Voice Technology is the killer app particularly as the mobile Web becomes more ubiquitous. However there is a downside. Your voice carries. With voice technology, you may even avoid moving. That is certainly possible if you buy an alarm clock that features voice recognition. Here is what such an alarm clock allows you to do:

When the alarm goes off in the morning and you don’t feel like getting up, all you need to do is yell ‘Stop’ which starts a 5-minute snooze timer. The alarm clock recognizes 10 different spoken commands including Set alarm, Set time, Check alarm, What’s the date, Alarm sound, Stop and Temperature.

In this world where ParticipAction is the watchword, such a device seems to be going in the wrong direction. Perhaps you should use an alarm clock that forces you to get up after a short delay. Here is a description of a runaway alarm clock.

After you hit the snooze button, the contraption rolls off the bedside table and zooms away on a set of wheels to some other part of the room, finding a new hiding place every day.

Using a Snooze Button goes entirely against the principles set out by Dave Allen of the Get Things Done company. He would say you should decide when you’re going to do something and then do it. With that philosophy your alarm clock does not need a snooze button of any kind.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• August 17, 2006 -- Windows Live Search (now inside Windows Live Messenger)
• November 12, 2007 -- Minimal Handsets Can Bridge The Digital Divide
• October 24, 2006 -- Screen Size Trends

Some talented management have been leaving Yahoo! this week. Yesterday it was learnt that Jeff Weiner, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Network division and leader of many of the company’s core products, is leaving the company. Yesterday also veteran developer Jeremy Zawodny, who helped spearhead important projects like the Yahoo Developer Network, announced on his blog that he would be leaving. Today according to the Washington Post, NYT Bits is reporting the departure of Usama Fayyad, chief data officer and EVP of research and strategic data solutions, which is expected to be officially announced later today.

The most intriguing news for those interested in speech technology was an announcement earlier in the week by Nuance Communications that two other ex-Yahoo’s were joining them. Gary Clayton joins Nuance from his role as vice president, Speech Strategy, at Yahoo! where he oversaw speech implementation for the Yahoo! platform and mobile products, including oneSearch with Voice. Prior to Yahoo!, he spent seven years at Tellme Networks, now part of Microsoft.

Victor Chen is also joining Nuance as senior director, Creative Strategy. Prior to joining Nuance, Mr. Chen served as the director of business management at Yahoo! where he was responsible for developing the company’s speech strategy and introducing oneSearch. Prior to Yahoo!, he was director of strategic initiatives with Tellme, guiding the strategy and design of mobile search applications. Mr. Chen will report to Gary Clayton.

Speech technology is playing an increasingly important role in the development of the mobile web and clearly Nuance is strengthening its position as one of the major players. Microsoft has also been acquiring talent to ensure its stake. Only Google has been somewhat quiet in recent months but by the end of 2008 that undoubtedly will change.

Other Related Posts

• June 5, 2008 -- Talk To Your Bank For Added Security
• May 15, 2008 -- Forget Typos, Watch Your Speakos
• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead

Long, long ago in 2003, Miles Burke was mourning the Lost Art of Conversation and wondering how it could be encouraged. Since then things have gone from bad to worse. Online forums, the natural home for conversations, seem to have a questionable future as John Carcutt points out. There certainly is a decline in conversations as opposed to chats and instant messages.

As we will show, there are two main reasons for this happening. The first is a natural phenomenon, while the second is a result of actions by one major player. The natural phenomenon is that the Internet brings with it incredible connectivity. Everyone can connect with everyone, provided they choose to do so. If they wish, they can also broadcast to the world in real time any significant happenings in what some call their Life Stream.

The Life Stream

One of the oldest and most popular is Twitter. Your life can be recounted in a series of short (140 characters) Tweats (newslets) to any of your friends who are watching. It certainly is difficult to have a meaty discussion in such short tweats. Somewhat ironically, a Twitter competitor Jaiku, now owned by Google, is titled Your Conversation. It will shortly be open to all and describes itself as your own microblog.

Perhaps the best illustration of the nature of these life streams is provided by another newcomer, Plurk. Its display looks very much like a river.

As time passes, we move downstream to the left and see the comments of those we have chosen to follow. It’s almost like logs floating down a river. If you wish you can jump onto such a log and add your own comment. It can be amusing but it’s hardly a conversation.

