disabled children were widely circulated.

In 2011, Cornwall Council member Collin Brewer told a member of the charity Disability Cornwall that, "Disabled children cost the council too much money and should be put down," reports This Is Cornwall. The Disability Cornwall member was taking part in "an event to allow councillors to meet equalities organisations," according to the site.

At the time, the organization made a formal complaint against the Councillor's "depraved comment," a move that led to an investigation by the council's Standards Committee, according to This Is Cornwall.

The BBC reports that Brewer was forced to apologize when the investigation concluded recently. Brewer told the BBC that, while he had meant the comment to spark debate about budget issues, he didn't mean his words to come out the way they did.

"Sometimes people can catch you on the wrong day," Brewer said, per the BBC. "It's not a good enough excuse and I will forever be apologising for what I said."

Brewer was also removed from his political group once the investigation concluded, according to This Is Cornwall. Group leader John Wood told the site he called Brewer as soon as the findings were released. Wood went on to say that he personally felt the embattled Councillor should resign from his council position.

"I was absolutely stunned at the time and I am still amazed that he said this," Wood said. "He should stand down and then if he chooses to stand for election again in May it will be up to the people to decide whether he should have a place at the council."

Brewer told BBC Radio Cornwall in an interview this week that he was not aware anyone was asking for his resignation, and that he had no intention of resigning. "I don't think I have done anything wrong," Brewer insisted.

Calls for Brewer's resignation seem to have intensified between Tuesday and Wednesday.

A Facebook group called "Cornwall Councillor Collin Brewer should resign" has more than 2,000 likes.

Speaking to Huffington Post UK, Disability Cornwall's advice services manager Theresa Court said the politician's apology seemed insincere. She also called Brewer's controversial comment "hate speech."

It is "an insult that he had to be told to apologise after a year and a half," Court said. "Anybody who says such things is in no position to hold public office. He was on council duty at the time. We want to raise awareness that this councillor is making funding decisions in this county about disabled people."

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Chitika made me 12 $+ in 8 months... Should I laugh? Should I cry?

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, since Chitika generated me income of 12 $+ in 8 months time.
This is an ad that I inserted!
We ran campaigns on travel sites, well established ones and have only managed to squeeze this amount out of them.

I think ads are not targeted well enough, their relevancy could be better and also the fact that most countries aren't supported, so blank space appears when someone from an "unsupported" location kicks in.

Any ideas, suggestions,... compassion?

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Office 2013 or Office 365 – Which Edition Should You Buy?

Learn about the main differences between Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 2013 plus some advice on buying the right edition of Microsoft Office for your needs.

Microsoft has introduced a new version of their trusted Office productivity suite and home consumers essentially have to make a choice between Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365. Compare Microsoft Office 2013 with Office 365

Before we delve deeper into the topic, please note that the new Microsoft Office editions are only available for Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X machines. Also, there isn’t an upgrade path available so even if your computer is running Microsoft Office 2010, you’ll still have to buy the full license.

Microsoft Office 2013, like the previous versions, is a bundle of core Office programs including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. A single license would allow you to install the Office suite on just one Windows PC.

Microsoft Office 365 is a suite of the same Office programs but here you have an option to install Office on up to five different Windows PCs or Macs. There are not product keys to enter as everything is tied to your Microsoft account. You also get 20 GB of extra storage space on SkyDrive with Office 365.

Another advantage with Office 365 is that you can stream the full version of Microsoft Office on any Windows PC on demand.

This is useful in situations when you are working on someone else’s computer that doesn’t have a copy of Microsoft Office – go to office.com, sign-in with your Microsoft account and within minutes you’ll get the full version of Office on that computer. The Office software is “streamed” and isn’t permanently installed on that computer (just like web apps).

With Office 365, you can temporarily install Office on any Windows PC

The Microsoft Office 2013 license is valid forever and you can use it for the life of your PC. However, in the case of Office 365, you don’t get a perpetual license but are required to pay an annual subscription (it’s like renting the Office suite).

The Office 365 Home Premium edition is $99.99 (12-month subscription) while the Microsoft Office 2013 Home & Student Edition is $139.99 (single PC).

Thus, deciding between the two Office editions should be easy. If you have multiple computers at home or need access to the entire suite of Office products (including Outlook, Publisher and Access), go with Office 365 else the Office 2013 Home edition could prove to be a more economic option in the longer run.

Also see: Where to Download Microsoft Office 2013

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Should Bloggers Pay Service Tax on AdSense Income in India?

