We all love to travel, and until now, booking flights for the lowest price has often been a crapshoot. Sure, we can guess when we think a flight will be the cheapest, but we rarely have any hard evidence to support that guess.

Have you ever held off on booking a flight because you had a gut feeling that the price would be going down? Do you ever monitor airfare so closely that you feel that you can predict what day of the week it will be the lowest?

Well, with a new travel search engine named farecast, you can back up your inclinations with historical evidence!

Here is how they describe their patent-pending technology:

Fare History shows what the lowest fare was for your trip each day, up to 90 days ago. We monitor price changes multiple times a day and store more than 50 billion observations (and counting). We make a significant investment in data, hardware, and storage costs to provide you with real prices based on availability.

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I’m often surprised at how few people know about local sponsored search. Well, I guess I’m not *that* surprised, given the fact that local sponsored search is a relatively new topic in the world of search engine marketing.

What is local sponsored search?

Local sponsored search is an extension of Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing that gives advertisers the ability to show their ads only to a limited, geographically specific audience.

This is achieved by using the IP address of each person who searches on Google or Yahoo to determine their location. Your IP address contains some valuable, geographically-specific information that allows the search engines to pinpoint your location to your specific county, city, and even zip code. This is made possible because the majority of Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) provide geographic information relating to their IP addresses.

Before local sponsored search was made possible, many localized businesses were not able to show up in the sponsored results for Google and Yahoo. This is because if they were to advertise for keywords on Google and Yahoo, they would not be able to limit their audience; they would be paying to have their ad run nationally! That would be the equivalent to a local bank advertising on a nationally televised program. Not only would it be extremely expensive, it would also lead to a plethora of inconsistent leads! (more…)

Google appears to be positioning itself to take a bite out of Microsoft Office and I think they will eventually succeed in doing it. I would much rather have all my records stored online where I don’t have to worry about a hard drive crash and where I can get to them from any computer, any time, for ever. I just had a hard drive crash and believe me, I wish I would have had all my documents stored on the Internet somewhere.

Source: http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?t=64656

I don’t agree. In fact, I believe that the recently released Google products miss the mark entirely. Now I must qualify my opinion by saying that I am not basing my opinion on actual use of the office system. I have not used any of the “Google Office” features that have recently been released by Google (spreadsheet, calendar, Google Base, etc.), nor do I intend to. Perhaps my reasons are ignorant, and perhaps my reasoning is short sighted, but here is why I will never trust my important documents to an online program:

The Internet isn’t always stable

What do I do if my Internet connection goes out? How will I access my most important documents if I can’t get onto my computer? What if I am traveling on business and need important documents for a presentation? (more…)

We’ve all been in this situation before: We create websites with great, fresh content, and then never look at the site again. We work long hours trying to finish up the website, and secretly hope that we’ll never have to make another change to the site for at least a year or two!

I have been there. In fact, you could even say that I “am there”. You see, since starting Digital Mantis, I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with several wonderful clients. As a result I have been very busy working as hard as I can to ensure that each client is delivered exactly what I promise them (and hopefully even more!), and I leave myself very little time to concentrate on updating the Digital Mantis website.

Yes, I do appreciate the irony associated with being a web designer who has trouble maintaining their own website, yet I don’t think that my situation is very uncommon. The fact is, I have been involved with many projects where websites are created as static entities, and they offer little room for growth. And you know what? More often than not, this is an effective way to approach website building.

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Building your brand encompasses a range of activities that are focused on a common goal: creating strategic positioning for your company. Many elements go into brand development including your copy style, layouts and colors, and core messaging. But perhaps nothing is quite as compelling, or can have as significant an effect, as your logo. Once you’ve designed your logo, your work has just begun; you need to creatively use it to ensure maximum exposure to your target market.

Source: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/0,4621,327433,00.html

Ok, so this article is not necessarily about web marketing. In fact, it barely makes mention of the web. However, I found this article to be interesting, and I am taking away several key points from what I have read. More than anything, I am sharing this article with all of you so that you can enjoy this perspective on how to use your logo effectively and in memorable ways.

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