Many are finding this plethora of social media where you can stay connected is overwhelming. Merely staying in touch can eat up a great deal of time. There’s hardly any time left to have any meaningful conversations. This is the natural phenomenon that we talked about.

Google’s First Blow To Conversations

Google is a powerful influence in the way things happen on the Internet. It has taken two major initiatives that have affected both the quantity and quality of the conversations that were occurring. The first is that its highly successful keyword search algorithm gives a major weighting to (hyper)links that point to web pages. Since this was widely known, this opened the floodgate to spammy comments on blogs seeking only to be given a link back to the author’s web page. This was so prevalent that some blog owners would block all comments to avoid this. Overall the Google algorithm has caused a significant reduction in the average quality of web conversations.

Google’s Second Blow to Conversations

The second Google initiative was a natural follow-on to their first. Noting that many website owners would pay others to create links to their websites, Google wished to block this. So they introduced the NoFollow tag. They insisted that anyone who created a page link to another web page for monetary gain should mark that link with the NoFollow tag. In this way, the search robots would disregard the link and it would count for nothing in the keyword search algorithm. The merit and efficacy of this approach for treating paid links could certainly be questioned.

What is more questionable is then using this NoFollow tag in a blanket way to devalue all comments on blogs. Spam comments on blogs are indeed a problem. Google suggested that it should be applied to all blog comments. Wordpress now adopts this as the default position. However unless there is some incentive for a genuine commenter to add a useful comment, it is unlikely to happen. As noted earlier, the flood of new social media leaves little time to add a blog comment that may be read by very few. Another approach is needed here.

Fighting Back With DoFollow

David Harry has pointed out the absurdity of this approach in his Monday morning rant this week.

It is a sad statement on the times
It’s a damned funny preposition really if we think about it. At its core Google is a nodal/link based algorithm that depends largely on the links of the web to establish popularity and to a certain degree, value. Now, what if…. by some strange twist of fate, the majority of the world’s webmasters and site owners decided to Nofollow all of their outbound links in a sort of, ‘better safe than sorry’ manoeuvre?

If more worthwhile conversations are to be encouraged on the Web, then some different approach is needed. If comments are to be accorded links, then there must be a strong process in place to avoid giving value to worthless posts created only for links. Many are now adopting this approach and you can find some of these listed in the following:

• “Do Follow” Blog Directory
• Do Follow List Of Lists
• Courtney Tuttle’s D-List

Tougher Love For Blog Commenters

This Dofollow policy has been running for the SMM blogs for two months now and there has been a very slight increase in the spam comments. Perhaps too many are assuming that comments of little value to subsequent readers will be acceptable. You might assume that from what Digerati Marketing says about its Over 160 Relevant Link Following Blogs.

Even for white hatters, I don’t think there’s an ethical issue here. So we’re putting our comment there for the sole purpose of getting a link, yes. However, if the blog author can read this comment and they think it adds value to the post, where’s the harm in that? If bloggers are so concerned about who they are giving their link juice to, they should be using the nofollow attribute in the first place.

The SMM policy sets out to deliver best value to our readers. Unless a blog comment is helping that aim, it will be deleted. Merely leaving the blog comment there with a NoFollow tag is the worst of all possible approaches.

Related:
We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

Other Related Posts

• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

This blog is created by using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software from Nuance. Just dictate away and typo-free text appears on the screen. It works very effectively and rarely makes a mistake. It really is very impressive. It is one of the reasons why I believe that speech technology is the killer app for the mobile web.

There are countless recent news items to support that belief. Perhaps one of the most dramatic is that banks in the UK will be using voice IDs. The main British banks plan to introduce voice recognition over the next year as a way of deterring card fraudsters, according to speech software specialist Nuance as reported in Personal Computer World.

Ian Turner, general manager for Nuance’s operations in northern Europe, said: “By the end of next year, about 20 million people in the UK will be registered with some kind of system.”

He said voice recognition can be 97 per cent accurate, but it is always used with some other form of identification, such as a password. He added that even good mimics cannot fool the system.

Nuance provides one of the major voice-biometric systems on the market. A recent survey commissioned by Nuance indicated that most people are in favour of multi-factor identification systems, including voice biometrics.

Other Related Posts

• June 13, 2008 -- Talent Management Losses At Yahoo
• November 5, 2007 -- More Speech-Enabled Applications With The Open Handset Alliance
• October 28, 2007 -- Sound Will Drive Mobile Web Growth

SMM has now launched a very useful website mini-review service. In doing market research on other website review services, some interesting aspects came to light that many will find of interest.

