It appears that back at the end of 2008, I created an account over at Today.com. I have no clue how I remembered – it might have been running down through my list of potential linking sites or money making possibilities.

Whichever the case, it provoked me to write this article Forensics Are You Sure? based on a real eye-opener I read in Popular Mechanics of all places (they started sending it to my son shortly before he graduated and it arrives free so what the heck).

If you want the real skinny on non-TV-based forensics, this is for you

More than ten years ago, I went through all the rigmarole that most people go through when starting out online. By this I mean joining anything and everything that looked like it had potential (yet never did). The surefire way I learned to build readership, that to this day never fails, is very simple. There is a bit of background involved first, so do read on – the meaty part is coming
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I received this email earlier in the day from my father. What do you think…? Personally I think it has a ton of merit:

This is from an article in the St. Petersburg Times Newspaper on Sunday. The Business Section asked readers for ideas on “How Would You Fix the Economy?”

Dear Mr. President:

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America’s economy.

Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan.

You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $1 million apiece severance for early retirement with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings – Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered- Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage – Housing Crisis fixed.

It can’t get any easier than that!

If more money is needed, have all members of Congress and their constituents pay their taxes…

Okay, it’s YOUR turn… so what do YOU think? Please comment!

We are long time subscribers to Discover magazine, and this morning there is a sidebar column chalked full of information useful to those of us using the internet – be it for fun or business. According to this analysis, written by Adam T. Hadhazy, here are some amazing facts (worth noting!):

Fact 1: Number of Bytes Transmitted Online

According to a University of Minnesota report, researchers estimate the volume of internet traffic is growing at an annual rate of 50 to 60 percent.

The number of bytes transmitted over the course of last year:

o A whopping 78,000,000,000,000,000,000

Fact 2: e-Commerce Spending

In 2008, the United States alone spent $214.4 BILLION online. These statistics come from comScore reports. They continue to draw the conclusion that online spending is increasing by 7 percent per year. However, this is down from previous years (before the huge financial mess the country and world has gotten itself into or had done to us by greedy s.o.b’s, which was growing at a rate of 20 percent per year). Time for those recovery plans to kick in!

Fact 3: Trojans, Worms, Viruses, etc.

Symantec reports a total of 5,060,187 bot-infected computers, the same computers that deliberately send out spam to the rest of us poor suckers, have produced 1,122,311 different trojans, worms, malicious code, etc.

To make matters even more critical, and to highly encourage you to PROTECT your computer (I recommend Kaspersky!), the Sophos internet security firm “discovered a new infected WEB PAGE every 4.5 seconds, on average).

NOTE: If you’re using nothing but the feeble Windows firewall to protect your computer, change NOW. It’s much better to get a real firewall/antivirus and malware protection system (again I recommend Kaspersky) that to trust to the fact that the folks at Microsoft 1) stay on top of things (they don’t) or 2) give a damn whether your system gets infected or not. BE SMART.

Fact 4: Number of Minutes We Are All Online

Viewing JUST the social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, internet users have racked up a whopping 34,916,000,000 minutes in the United States alone viewing just these sites. In fact, in January 2009 all by itself, the average user spent 10 percent of all of his/her minutes online in these network communities.

Fact 5: What State Ranks Highest for Adult Website Subscriptions?

That dubious honor goes to none other than… Utah. In fact 5.47 households out of 1,000 have adult-content site subscriptions. Montana comes in with the lowest rate, only 1.92 out of 1,000 households. And, just to round things out, 36% of all internet users spend time on at least one adult web site per month (reported again by comScore).

So what does this all mean to those of us using the net for say internet marketing?

o Online purchasing (e-Commerce) though lower than recent years, is once again on the rise.

o Facebook and MySpace may be very popular (duh) – and worth investigating – but also make us warn that you best have a truly unique approach to getting some of that traffic. Invest real time into building the community. You’ll get the traffic, but you still need to persuade them to choose you for the sale.

o Not protecting your computer, and not having a firewall warning system in place, has got to be the dumbest thing anyone owning a computer can manage not to do. There are those out there with, apparently, plenty of time on their hands to figure out ways to either ruin your computer or, at a minimum, make it necessary for that trip to say the Geek squad at Best Buy to fix it up. This can be very expensive, so why allow it to happen in the first place? Get the best program out there that covers everything from surfing to email to… And again I suggest Kaspersky.

o Maybe, just maybe, we all need a bit more fresh air. I know I am guilty of rarely stepping outside. While I have, and continue, to lose weight, really watch and upgrade my diet, and get a bit of strength training indoors, nothing beats stepping out your door. In fact, medically, to ensure you get enough Vitamin D, you need to spend from 5 to 20 minutes outside every day – during the critical 10 to 2 hours (high noon) WITHOUT sunscreen to absorb the Vitamin D your body needs. Step outside, do a bit of weeding, talk to your neighbors, walk the dog. But get some fresh air LOL!

o Well… the last being the adult websites, don’t know what to say about that, but the fact that it’s Utah (we live in Nevada) has us laughing our heads off.

Okay, there are enough stats to keep you busy and maybe planning some internet and marketing strategies and plans for your business, blog, website online.

PLEASE Don’t forget to COMMENT!