I am a huge fan of http://Aweber.com because of wonderful people there like Crystal Gouldey, whom has been so very helpful in segmenting my rather large list. Tom, you make sure Crystal gets a little something extra this month!

Ty guys

Just a note to address the video issues going on with this site right now.

Up until today I was paying for a premium video account over at Blip.tv. They have informed me that they have elected to cancel my membership because ”selling through videos is against their policy”.

Strangely enough, as my readers know all too well, I, too am against any selling in my videos, and none of them contain any kind of sales whatsoever.

Further investigation reveals that they have recently cancelled a number of authority sites from the use of their system.

My guess is we were using too much bandwidth, or perhaps Bliv.tv marketing gurus decided that all the exposure we were providing them at no cost was just a bad thing. Maybe they need to get out of the city and get some fresh air, who knows :>)

Needless to say, I strongly advise against the use of Bliv.tv, or any of their services. My staff and I invested about 300 hours in converting and uploading videos to their system, not to mention endorsing them on a massive scale, as well as paying the monthly fees.

So, at this time, as I prepare for the conference next week in Orlando, we are also trying to locate a respectable and professional video service provider to restore the videos on this site and a few others.

As Blip.tv has evidenced that our loyalties to them were ill-placed, I am open to suggestions from eaders on other video service providers capable of multiple format conversions and RSS feeds of video data to iTunes for syndication.

From everything there is something to learn, and in this case I would have to say that we will run a longer trial before committing time and money to future third party service providers.

In the mean time, if you don’t mind putting a note on all of your blogs and sites telling users to avoid using Blip.tv services, I think you will be doing your readers a real service, and they will respect your attempt to protect them

Thank you for your patience as we get this sorted out.

from such unscrupulous service providers.

Cheers!

Ron Davies

I suspect that when Google came up with Google Alerts they knew they had a cool tool that people could use to keep track of subjects they were following and wanted the latest news on those subjects coming to them in their email inbox.

People have used Google Alerts for following things like Nascar, the musician Pink, Soccer, their favorite WWE wrestler, you name it.

But, many people have found other clever uses for it as well, as it is a very powerful tool whe it comes to staying on top of who is saying what about whom and where it was said.

Recently, one of my members shared they way they use Google Alerts with me for this very purpose, and I found it worked so well that I would now like to pass it on to you.

Google Alerts searches the Google archives for any given search term, and if it finds it, sends an email to you with the link to where it found the search term, and a summary of the text where it was found. This is very handy for someone that is either particularly vain, or someone that has a vested interest in what is said about them, or even about their product.

Doing this kind of search manually would be agonizing, as you would always get the same results, and they would not be based on the most current occurences of your keywords.

So, if you go to Google Alerts and

1. type your name  or your product name or even your Twitter username (which looks like @rondavies);
2. for “Type” select “Comprehensive”;
3. for “How Often” select “once a day”; and
4. enter your email address where asked.

You will receive any new occurences of that search term (your full name or product name) as they come into the Google archive system.

This means that if someone says something nice about you on blog XYZ.com, (or heaven forbid, not so nice), and Google spiders thier normal update for that blog and finds your name, you will be notified by email within the day.

Then you can either thank them, or spank them I suppose, depending on the nature of the comment or post where your name or product name were found #;>)

Another very cool, very easy to use tool from my little toolbox.

Have a great day!

iPhone continues to dazzle as Blackberry’s “abacus” leaves much to be desired for the habitual or professional WordPress blogger.

Do you have a WordPress blog that you would like to keep updated while on the train, riding as a passenger in a car, or just sitting on Starbucks warming up with a cafe latte?

If you use iPhone, you are indeed in luck. iPhone continues to reward those that avoided or left the “crackberry” for the real McCoy, at least as far as power, flexibility, ease of use and breadth of applications and speed are concerned

Just click the iTunes icon on your iPhone, hit “Search” and type “WordPress” and you will immediately be rewarded by a whole selection of instantly installable iPhone Apps made just for managing your WordPress blogs.

The onebi am authoring this post on is free, and I look after 6 blogs with it, all without cracking my notebook open.

If you love to “work it” as far as your WordPress blog is concerned, this is the way to go!

You need only go install the (probably free) iPhone App, and log in to your blog ad an Admin, and under “Settings” go to “Writing” and enable the check box for “xmlrpc”.

That’s all there is to it! You are blogging anywhere, any time.

To do this on Blackberry, simply return it to your local cell phone shop, and get an iPhone.

It will be the best thing you do for youself this year!

Cheers!

Here is another great video on the topic of Web 2.0 done by the clever people at CommonCraft.

This video does a very good job of explaining why social networking sites are so popular. We think one reason is because they help to solve a real world problem.

Cheers,