Free Is Never Free

That innovative thinker, Chris Anderson, will be publishing his new book, Free, at some time in 2008, we presume. This will discuss giving zero cost products/services away for free and then making money on upgraded versions. That’s one of the opportunities this zero-cost virtual world now gives us. A more important sub-theme in the book is that of course everyone pays for such products or services by investing their personal time in them. This means that you should be even more skeptical in checking the teeth of any gift horses. Looking after that horse could involve major effort and expense.

This is particularly important in thinking about website review processes. Whatever you learn from such a process may well involve you in major effort to implement the findings. Given the importance of your website and of your time, it’s important to make the right choice.

Who can best assess your website’s performance?

Whatever objectives you as the owner may have for your website, they can only be achieved if there are enough visitors to the website and if they can take the actions that you hope for. So it boils down to good visitor traffic and visitors having satisfactory experiences on the website. Both aspects are tough to evaluate. If you do not think so, just spend a little time checking out the excellent research work that Jared Spool, and his team at UIE (User Interface Engineering), do on website usability. There’s more to the way visitors move around a website than the you might have imagined.

Which website review process is best for you?

Assuming that you are not about to invest in a massive program of visitor testing of the website, some simpler process that looks at all aspects of performance must be found. All aspects of performance covers a lot of ground. To get a sense of this, you might wish to review a very long checklist for website review put out by Polson Enterprises. Unfortunately this has not been updated since 2006, but most of it is still very appropriate. It stretches to fifteen pages and includes almost 300, often meaty, paragraphs on different aspects of website performance.

A website review covering that degree of detail is a major undertaking. A better initial step is to take a ‘big picture‘ or ‘helicopter vision‘ approach. This will help to identify where work may be needed. If you are searching for free resources for this big picture approach, there are two main alternatives. Some Forums offer such ‘big picture’ website reviews and some experts will do such reviews but require the freedom to publish their work.

Forums Offering Website Reviews

The type of website review you will get from a Forum depends on the interests of its members and their skills and experience. You should only consider active forums where you’re likely to get a number of members commenting. Three Forums seem to do a reasonable job in this respect:

• Estetica Design Forum > Graphic Design & Web Design Critique
  Given the fields of interest of its members, you might expect a review that will put much more emphasis on graphic design aspects of the website.
• Web Design Forum, UK > Web Designing Resource > Website Reviews
  Checking on activity in other threads, although the main emphasis of the Forum is Web design, some attention is paid to other Internet marketing aspects.
• Cre8asite Forums > Web Site Building, Testing and Support > Website Hospital
  The Cre8asite Forums (where I moderate) covers all aspects of web design and Internet marketing. Reviewers would therefore bring a variety of perspectives in their comments.

Experts Offering Free Website Reviews

If you do not mind an expert giving a public review of your website, then there are a number of experts you can consult.

For example, Jackie Baker at Search Engine Guide offers a weekly site clinic column. As she says:

Small businesses are invited to submit their websites for review. Can’t beat a little free advice, right? I’ll be looking at the design, copy, usability, SEO, marketing, and any technical issues that may prevent websites from drawing loyal, active visitors and meeting goals. Each week, I’ll give the top five issues the website owner/manager can address to significantly improve performance.

Scott Hendison offers a Free SEO Site Review. As he explains:

For a limited time, you can get a video made of your own website, seeing how it complies with generally accepted search engine optimization best practices.
…
In exchange, all I ask from you is that you agree to allow me to make my information public, so that others may learn from the experience. Selected video reviews will be shared on my site and on my blog.

Such expert views are likely to be well-founded, particularly since the expert is also going public and their reputation will be affected by what they reveal.

Free Website Reviews Come With A Risk

There is a risk in having your website reviewed in public. The UK Web Design Forum outlines this well:

When posing a link to a site to be reviewed remember that some people may not like your site and could leave comments to that effect. These threads can appear on a search engine results for your website or other searches, so if you get negative comments people who search for your site may see these.

Please be sure that you don’t mind that some members may not like your design and may criticise the work you have done. Most of these members will offer opinions on how to improve, which is what this section of the forum is about. So if you are looking for helpful advice and a honest view of your site this is the perfect place to do it.

Really all we are saying is post your sites at your risks, this forum will not be held responsible for any loss of business or negative things that happen due to you deciding to place your site here for a review.

