Monday, May 10, 2004

Computer Virus Update

As you know our email boxes are inundated daily with emails that could be infected with a virus. We all rely on Norton and other virus detection programs to eliminate and manage the viruses on our computers. There are times however that we need to be our own virus detection software and decide what emails could be potentially harmful to our computers. If we open the wrong e-mail, a virus can worm its way through our computer and ruin all of the data we have stored. We have to remember that the goal of the hacker is to create a virus that will get around virus detection programs, and around you. When you are going through your inbox, be cautious about what you open and hope that the authors of these harmful programs will be arrested like the authors of the Agobot and Phatbot worms.

Recently, there were arrests made for the creator of the Agobot and Phatbot Trojan horse worms. The creator of the Agobot and Phatbot worms was arrested in a southern German town of Waldshut. He was a 21-year old self-taught hacker. Five other men were also charged in connection to the Trojan horse programs. We may not see the arrests end here. According to an article on www.infoworld.com, "The computer code for Agobot circulates widely on the Internet, and may have been modified by countless individuals with access to it..."

Click here to read the entire article about Agobot and Phatbot worms arrests.

posted by Gina at 5:30 PM

Thursday, May 06, 2004

What to consider when budgeting
for e-marketing?

More and more companies are adding e-marketing to their marketing plan. But for many marketers, this is new territory, and they need some guidance. Those new to the e marketing world want to know, "What e marketing services are out there? What is working for other companies?"

Recently, Marketingsherpa.com conducted a detailed survey of what is working for IT marketers, and I think it gives every marketer food for thought.

According to the survey, the number one marketing spend that got IT marketers results was website improvements. When the marketers decided to spend money on e-marketing, they allotted for changes in their website that helped convert qualified leads to qualified prospects, and ultimately to a sale. The IT marketers polled in the Marketingsherpa.com survey added various incentives to attract and retain customers:

35.8% Free trial demos
29.7% Webinar offer
24.2% White paper offer
23.5% Road show/in-person seminar offer
19.4% Discount offer

IT marketers will also continue to spend their budgets on online advertising. According to the poll It marketers, "...were getting an average 3.6% click rate from paid search and 1.2% click rate from other online ads. "

Lastly, but certainly not least, IT marketers allotted a budget for email marketing to an in-house list. This was the second most budgeted tactic.

Read more about what marketing tactics worked for IT marketers at Marketingsherpa.com.


posted by Gina at 2:09 PM

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Google Indexes Flash

Google has indexed Flash files for several months, despite the persistent “don’t use Flash” mentality of search engine optimizers. Indeed, Flash might be a poor idea for numerous reasons. But now it appears that Google’s spider is able to see into Flash code more effectively than before, and rank Flash elements in the index rather than merely refer to them.

Google has now managed to look inside of a Flash file at the actual text and content and then crawl/rank it accordingly. Google also has the ability to report backward links from some Flash files.

To see an example of how Google indexes Flash files, I did a search for "skip intro," which is common among most Flash files. To see the results of the search, click here.

You can see all of the Flash results have [Flash] next to the link. You can see by looking at several of the descriptions that Google has the power of reading some of the actual content of the Flash files. It's not perfect yet, but I'm sure as time goes on, Google will be better able to read the content of all Flash files, but until then you may still want to stay away from relying on Flash to get your site found in the rankings of the search engines.

To read more about this subject and keep updated on this, click here.

~Kristen

posted by Gina at 9:35 AM