From Selling Power …Market research firm IDC states that half of all Internet-enabled employees access the Web while at work for personal tasks, such as reading the news (81 percent), personal email (61 percent), online banking (58 percent), travel (56 percent) and shopping (52 percent).

That’s really creating a conflict between management and the employees… Almost two-thirds of companies monitor workers’ Internet connections and one out of two store and reviewing employee email… Read more about this in the Selling Power article

What is the correct balance to have? This is a great discussion point for employers and key knowledge workers…

From Duct Tape Marketing Blog - their weekly newsletter they profiled what I think are essential small business tools. These tools don’t all directly relate to marketing, but most perform a marketing function. You can DuctTape’s 10 essential tools here. They cover things like project management, virus protection, file sending, spam blocking and keyword locating.

I highly recommend the Duct Tape Marketing Blog as a fantastic resource for great marketing articles.

• See the Top 10 Small Business Productivity Tools list

From Fortune - When Google spent $1.65 billion for 19-month-old online video phenomenon YouTube, it was portrayed as a sign of the triumph of online video. And in important ways it is. But the voluminous coverage missed something central. Google’s interest in the video-sharing site, ironically, also has a lot to do with its belief in the staying power of conventional broadcast television and cable.

• Read the rest of this article

2006 was a fantastic year in so many ways but one incredible statistic to share was the readership growth of our weblog. We started the Executive Edge weblog http://blog.premierstrategies.com as a companion site to our email newsletters in Q2-2006. We’ve received fantastic feedback over the helpful information in the e-newsletters over the past few years. Our in-house email list has grown to just over 8,500 business owners, executives and professionals. We never had a place to archive those articles and resources online for others to find online and use. With the weblog, we do.

Enter the world of the weblog. We use www.wordpress.com It’s made it so much easier and faster to write, share and contribute articles online, posting them to the weblog. We then then simply share with you a shorter, briefer compilation email each month that indexes our recently published resources. You can visit anytime and see any past articles or links.

The growth in readership has been incredible. Primarily because now all of that content is indexed by Google. This pulls in a significant number of new visitors and readers to not only the weblog but our website. I would highly recommend this experience to anyone who is looking to improve their personal or professional profile in a particular market. I believe it could be a very rewarding experience for you or your organization

Here is an incredibly, free, convenient, and extremely useful web-based tool that lets you make all sorts of checklists.  You can keep them private, share them with others. (I used mine to help plan our wedding!!) - and best of all - you can get to it on the web from anywhere, anytime. Visit http://www.tadalist.com to check it out - here's a quick screenshot to give you the idea…

Just another one of these simple - killer conveniently little web applications that we all wish we had thought of.  It's made by the team at 37Signals.com - a brilliant team of developers out of Chicago.  Paul McNeely and I had the chance to meet them this summer - fantastic perspective they have at keeping tools like this simple and usable.  Enjoy.

• Visit www.tadalist.com  

From CNN - Are your Web surfing fingers getting tired?

There may be a reason. Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995, says a mammoth milestone was reached during the month of October.

"There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them," said Netcraft's Rich Miller

•  Read the whole article

BusinessWeek has a new article up containing noteworthy news and tips for entrepreneurs.  Amongst the things discussed– a smart way to divide stock, VC interest in early-stage companies, doing business related to Cuba, and Google vs. Yahoo for advertisers.

• Read more

Our most exciting announcement this issue - we've been working the past three months to create WV's most   comprehensive news headline aggregation site.  We're launching this nationally in all 50 states - beginning right here in our home state of West Virginia!

The website puts all the headline links from most every WV news source on one page. This saves you time each day by helping you quickly find the news you want to read.

WVNewsline.com automatically aggregates headlines and links to every news article published online in West Virginia. The site is currently tracking over 30 news sources and updating hourly. 10-20 additional news sections are coming soon!

Please take a quick moment to visit the site and see if it might be a useful tool for your own daily news experience.  And most of all, please let us know what you think and how we can improve it and make it even better! 

• Visit www.WVNewsline.com 
  

From SmallBizTechnology - When you search on Google for a topic you are overwhelmed with a list of search engine results. If you are a business, especially a small business looking for answers to a specific question, you simply don't have the time to wade through all of these results looking for a specific solution.  With work.com, you can get the answer you need quickly.

• Read more

from Gizmodo - Here's the iPod nano (PRODUCT) RED, and It has the same specs and price as Apple's other 4GB nanos, except $10 of its $199 purchase price will go toward fighting AIDS in Africa. That money will be contributed directly into the Global Fund, according to Apple. Click to view - this is hot!