Time Is Money

Each webmaster will decide for herself or himself how to balance the usefulness of the website review, its cost and the time it takes to get it. However it is done, it is important to have your website performing well and that requires knowledge. SMM is now offering a Website Mini-Review service that gives good value in getting the right big picture view. It’s not free, but it may be less costly, taking everything into account, than these other free services.

If you have your preferred method of assessing the performance of a website that you think others might find useful, why not give details in a comment.

Other Related Posts

• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience
• November 24, 2007 -- Do You Want The Full Web On Your Phone?
• October 23, 2007 -- Free 411: GOOG or CALL

The Internet continues to get ever more crowded. Google is continually modifying its algorithms and its ways of presenting more personalized results to searchers. It’s no surprise that many feel that SEO, or organic search engine optimization, is getting increasingly difficult. That’s the view you’ll see in many forums. Just check a discussion at Cre8asite Forums for confirmation. It was titled ‘Been Reading That SEO Is Slowly Dying / Changing‘.

A coming SMM newsletter will discuss the state of the nation on SEO. As always, the aim is to create something useful for our readers but also create a memorable and search visible item. As we have recommended, potential titles were checked in both a Google Web search and a Google Blogsearch. The results were intriguing.

One possibility was the notion of a SEO Cash Cow. That kind of talk has not been around for some time. Back in 2006, a website offering SEO Cash Cows claims that all packages were sold out within 15 days of launch. Early in 2007. you could still find other sites that would help you build your cash cow or would turn your website into a cash cow. Since then, the Internet seems somewhat quiet on the subject of cash cows.

Another possible phrase to draw the eye might be fat cow. This seems to be in more current usage. That’s because of the efforts of Garry Conn with his John Cow dot Com website. His tagline is Making Money Online by Milking the Internet. Of course to an extent he is riding on the coattails of the much better known John Chow dot Com website. John Chow is a resident of Vancouver and and has the tagline, I Make Money Online by Telling People How Much Money I Make Online. It was visible on the fat cow query, because of a little sniping at John Chow from Garry Conn. Whether the efforts of either of these gentlemen and their interactions can be regarded as examples of fat cows or cash cows that others might wish to copy is open to question.

Clearly something is happening and webmasters must adjust. Perhaps the final word should go to John Mueller, one of the more visible Googlers who is always delivering eminently good sense, in his post on that Cre8asite Forums thread.

If you “fall” for a product/service that doesn’t deliver close to the expectations that they set in their marketing, you’re not going to fall for it a second (or at least a third time). If a search engine notices that it’s falling for content that doesn’t deliver close to the expectations set with regards to SEO, it’s going to work on recognizing and ignoring that. If you constantly have to adjust your SEO efforts because the search engines aren’t falling for it anymore, perhaps the problem is not the SEO.

What seems quite clear is that SEO is no longer a license to print money. There are increasing challenges which the successful practitioner of SEO must overcome. However, the ROI (return on investment) will still well reward the effort.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• August 26, 2006 -- China has most mobile phone users in the world
• November 22, 2007 -- Will Open Source Undermine Walled Gardens?
• November 19, 2006 -- Firefox Mobile Companion

You may be aware that the Internet is becoming very crowded. Google will attempt to help you get where you want to go, but is having increasing difficulties. Part of that is Google’s doing. Their methodology depends on links from other web pages, so naturally, everyone is producing web pages. Indeed, some use computer software to generate thousands of web pages to influence their Google ranking. Since Google will only use computer based algorithms, it becomes a battle of the giant computers.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, seems to be acknowledging that his protégé has problems. He has accepted one of the Knight News Challenge 2008 awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content. He will be working with the BBC and Reuters on what has been dubbed “source tagging“.

Tags To Bring Order To The Cyber Sphere

Tagging certainly seems to be something that has real potential in helping us all navigate our way through the World Wide Web. Tags do of course come in two flavors. You can take a body of text and use a computer to determine what are the most frequently used terms. That is one way and it may be the route that Sir Tim is following. What is much more powerful is to encourage authors to choose a few tags that they feel will best represent their work. Thankfully this version seems to be attracting more and more attention, perhaps given the problems that Google is having with computer based algorithms.

A good example of the approach can be seen in the excellent blog of Kate Trgovac. Just look at her post on links for 2008-05-13. You will find for every entry she has added tags. If you wish to see more on what she believes is important on any given tag, then you can click through on that tag. There you will find the favorites she has collected, which are typified by that tag. She is using the website, del.icio.us, to hold these favorites. That is a free service and anyone can do it.