We ask the tax experts if bloggers in India should pay service tax on income through online advertising (like Google AdSense) and affiliate sales?

Service Tax is a form of tax which is levied on any service and is to be paid by the “provider” of the service to the Central Govt. at the rates in force. The provider of the service can in turn collect the tax form the recipient of his service.

Starting July 1, 2012, India has shifted to the Negative List System which states that Service Tax would be levied on all services except the ones mentioned in the Negative List. Earlier, all services were exempt from Service Tax except those mentioned in the act.

The sale of advertising space or time slots is included under (G) Section 66D of Finance Act, 2012.

The educational guide on Service Tax, released by the Indian Ministry of Finance on June 20, 2012, mentions (page 35) that Service Tax is to be levied on the sale of space or time for advertisement to be broadcasted on radio or television. However, the notification also states that service tax is not to be levied on sale of space in print media, bill boards, buildings, cell phones, ATM Machines & Internet.

As the new service tax regime has specifically stated that Service Tax is not chargeable on the sale of space for advertisements on the Internet, website owners and bloggers are exempted from paying Service Tax in India.

In case you have already paid Service Tax on online income from Google AdSense and other direct ad Sales, you can always claim refund of Service Tax.

The service tax is only exempted for advertising income but if you who are earning revenue though affiliate commissions (like Amazon Associates) or by providing other related services on the Internet, service Tax would be levied on all such services.

Moreover, service tax is levied on the Gross Amount Received rather than on the Net Income (i.e. Gross Amount – Expenses).

You can however claim Small Scale Service Provider exemption if the gross value of such services is less than Rs. 10 Lakhs. In other words, you are not required to pay any tax if the gross value of services provided by you is less than Rs. 10 Lakhs.

Also see: Calculate your Income Tax Liability on Online Income

Karan Batra is a visiting faculty member at Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and blogs at charteredclub.com.

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How Long Should A Cough Last? Longer Than You Might Think

By Erin Hicks

Once you develop a cough, how many days should you expect to have it? Researchers at the University of Georgia in Athens found that our expectations for how long a cough should last don't quite match up with reality, and that this gap may account for why so many people go to their doctors and ask for antibiotics when they have a cough.

The researchers looked at data in 19 studies that included 23 to 1,230 subjects each to find out how long an acute cough lasted in patients with acute bronchitis -- a condition people often refer to as a chest cold (as opposed to a head cold in which the symptoms are mostly nasal). They found the average duration of a cough among the people in the studies was 17.8 days.

Then they surveyed almost 500 adults to find out if their expectations for how long a cough should last matched up with clinical data.

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In the survey, they asked about 500 Georgia residents 18 years-old and older, "[S]uppose that you get sick and the main symptom is a cough. You are coughing up yellow mucus and have a slight fever. You are not taking any medicine for the cough. About how long do you expect that it will take from the time you first feel sick until the time where you feel well and the cough is gone?"

Study author Mark Ebell, MD, Associate Professor at the College of Public Health at the university, says that those polled generally thought a cough should last an average of seven to nine days.

Men and nonwhite respondents predicted a shorter cough duration, while those with self-reported asthma or chronic lung disease predicted a longer cough duration.

"I knew that bronchitis will often last a couple of weeks, but I wanted to see if this was my impression or if it is real," says Dr. Ebell. "[Now] we have pretty good evidence the mismatch [between patient expectations and clinical data] is real, so we need to do more to educate patients about what they can expect when they get a chest cold."

He says he often sees patients in his practice who, if they don't get better from bronchitis after four or five days, think they need antibiotics.

"As soon as people see a doctor" for a cough or cold, he says, "60 percent or more will get an antibiotic for it, while only a small percentage would need an antibiotic or benefit from it."

The Downsides of Antibiotics

Of course, some people with a chest cold or cough should seek treatment from a doctor: those who are chronically ill, elderly, or very young, or patients who are short of breath or cough up blood. But most people don't fit in those categories and could ride out the sickness and let the cough run its course -- without taking antibiotics, says Ebell.

There are many downsides to taking antibiotics. One of the main reasons physicians worry about over-prescription of antibiotics is that they are concerned bacteria will become resistant to the medicines available, which could be dangerous for those who develop pneumonia or another serious infection and desperately need antibiotics to work.

Another reason is nasty side effects. About 10 to 20 percent of those that take antibiotics experience diarrhea, nausea, or vomiting, and in some cases people develop severe diarrhea that can be life-threatening and lead to hospitalization, Ebell says.

