Image via Wikipedia

With fewer jobs and more college graduates applying for them, the need to keep up with information and technological advances in your chosen field is critical, if you want to stay competitive in the job market. The challenge is to balance the time demands of work with the demands of furthering your education. Fortunately, with the advent of  online learning colleges, which offer accredited courses in virtual classrooms,   opportunities for career stability and advancement are readily available. With that in mind here’s a list of 7 smart reasons to pursue online career training.

Image by George Morris via Flickr

You have built the perfect website and it clearly offers all the services you provide. It is user friendly, has a great look and feel to it, beautiful colors, great pictures, everything anybody could want from it. All that is left to do now is have it advertised. There are an estimated 312 million websites on the web today and this number is forever growing. So how can you make sure yours is different? How do you make sure yours is the one people want to visit?

Image via Wikipedia

What makes a food blog stand out? Is it the clean layout, cool graphics or frequent updates? While all those elements are crucial for any food blog, they are not enough to sustain and maintain interest in the long run among readers.

The top 5 food blogs we are featuring today have all those things and a lot more. A steady supply of easy recipes with easy to find ingredients, beautifully photographed pictures, and well written descriptions of the foods are sure to entice readers from coming back, aside from the elements mentioned above.

Intimacy, also very crucial aspect, which is quite frankly, often overlooked in most food blogs today. You must always make the reader feel as if you are talking to him in person to build a sense of connection and rapport with your target readers.  Lastly, you must have passion for what you are doing and when in doubt, always keep it simple.

Image via Wikipedia

I am not a very big fan of PayPal. I mean, it provides an absolutely necessary service, but for goodness sakes it takes 3% of anything you receive! That being said I am a very big fan of what the co-founder is doing these days. He's paying people not to go to college!

That's right, $100,000 grants not to go to college, but to start a business. He says that college costs too much these days (in fact the class of 2011 is coming out with the highest debt of all time) and he is probably right. Even Harvard students are taking him up on his offer.

A lot of SEO's believe that SEO should not be taught in high school or in college. They believe the market will get flooded very quickly and that they will have tons of 17 and 18 year old kids getting a huge jump start in the SEO world. Although I do not believe that this is a valid reason for them to not teach it in school (everyone deserves to know how the information that comes up when they search for it gets there, and what agendas are at hand) I still do not think they should teach it in school because no one knows exactly how long SEO will actually be around and it is always constantly undergoing changes. That being said, Google’s web spam leader, Matt Cutts, has stated that white hat SEO tactics are actually a good thing and will be around for at least another 5 years to come.

Image via Wikipedia

We've been told that "the cloud" is the future of modern computer and data storage, and services such as Apple's iCloud are certainly making a strong case for using the inexpensive resources offered by networked computer systems as a way to securely host personal and business information and applications. Unfortunately, cloud-based services also threaten to expose one of the uglier sides of the Internet service provider industry: bandwidth charges.

Image via CrunchBase

Pretty much every website you go to tries to provide you with a customizable experience. Amazon suggests other items you may be interested in – based somewhat on what others buy but also on what you’ve bought, what sites you’ve visited, any cookies your browser may have, etc.

Facebook takes into consideration which links you click on and which posts you like, and then displays more updates from those friends and fewer updates from other friends. This may be good or bad, depending on whether you want to stay in touch with everyone or you want to just see what you care about most. (Compare this to Twitter, which may suggest users, but leaves it up to you to manage your actual feed.)

Image via Wikipedia

Recent employment trends have begun to show that many employers are no longer put off by online degrees or certifications. There was a time when an online degree carried a sub-par reputation, but today's online courses are more in-depth and provide real training that can compare favorably with the education you would receive through a traditional college program. Now that several universities have begun to offer online degrees, it is possible to attend classes online and receive a diploma that isn't any different from the diplomas received by students who attended classes on campus.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

In a break from typical Apple style, the California-based company has pre-announced some details of its new cloud service, iCloud. Apple plans to reveal product details at its Worldwide Developer Conference. In addition, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, taking a break from his medical leave, will provide details on two existing operating systems, iOS5 and MAC OS x 10.7 or Lion. Cloud-based services are quickly becoming a big part of the world of technology, but Apple has not been strong in this particular area. Industry insiders generally agree that Apple needs to compete effectively with cloud technology in the same way the company does with software and hardware.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

In recent times, the Obama Administration has remained on a complete-court onward spiral to sell Americans on the ideas concerning bailouts for auto dealers, begun by its forerunner however augmented into politically schemed insolvencies by the present White House Administration. In the previous week, President Obama welcomed Chrysler’s declaration about the fact that the bailouts had been paid back – devoid of mentioning that the payment derived from additional Government loans to Fiat, and that the Presidential Administration has before now pardoned four billion dollars’ worth of loans to the auto dealers. In the recent days, Tim Geithner, the Treasury Secretary for the Government, did some additional spiraling in a thesis paper for the Washington Post, asserting that each bailout had resulted in a rebirth of Detroit jobs:

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

On May 25, Google released Google Correlate – and statistic nerds everywhere spent the weekend playing with it.

            Google Correlate is the math-nerd cousin of Google Trends. With Google Trends, you can input and compare any given websites or keywords and phrases. You can see spikes in search and web traffic, see where the most traffic is coming from geographically, and other details. But you’re not really working with any raw data and you certainly don’t need to know what r is.

            Google Correlate, however, is a more statistical analysis of keywords and trends – telling you the correlation between your keyword and other keywords based on either time or geography. You still don’t have to be a stats junkie, but it might help.