Picturing Tags - The Tag Cloud

If you want to get a sense of what Kate Trgovac feels is important and worth tagging, how can you best do that? The del.icio.us website does give a listing of all the tags she has used (1203 in all at the moment) with the numbers of web pages for each tag. Such a long listing is a little indigestible, so a visual approach seems more appropriate. This is where the tag cloud comes in. You can see a mini-example at the top of the right sidebar. Perhaps we should mention that the tagcloud.com website is somewhat confusing here, since it seems to be only a register of RSS newsfeeds.

If you’re working with del.icio.us, it would be nice to be able to easily display a tag cloud of your favorites. Nick Bouton seems to have attempted that in 2005 but apparently ran into problems with the server capabilities of the del.icio.us website.

It is perhaps an indication of the attraction of tag clouds that a number of people have worked on appropriate software. Eric (engtech) developed one in 2007, which was somewhat complex. If you can accept complexity, then you may even be tempted to use a Flash Tag Cloud WordPress plugin that Alex Cristache found. It is one developed by Roy Tanck and is called WP Cumulus, in a pleasing play of words on the notion of a tag cloud.

WordPress Has A Tag Cloud Feature

Luckily for those who are enthusiastic about tag clouds, and are authors of WordPress blogs, the whole situation has become dramatically simpler. With the latest upgrade (version 2.5), tags are now much more effectively supported. In particular, there is now a template tag function, wp_tag_cloud. That makes the addition of a mini tag cloud to a sidebar almost child’s play. You may have noticed a small example in the right sidebar when you arrived at this blog.

Making Your Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page

Displaying the full set of tags generated for a blog is clearly inappropriate for a sidebar display. What is much preferable is a web page displaying the full set of tags. As it turns out, with a little ingenuity there is a very simple way of creating such a web page. This is done by creating a specific page template just for that page, which we suggest should be named tags.php. A suitable code for this in the basic Kubrics theme is shown below.

<?php /*
Template Name: Tag Cloud
*/ ?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<div style="margin:25px;border:1px solid #111;padding:15px;">
<ul  style="margin:0 0 0 8px;padding:0;">
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&number=0'); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

<p style="margin-left:33px;">
Tags:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in Technorati |
<a href="http://del.icio.us/bwelford/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in del.icio.us</p>
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

An example of the output can be seen in the tag cloud page for this blog. The only point to note is that the tags shown below the tag cloud are not a natural feature of a WordPress blog page. Wordpress posts do have tags, but WordPress pages do not, unless they are added manually as is done here. The left-hand tagcloud tag for Technorati is applicable to all tag clouds and can be left as is. The right-hand link for the del.icio.us tagcloud can be modified to link to the individual author’s del.icio.us tagcloud favorites, if so desired.

You can copy and paste the above code to create your own tags.php file and it can be FTP-ed to your own Theme folder. The properties of this file should be set to Read and Write for the Owner and Read only for others.

Once the tags.php file has been uploaded, the Tag Cloud web page is very easily created as a New Page in the ‘Write Page’ Subpanel. Select the template to be used at the very bottom of the Subpanel from the drop-down list. Its name is Tag Cloud. In the Title field, type a suitable Title such as ‘Tag Cloud for this Blog’. Within the Content field, type the text which should appear as the heading within the Page and this is all that is required. This could appear as follows:

<h2>Tag Cloud for this Blog</h2>

The template will then automatically add in the complete tag cloud together with the two tag links for tagcloud which appear below it.

Once the Tag Cloud Web Page has been created, a link to it can then be displayed at an appropriate point on the Home Page. Visitors to the blog can then easily use it to get a sense of what subjects the blog covers.

Related:
Tags Attract Eyes
Tag Clouds To Guide You

Other Related Posts

• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links
• February 10, 2008 -- Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers
• February 5, 2008 -- My Other Wordpress Blog Was Hacked Too

Tiffani Mozingo, administrator for the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) at Sky Lakes Medical Center, in Klamath Falls, Ore. had some dramatic news to report at a recent Medicexchange conference on patient safety. The PACS expedited diagnosis and treatment by getting radiological information into physician’s hands more quickly and with greater accuracy.