There's also the cost of antibiotics. Going to the doctor and paying for antibiotics is a lot more costly and time-consuming than simply going to the nearest drug store for an over-the-counter cough medicine, Ebell says: "We spend so much more than any other country in the world on healthcare because we're spending money on things that don't make us healthier, and this is a good example of that."

The study was published in the January/February issue of the Annals of Family Medicine.

While many coughs can be treated with an over-the-counter cold medication and Mom's advice to rest up and drink lots of fluids, sometimes a cough is a sign of something more serious than a cold. Make sure you see a doctor if your cough is accompanied by chest pain, wheezing, or shortness of breath, if you cough up blood or yellow or green mucus, if you have a fever of 101 or higher, if you've lost weight, or if you're soaking the sheets with night sweats.

A cough that lingers past eight weeks is considered a chronic cough and could be related to gastroesophageal reflux disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, allergies, smoking, and in rare cases, even lung cancer.

"How Long Should a Cough Last? Maybe Longer Than You Think" originally appeared on Everyday Health.

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7 Reasons Why Unemployed People Should Start Blogging

Are you unemployed and are looking for work?  If so, start blogging today! Read on to find out why… Blogging has exploded into the mainstream web over the recent years, with more and more people turning to blogging for a variety of reasons.

The beauty of blogging is that you don’t need a degree or a scholarship to start doing it, you don’t need a huge amount of money either, and more over being unemployed means you have all the time in the world to work on your blog, to some degree.

I certainly wished that I had made the decision to start blogging when I was unemployed for a solid 4 years, back almost 20 years ago, but to be honest the internet had only just started coming to life…

Today, blogging is no longer considered as a pastime online activity, in fact these days blogging is considered to have huge potential in becoming an extremely profitable business venture for many people, and for you too if you know how to do it right, and are prepared to work at it.

Many university and college students that I know have decided to start blogging to help them make some extra money, and even at the end of their studies some are able to sell their blogs for a considerable amount.

So I also think that people that are unemployed and are receiving some kind of allowance for being jobless should also take the opportunity to start a blog.

Blogging whilst being unemployed is a great way to expand your horizons and connect with a whole new community of like minded people online.  In this article I’d like to outline 7 good reasons why blogging could benefit you whilst you’re looking for work.  Who knows it might even become your full-time work…

1. If you have a blog, you’re able to create a compelling ‘about me’ page, as most bloggers use this page to provide their visitors with an insight into their professional background.  Your ‘about me’ page will usually outline your experiences, qualifications, skills, ambitions and goals.

You can use your about page as your online resume.  You can even link this page to your professional social network profiles such as your LinkedIn and eCademy profiles, should you have one of course.

2. Blogging can help you stay productive whilst building your online portfolio.

Being unemployed can sometimes be pretty boring, I mean you can only search for work for a few hours each day right? The rest of the time you’re playing the waiting game…  So blogging can certainly help you remain productive.

3. Blogging can help improve your writing and grammar skills, essential in any line of work, and perfect when writing your letter of application to potential employers.

4. Blogging can help you build new connections and engage with other professional individuals in your industry.

5. Blogging can help you make money through various monetization methods, i.e. AdSense, promoting affiliate products etc.

6. Blogging can help you keep your morals up when feeling distressed and anxious, ensuring that you stay positive and have something to work for, even if you’re not getting paid much initially.

7. You don’t need any qualifications, a scholarship or even much, if any money at all to start blogging.

Being unemployed and searching for work can be a stressful time, I know too well what the feeling is like.  You might feel as if that your family and friends look down upon you as if you’ve somehow let them down.

Blogging can be your ultimate road out of being unemployed, but even if it doesn’t  it will certainly help you build an awesome online portfolio that might land you that dream job.

So just to recap, here are 7 reasons why being unemployed is the perfect opportunity to start blogging.

Your ‘About’ page is your resumeBlogging will help you stay productiveBlogging will help you hone in on your writing skillsBlogging helps you to connect with other professionals in your industryBlogging can earn you moneyBlogging can help you stay positiveYou don’t need any qualifications or previous experience to start blogging

So if you’re unemployed, start blogging today and start reaping the benefits.

Over to you!

I’d love to hear your thoughts about the points I made above.  Perhaps you were once unemployed and turned to blogging to help you build credibility and to stay positive, perhaps blogging paved the way to a full-time career for you. Regardless, do share your reactions and comments below as always.

Tagged as: How To Blog, Unemployed people

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