• TechCrunch Article
  
• Apple's Product Page
  

From CNet news.com - Smart-phone sales have already increased by 75.5 percent in the last year to 37.4 million units, and will grow by a further 66 percent during 2006, according to data released last week by the analyst firm.

Sales of PDAs also continue to rise, racking up a 5.7 percent increase in the last year to 7.4 million units. Growth of 6.3 percent is predicted for 2006, as PDAs continue to be eclipsed by more voice-centric smart phones.

• Read more

Here is a set of Web sites / Web tools that students use on a regular basis. They ’re handy because they either a) help get things done or b) educate / inform students about things they need to know.

• Read more

From Yahoo - Google launched a test version of a service that lets users create documents or spread sheets online instead of needing word processing software on their computers.

The Google Docs and Spreadsheets service was a "mash-up," or meshing, of its Spreadsheets program and word processing capabilities from Writely, which Google bought earlier this year.

• Read more
• Try it out - it's FREE!

From Gizmodo - As expected, Palm has just announced the low-end Treo 680 for GSM markets sold unlocked in four colors: crimson, copper, arctic and graphite. Each of these phones come with a 320×320 color screen, 64MB of internal storage, 312MHz Intel PXA270 processor, quad-band GSM, EDGE class 10, speakerphone, VGA camera, 352×288 video recording, and a full QWERTY keypad. Software includes an MP3 player, threaded IM software, and various other PalmOS compatible apps.

•  Read more

From news.com's Gadgets Blog - Research in Motion and Palm announced Wednesday that Cingular Wireless will now offer Blackberry Connect to Palm Treo 650 users. Since Treo's account for almost 25% of the SmartPhone marketplace this is a very welcome addition.

RIM's popular push e-mail service, calendar synchronization and other features will be available on the Palm smartphones. All you need is a Treo 650, a BlackBerry Connect plan from Cingular, and BlackBerry Connect software from the Palm Web site. Oh, and your IT department needs a BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Then you're good to go.

• Link to article

Many of you saw the cover story on Business Week a few days ago about Kevin Roses tremendous success with www.digg.com and having redefined the news industry.  We wrote an article on him just a couple months ago.  Well this cover story has stirred up alot of controversy about the hype associated with some of these web startups.  Here are two more realistic views of what's happening in this Web 2.0 space.  Still promising - but not as hyped as the lead article.

• Original Business Week Article - Kevin creates $60 million of wealth in 18 months - hype or hope?
• Scott Rosenberg's Comments - on the bubble spirit and what he feels is happening
• Jason Fried of 37 Signals Comments - on the same topic, and a great user discussion

Citynet Digital Phone Service is now available for the low price of $24.95 a month - giving you unlimited calls anywhere in the US.  They just had an open house in Charleston and the service is pretty incredible.  They have an excellent product/service offering that has every feature you could want. All you need is a cable or DSL connection to the Internet. There are no contracts, they provide the hardware, you keep your phone number and setup is easy. The service includes real time online account management and 24/7/365 access to customer support.

• Learn more about CityNet's Digital Phone Service
• Contact Carolyn Barr, Sales Support Manager at 304.391.5923, carolyn.barr@citynet.net
• Contact Tim Thompson, VP of Sales at 304.391.5921, tim.thompson@citynet.net

Just for fun - sometime these little videos are SO worth sharing.. This one's pretty catchy Enjoy.

• Watch the Google Video - Dream Car for Ladies (15 sec)

From TechCrunch: Fox Interactive Media has entered into a nearly $1 billion, 3+ year deal with Google to exclusively power search across most Fox online sites, including Myspace. The partnership will begin in the fourth quarter of this year and extend though the second quarter of 2010.

This is big - not only for MySpace users, advertisers, Google, those who compete with Google, the Fox network, most everyone on the internet.  Big.  Specifically for businesses that have been working on a strategy to figure out how to monitize the tremendous traffic of MySpace - well Google is an expert at doing that with their search.  And beginning this fall - its available to you..

• TechCrunch Announcement

From Hitwise: This July, MySpace has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users.  This is an incredible result in just a couple of years - the opportunity for business development and for advertisers is just tremendous.

• Complete Report from Hitwise  

Today Hitwise issued a press release reporting that for the first time, www.myspace.com has surpassed Yahoo! Mail as the most visited domain on the Internet for US Internet users. To put MySpace's growth in perspective, if we look back to July 2004 myspace.com represented only .1% of all Internet visits. This time last year myspace.com represented 1.9% of all Internet visits. With the week ending July 8, 2006 market share figure of 4.5% of all the US Internet visits, myspace.com has achieved a 4300% increase in visits over two years and 132% increase in visits since the same time last year.