Who does not, at some point or other in life, get nostalgic about their childhood friendships – that neighborhood kid they played together with in the garden, the kids from school who were regulars for play dates or even the friends they hung around with in college? Looking for these friends and reconnecting would have been impossible if not for social networking websites, like Orkut or Facebook, which is without doubt the most popular social networking websites today.

Social networks are undeniably a double edged sword, both from an employer and employee perspective. Businesses are increasingly seeing the need to establish some kind of social network presence. Whether or not they know anything beyond the fact they ‘need’ social media is open for debate, but the fact remains: in most businesses, social media usage is welcomed with open arms. With a growing population of smart-phone users, and the increasing availability of iPhone-style apps on cheaper phones and tariffs, social media has become a near-default method of communication for many. Why text or call from your phone when you can freely send a multi-recipient message, perhaps even to more than one platform or just to the world in general?

According to reports from TechCrunch, some content farms are going to be completely banned from Blekko which is a search tag search engine company, and these farms will also be discarded from the companies search index.

Rich Skrenta who is also Blekko’s Chief Executive Officer did confirm the move based on the rationale of click/spam results from users, and that these sites will be removed from Blekko’s index completely. This will affect eHow.com, a content farm that is amongst Demand Media most productive websites.

The recent news of the California hacker that stole nude photos from hacked emails highlights the fact that most people do not consider the importance of that security question that comes up when you go to reset your password. Many people do not give that much thought, but the story of George Bronk should give folks pause.

LinkedIn is a social networking tool dedicated to the employees and employers of various organizations around the world. Both employers and employees have plenty of features available in LinkedIn which are beneficial to them in business networking. While Facebook is targeted at youth willing to relax in their spare time, LinkedIn has become the main networking hub online for career minded people. Those who seek challenging career opportunities post their profiles in LinkedIn.

What is it? 

Cloud computing is the progression of several  technologies that together have vastly altered the landscape of typical medium and large organizational infrastructure, in much a similar way the www (World Wide Web) altered the way we communicate, do business and so many more aspects of day to day life, in so little time yet more than a decade ago. The clouds is essentially built upon the initial technologies and under pinning technologies behind the WWW, and have simply been made accessible publicly, the theory has been put into practice through the amalgamation of converged technologies.

What’s the next strategy if you are Silicon Valley’s most infamous, yet most persistent, ‘also-ran’?  Just having moved its paid ads over to Bing, and with early reports that it will layoff roughly 5 percent of its workforce (Merry Christmas!) as early as December 14, it seems that Yahoo! is all set to undergo yet another restructuring.

Reuters reports that, Yahoo “plans to lay off more than 600 employees as early as Tuesday,” December 14. Most of these cuts will reportedly be in Yahoo’s product group. Reuters notes that, “(t)he layoffs come two years into Chief Executive Carol Bartz's tenure, as Yahoo works to grow its revenue amid tough competition from Google Inc and Facebook.”

Making a backup of your important files and or your mission critical work documents is essential to the smooth operation of day to day business. Ignorance is practically inexcusable with their being hundreds of options both online and offline. With the price of consumer electronics on a steady price decline, hard disc drives have become something that is available to everyone. Unable to install a hard disc? This is no issue with the arrival of portable / external hard discs. Portable hard discs allow you to back up all of your data and take it off site, which should also satisfy your disaster management planning by ensuring there are multiple copies of mission critical data at more than one location.

The swirl of negative publicity surrounding suddenly infamous ‘Black Hat’ online marketer, Vitaly Borker - whose anti-social online marketing practices and absolute lack of any business ethics were featured in an interesting yet scathing report in The New York Times – seems to have forced Google to tweak its all-important search algorithm. But, as ever, the folks at Google’s MountainView, CA headquarters are being circumspect about the changes to the highly-secret search algorithm that is at the core of Google’s business.