Google Places (99 luft balloons) and Google Tags for small businesses.
Have you ever Googled a location and noticed all those cool little red balloons on the map with businesses attached to them? Well now, like a starry-eyed child at the google circus, you can have your own balloon – only this time, no clowns! If you have a small business, restaurant, cafe, bike shop, book shop, any shop, non profit etc.. head to http://www.google.com/places  and follow the instructions there.
While you’re at it, Google has a new offering called tags …

Middle of the Sea – Ambient Video – Stretched 800% from stacy bias on Vimeo.
This morning on Facebook a few folks had posted a hilarious link from Gawker.Com on how to make Justin Bieber actually sound good by slowing down one of his songs by 800%. Inspired by how lovely you can make something that’s utterly vapid by simply stretching it out to its essence, I researched some Macintosh sound-stretching software (here’s the PC version) and set to work stretching one of my own compositions.
To my surprise, it turned …

Before I dive into the list I want to cover some web analytic history, because I’m nerdy like that. In the neolithic era of the web (see: geocities) we had these nifty little hit counters. Remember those? They were rad! You could track people “hitting your site” which was pretty darn cool, and if you were bored on a tuesday afternoon you could inflate the numbers yourself by shotgunning a Jolt Cola and pounding the refresh button like a deranged monkey. Also they usually sparkled. But that’s beside the point.
From …

In simplest terms, bandwidth is the amount of data that can pass between your website and everyone on the Internet who wishes to see it.
Bandwidth is measured in bytes, kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes.  What creates that measurement is both the number of requests (the number of people who request to access your site) and the size (number of bytes) of the files they request.
Each website is made of digital files. Each character of text and its containing file, each image, video and mp3, has a …

Here in the Pacific Northwest where rain falls from the sky with a near-comic regularity, nothing outs you as a n00b faster than using an umbrella. That opening whoosh of nylon inspires a smug Pavlovian eye-roll response from most of us in the great wet North. Here, a ‘light sprinkle’ is shorts weather, soldier — and don’t you forget it!
In a place of such liquid plenty it’s hard to fathom how precious a resource water is, and yet, according to the FAO, by 2025, 1 800 million people will …

If you’re anything like me, the last time you actually cracked open a phonebook, “social networking” required leaving your home and the “Blogosphere” was just a twinkle in the eye of the Intarweb. Yet, with the irritating faithfulness reserved only for those things in life you really wished would go away, the Phone Book appears, year after year, plastic-sheathed and anxious to be useless. To illustrate my point, I reference the picture that accompanies this article. This photo is of one of FOUR bins at Chad’s condo today. …

When we say we’re always working, we kinda mean it. ;) Hosting emergencies wait for no sandwich!

If you’re like me and you get a little bit of macabre pleasure from things like picking at scabs or biting at hangnails, you are probably similarly amorous of those little cans of compressed air.  There’s something supremely satisfying about using them to clean your keyboards –waking sleeping dustbunnies with a surprise burst, sending bits of cracker and lint flying at incalculable speeds.  Good times, good times.
BUT, it’s not so much with the eco-friendly. Nor are many of the commercially-available computer cleaning supplies commonly available.  So how can you clean …

As a small business start-up, an activist, artist or non-profit, here is a phrase that should tickle your ears like the collective snuffling of ten thousand happy puppies: Open Source.

Why does Open Source make such a joyful noise? Because Open Source means FREE. And, not only does Open Source mean free, but it also means that any open source project has likely become part of a braintrust made up of multiple bright and open minds who contribute their talents jointly for a greater good (that good being the product they are making available for public use.)