Author: Stan Shinn

A great list of Essential Mac OS X applications

Lot's of interesting stats here:

The percentage of women using the Internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men, according to the study. Sixty-eight percent of men are Internet users, compared with 66 percent of women. Because they make up more of the population, the total number of women online is now slightly larger than the number of men.

Women under 30 and black women outpace their male peers. Sixty percent of black women are online, compared with 50 percent of black men.

However, older women trail dramatically behind older men, according to the study. Eighty-six percent of women ages 18-29 are online, compared with 80 percent of men that age. Thirty-four percent of men age 65 and older are online, compared with 21 percent of women that age.

Read more from Study: Men and Women Use Internet Differently

Want to take free courses?

The OpenCourseWare Finder organizes and lists open (read:free) university courses with materials that you can access online.

Currently the OpenCourseWare Finder is listing results from five universities like MIT and Tufts. The usefulness of the materials provided online varies from course to course, but it’s worth checking out if you’re interested in freely available university learnin’.

Read more at Lifehacker: Find free courses with OpenCourseWare Finder

Amazingly, some sites still tout 'hits' as the main metric on judging their site's marketing performance. In response, the industry is trying to standardize the terms and the specific metrics by which we measure web traffic:

Since the Internet bust, industry leaders have been trying to clean up the messy spots. One project finalized this past year, for example, pushed to create new standards for counting advertisements as they are delivered to a page. In that instance, the Web publishing industry reached consensus on counting ad "impressions" as when the visitor has the opportunity to see the ad on the page, or when the graphic is fully loaded on the page, as opposed to when the graphic is merely sent from an ad server. Some top sites are still changing their pages to meet the standard.

But what constitutes a unique visitor? Even this is something not universally agreed upon:

The project is to develop common methods for how to count the number of unique visitors to a site. Before that can be accomplished, he said, the task force must devise rules for what counts as a page view--can it be counted twice or only once for content partners?--and how digital tags known as "cookies" play into it.

I look forward to industry standards that will ease the work for those involved in web marketing.

Read full article at CNET News.com

Some tips on dynamically generating CSS from PHP. Note this first code trick by changing the content type:

< ?php
header('Content-type: text/css');
?>

Read full article: Variables in your CSS via PHP

For bloggers wanting better page rank, a helpful article:

In it, he talks about Google's problems with splogs on Blogger.com, and their efforts to solve the issue, aswell as giving advice to bloggers on ranking in Google and how bloggers can use Google to find and organize information.

Read full article: Exclusive: Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank

A handy tip:

Google may be all-knowing, but when you search for the word “java,” even Google doesn’t know if you’re talking about programming or coffee.

Narrow the context of your Google search by subtracting words from your results using the minus sign, like this:

salsa -dance
virus -computer
java -coffee

From: Google School: Subtract words from your search - Lifehacker

IT is on the rebound, accorindg to Forrester:

"Any suggestion that information technology is yesterday's news, doesn't matter, or has lost its edge as an economic driver is just plain wrong," Miller said. "In fact, major trends indicate the opposite is true."

Later Forrester says:

The tech industry has "clearly recovered" from the
recession of 2001-02, Colony said.

Read the full article at PCWorld.com

A nice analysis of the power of a blog:

Funny topic of conversation huh? Particularly bearing in mind the participants area of expertise. It's true though, and it's something I've said here a couple of times in the past: For the most part, bloggers just shouldn't be worrying about SEO.

Why Bloggers Don't Need SEO

Need to wed an eCommerce solution with a Content Management package? Here's one way how: Embedding WordPress into OS Commerce