Hey! Back again with a New Year and this article caught my eye. Apparently with the XBox Live outage over the holidays, there is a class action suit being launched against Microsoft. That old “deep pockets” coming into play - remember the good old days when if your TV or phone service went out, you sat down with your parents/friends/family and read a book, waiting patiently for service to be restored?

Yeah, me neither. But it is interesting that these days the initial response to any situation is “Who can I sue?”

Google reached an agreement yesterday to acquire the online advertising company DoubleClick from two private equity firms. The acquisition will cost Google $3.1 billion in cash, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year. It looks like Google has found a use for all that cash they’re sitting on.

Read the full article from Reuters

The “Storm Trojan” is snowballing out of control… this worm tries to trick you into installing a patch “to clean your computer” and pretends to be from your service provider stating that you have sent out a large amount of email. Playing om your fears, it attaches a zip file (with randomly generated name and password) and urges you to install it immediately.

DON’T DO IT!

We never, EVER send out patches via email. This worm disables your virus protection, ads your computer to a botnet (a group of remotely controlled computers used for spamming, and other things) and then starts sending out more copies of the virus to everyone you know. So, never install anything that is randomly sent to you via email - and if you have ANY questions, call and ask your provider if you receive any sort of service notification!

A lot of people think that all you have to do is build a web site, and They Will Come (sort of like the field of dreams.) But they are wrong. Like any other advertising vehicle, you need a solid marketing plan in order to build your web sites traffic. Ideally, you will build a web site to attract search engines to your web site like moths to a flame.

But how to do that? One way is the old stand by of ‘trial and error’; build it, track results, then make changes until you achieve the desired results. Unfortunately it can take months to make progress, and it can also be difficult to decide why certain changes were successful - or how to replicate them! A better idea is to hire a specialty SEO consulting firm. With years of experience, a SEO consultant can help you to refine your web site, get quality backlinks from related pages for higher page rank, and select the keywords and phrases most likely to get you qualified results. In the long run, hiring a consultant is more cost effective than trying to go it alone.

Sometimes I think that everything old is new again. Or to put it another way - those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

A few years ago I worked as an IT person in a Large Company. And after I got nicely settled in,management wanted me to be 'more accessible.' Read "we want you on call 24/7 but we're only going to PAY you for the 9-5 bit." I kicked, screamed and ultimately caved; toting around my cell phone,which the few times it rang was generally one of my bosses calling 'to make sure I was available.'

Um, yeah. Whatever.

What's freaky scary is how damn quickly I bought into it though. When I left and started my own gig I shackled myself with chains made of pagers, cell phones, IM, email - always available, 24/7/365. God forbid I stepped out of my office, or ate lunch, or even slept - sometimes I had people calling me at 3am "with this great idea I couldn't wait to share with you about the website!"

Um, ok. Lemme go get some coffee.

Eventually I broke free. Turns out that returning a call the next day IS good enough, most of the time. And I get sleep, and regular meals - you know, the stuff normal people need to prosper and flourish. Which is why I'm so surprised that I actually almost picked up the shackles again, with Twitter.

Yup, I called them shackles. Could be a great affiliate marketing process, perhaps - updating an anonymous website about every little move you make every day! But I doubt it. Good grief, why does ANYONE need to know I just had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, but the bread was stale, and now I'm SO EMO about the restaurant that I will probably go out for lattes later?

But I see that many thousands of people think that this is a good thing. They twitter away and in the process find themselves increasingly attached to those gadgets - their IM, their cellphone (yes, you can Twitter on them!) until you see entries like "Its 3am and I'm really tired. But I wanted to post one more entry."

How pointless - but it will probably usurp Digg as the next Big Thing ™ - until something even mroe mind-numbing comes along.