Use of this technology enabled Sky Lakes to reduce average TAT (turnaroundtime) for normal reports to the emergency room from almost 78 hours in November 2006, to 5.4 minutes in November 2007. Abnormal reports take less than 15 minutes. The reporting system also yielded a substantial economic benefit. Once Sky Lakes went “live” with the reporting suite, the hospital was able to reassign all 10 of its radiology transcriptionists.

This represents an astonishing improvement, and shows the potential for the immediacy and efficiency of speech technology. It suggests an exponential growth in a wide variety of uses for voice recognition software.

Other Related Posts

• February 15, 2008 -- Voice Recognition Technology To Stop Hospital Cross-Infections
• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead
• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience

Move over, small world, it’s a sound world after all. You might be surprised to see (or perhaps to hear) how much speech technology is impacting your own personal world, as compared with say 12 months ago. Clearly, this is not a silent revolution, but you could be forgiven if you had not spotted the changes. Sound is really the killer app. .. and that’s before we hear the impact of the major initiatives that Microsoft and Google have in hand.

Some things are almost imperceptible. Six months ago, you would call your telecom supplier and were frustrated by the experience. You wanted to press zero just to cut through the electronic thicket and get someone who could understand you. If you had an accent, it was even tougher. Call today and in many cases your virtual assistant will do as well as a skilled and well-trained agent could ever have done.

Of course voice to voice is not too difficult. Human beings sometimes have difficulty talking to each other, so we are somewhat forgiving. The much greater challenge is voice to text. Indeed, many readers are sticklers about fine points of grammar and typos. Luckily, most document software has spell checkers. That means that the worst mistakes (typos) can be caught.

This post is being written using Dragon Naturally Speaking software. By now I have trained it reasonably well so it requires few corrections, even with only a modest microphone. This is a growing trend, as you can see by checking on other blog posts. The one that triggered my writing this post read as follows:
If you have cash higher personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.
Clearly the author meant to say:
If you have cash, hire personalities and market leaders for brand association and exposure.

Then this morning, a much more visible example showed up on that excellent blog by Andy Nulman. The title read as follows, Changing The World Once Cellphone at a Time. That clearly is an example of a speako.

Some like Eric Bakovic or Adam Albright question whether that is the best term. Would talko or mistalk be better? Well my vote is for speako. The problem is that, since the computer made the speako and it is not mis-spelled, a spell checker does not spot any mistake.

It’s a fascinating subject. There is a discussion at Cre8asite Forums on this if you’re interested. That even branches into the subject of your blog talking back to you. Check out A.L.I.C.E or PandoraBots if you’d like to see where this is all heading.

Other Related Posts

• June 13, 2008 -- Talent Management Losses At Yahoo
• June 5, 2008 -- Talk To Your Bank For Added Security
• April 2, 2008 -- Keep Your Snoopy Eyes On The Road Ahead

Ending breast cancer is a cause we can and should all support. So many families are affected by it. It’s not surprising that a great number of people get involved in trying to help. One very powerful way is in raising donations. Many thousands do it through the Weekend to End Breast Cancer®. If you check out their website, you will find that 60-kilometres weekend runs are being arranged again this year right across the country.

• Ottawa June 6-8
• Calgary July 25-27
• Edmonton August 8-10
• Halifax August 15-17
• Montreal August 22-24
• Toronto September 5-7
• Vancouver September 5-7

You can get an idea of what has been achieved by looking at the 2007 results in Vancouver. As is noted, over 2,000 participants walked 60-kilometres through several neighbourhoods around Vancouver during the Weekend to End Breast Cancer and raised $5.1 million. Proceeds benefit the BC Cancer Foundation, funding important breast cancer research, education, services and care.

If you want to get involved here in Vancouver, then the Vancouver End Cancer website provides full information. More immediately you could look at a short Video, which opens in a new window, by clicking on this button:

I’m proud to say my wife Vivianne has decided to take part in this. If you would like to support her, then you can visit her website and make a donation. Any amount, large or small, will be much appreciated. If you like what you read for free on this and the other SMM blogs and newsletters, then this could be a good way to show your appreciation. It certainly beats those [Buy Me A Beer] buttons that some blogs carry.

If you know of someone else who is participating and would like to support them, or wish to make a donation directly, then this link will get you there.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• December 8, 2006 -- The Whole World Is Going Mobile
• July 15, 2007 -- Mobile Device Diversity Database
• March 5, 2007 -- Does Social Media Marketing (SMM) Do Mobile?