What is this new Policy Shift?

Google recently announced that they are going to be eliminating a significant number of their privacy policies across their different services to make way for a single new privacy policy. This policy states that on March 1 of this year Google will begin integrating information from each of their different web services in order to develop a profile for each user. Google states that these profiles will be used to “tailor” search results and provide advertisements that each user will find more relevant. If you aren’t already worried about this policy, you should be.

Who Should Care and Why?

Just about everyone. Anyone who uses any form of Google web service (i.e. YouTube, Gmail, Google+, and Google’s search engine) and enjoys some level of privacy. The new policy becomes much more frightening in conjunction with the fourth privacy principle of the Google company philosophy:

People have different privacy concerns and needs. To best serve the full range of our users, Google strives to offer them meaningful and fine-grained choices over the use of their personal information. We believe personal information should not be held hostage and we are committed to building products that let users export their personal information to other services. We don’t sell users’ personal information.

This means that as of March 1, any online activity that you perform with some degree anonymity using one of Google’s services will be public knowledge that is associated with your name, your face, and your phone number. This should be particularly off-putting to android phone users whose real-time location, Google Wallet data, and much more will also be available.

The Take-Away Message?

So what can you do? Not much really. There’s no way to opt out of this debacle. If you plan on continuing to use Google’s web services, you’ll simply have to submit to these policies and the fact that all personal information you share or indicate with them being available to anyone who cares enough to know. Ultimately you’ll just need to reevaluate using Google’s services instead of their alternatives. Time to break out the pros & cons charts again!

Ok so you want to start an online business. That’s awesome. But what are you supposed to do??

Of course you’ll need to do all of the annoying paperwork for setting up a business with the government, but we won’t get into that here. What’s next? You have an idea, you have product/service, and you’ve created your company and registered it with the government… but you need something else… A WEBSITE!

Now I realize create a website is a seemingly expensive, frustrating, and time-consuming ordeal. But that’s not true! Sure, you can hire a web developer (like me! email: dabonz413@gmail.com). Although I don’t charge much, if you choose the wrong developer it can cost thousands of dollars! But a start-up online business can’t usually afford that. There’s a better way: WordPress!

WordPress is an online content management system, that anyone can use! It provides a simple, clean, & user-friendly interface for creating your website. There is a learning curve since it’s a new system, but it can be learned and you never have to learn a programming language like HTML.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this article, right here on internet-entrepreneurship.com!

I also post weekly here. Check out some of my other articles!

This social media youtube video gives everything you need to know about using social media in every aspect of your life. From personal, to small business, to big business. This video gives a good visual aid which I am not able to achieve just using blogging, so learn and start developing your social media skills.

In my previous Post Challenges of Starting a new website Part 1.  I talked about my new website My Weekend Trip Planner and how difficult it is to get your website discovered.  It is very difficult to get that initial traffic to the sight especially because SEO is really hurt by the fact that the site is so new. It is important to build the traffic to your site at least initially through other sources then just search engine.  These ways can be things like word or mouth or paid advertisements.  One of the ways I have found that works the best is social media.  Social media is extremely important especially for discovering a website.  You need to use social media to create a buzz for example on My Weekend Trip Planner when I launched the site I changed my status on Facebook to announce the launch of my new site.  I also tweeted it.  I received 30 visits from that in 4 hours.  This is perfect example of you can use social media to tell people about your site hopefully they will then tell their friends and the result can be viral.  This will then increase the likely hood people liking to you and before you know have a powerful website.

1. Squidoo has 1,800,000 user made different “lenses”.

2 They call their pages “lenses” because each is one person’s focus on something that their interested in, something that matters to them.

3. The entire company is only run by 6 people. The most famous creator is Seth Godin.

4. They are 1 of the top 100 most viewed companies in the United States.

5. They generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual royalties to charities and to their users.

6. Many of the users earn more than $1,000 a year from Squidoo. Some make $10,000. On average a user can make between $4 to $40. And they are many who just use Squidoo to give it to charity.

7. More than 1,000,000 people visit Squidoo everyday.

8. They have a tool called SquidU which is a page where you can get tips for making better lenses.

9. Squidoo is free to use.

10. Their main page has a list of 25 different broad topics including

• Food and Cooking
• Pets and Animals
• Travel and Places
• Weddings
• Parenting and Kids
• Holidays and Celebrations
• Education
• Fashion and  Beauty
• Arts and Design
• Entertainment and Media
• Culture and Society
• Music
• Sports and Recreation
• Cars
• Healthy Living
• Internet
• Relationships and Family
• Nonprofits
• Business and Work
• Computers and Electronics
• Home and Garden
• Hobbies, Games and Toys
• Video Games
• Books, Poetry, and Writing
• And a Squidoo Community

If you’ve used YouTube recently, you’ve probably noticed that many of the videos on the site now feature subtitles or closed captioning. And, if you’re even more astute, you might have noticed a CC button that allows you to turn on closed captioning for just about any video on the site.

What’s going on here? Well, YouTube has introduced a new feature that lets people add a closed captioning file to their videos when they upload them to the site. For those videos that don’t have a CC file, they’re using speech to text technology to generate the subtitles. This technology is something that is being implemented by companies like Adobe in video editing software. Basically, it lets the computer do the work of figuring out what was said so that the user doesn’t have to type it all in.

To some, this might seem like an odd feature for YouTube to be adding. But we must remember that YouTube is owned by Google and Google specializes in search. Allowing the actual words in videos to be indexed means that YouTube can do a much better job of searching for particular videos and can, hopefully, create a better experience for its users using this method. In addition, it brings Google one step closer to indexing all the world’s information.

Want to read a little more? Check out ReelSEO’s article on YouTube’s speech to text technology.