Maybe you have been sleeping for the past 6 months, and you are not aware of FaceBook, or FaceBookAds, here is a great way to try it. The trail is completely free, and via VISA you get a voucher for $100 worth of ads on the social network FaceBook.

As part of VISA’s Business promotion, you can get a voucher for $100 advertising credit. To get this free credit all you have to do is

1. Log into FaceBook
2. Add the Visa Business Network App to your FaceBook profile
3. Once added, Facebook/VISA will send you an email with a code, and you can use this to claim your advertising credit

This offer is open to existing and new users of the FaceBookAds system and is valid for both CPC and CPM campaigns. With $100, you are sure to be able to get quite a few leads. Maybe some people will find this of interest.

I actually heard somebody mention “think outside the box” today in a meeting, and I almost lost my lunch. What types of Jargon get on your nerves? There’s loads on buzzwhack, but here are my top 25 annoyances. Which ones annoy you?

1 - Think outside the box
2- (This one’s a gas) “Natural Tea Break” (logging of away-desk/bathroom break time, particularly in call centres)
3 - Downsizing (ie making redundancies and annoying both employer and employee)
4 - Outsourcing (ie can’t be bothered to do it yourself, so pay someone)
5 - Wrinkle (aka challenge, but really means problem)
6 - EBITDA (if you see EBITDA mentioned in a powerpoint, run a mile. It can only be boring stats)
7 - Venting; to vent (aka having a good whinge)
8 - SMART (Specific Measurable Agreed Realistic Time-bound. In other words, anal…arghh)
9 - Walk The Talk
10 - Walk The Floor Management (ie hovering around, looking like a spare wheel, and getting on the nerves of all employees)

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Today I read that the handy tool Google Browser Sync is to be discontinued:

It was a tough call, but we decided to phase out support for Browser Sync. Since the team has moved on to other projects that are keeping them busy, we don’t have time to update the extension to work with Firefox 3 or to continue to maintain it.

Personally I used this a lot and I’m sad to see it go More about this from the official google systems blog.

Last Thursday I noticed that Increased Sociability managed to get a mention on SEOmoz’s roundup. They were kind enough to give me a 3 out of 5 for the plugin . To be honest I had kind of forgotten about the plugin, and the increased traffic from SEOmoz came as a bit of surprise. This also pushed me to upload the latest version of the plugin, this version has just been updated on the Wordpress Plugin Database. In the last few months the plugin has been covered on a few websites like SearchEngineLand / Wolf-Howl, and the feedback for the plugin has been much better than I expected.

It did take me a bit of time to get the plugin on the Wordpress Plugin Database, but for any plugin author I think it is a must for you to have your plugin there. They provide statistics on the number of downloads and they will host your file for you in a nice .zip file. This also allows your visitors to use the automatic plugin update.

New Features for Increased Sociability

This version has some nice new features like the option to enable a test mode, this will include the DIGG message to everyone, this allows you to navigate your pages and see how the message will appear on your wordpress pages.

Also I added the option to add a custom website, currently I am using mine to welcome the visitors from SEOmoz. This 3rd welcome message is customizable, so you can either add another social media website (sphinn, rededit etc) or you can just a pick a random website that gives you traffic (maybe google searchers_ , and you can display a message to them.

Anyway the plugin can be downloaded here.

I always have a hard time finding these… here are the current Paypal merchant fees (as of May 20th 2008)

US Transactions Costs

and seeing as I do many European transactions …

European Transactions Costs

Note there are differences in the charges depending on what type of account you have and depending on whether it’s an international transfer or not. More can be read on PayPal.com itself obviously.

Signup for PayPal

And if you haven’t done so, you should sign up for PayPal and start to accept payments for advertising or work done online. I’ve used PayPal since 2003 and never had a single problem with them, besides the PayPal fees that is !

Many people use YouTube for content in their blogs. (In case you have lived under a rock for the last 2 years) YouTube (www.youtube.com) is a video hosting website. Adding videos in your posts does enhance your content. Using videos for example in a fly fishing blog will help your users learn to fly fish quicker. Most people respond well to video content, as it generally explains things much faster and the information is retained by the reader for longer. So how do you find out about videos before everyone else does ? Read on to find out

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