There are two different bills working in the Senate to push for a federal sales tax, the Main Street Fairness Act and the Marketplace Fairness Act. Amazon feels strongly that a bill at the federal level would simplify collecting sales tax for online vendors who don't have a physical nexus in a state and resolve the long standing problems that the "Amazon tax" has held for … [Read more...]
Analytics Come to YouTube
The YouTube blog announced YouTube Analytics yesterday. Just as Google Analytics enables webmasters to better understand all sorts of details about their traffic, YouTube Analytics will do the same for those publishing videos. YouTube Analytics replaces Insight, the previous stats tool for YouTube videos. It can be accessed from YouTube.com/analytics where you can see the stats … [Read more...]
“Incorrect Product Key” Trying to Activate Windows XP
A client's hard drive recently died and I needed to get them up and running quickly. The computer was an older Dell computer and had been built off of the Dell pre-install. I grabbed a new hard drive, a CD that had Windows XP's Service Pack 3 slipstreamed into it, and began the install. When the install reached the point of asking for the product key, I typed in the … [Read more...]
Google Insights for Search reveal the hot Black Friday items
This time last year, I was writing about how Google Trends could tell us what to expect for Thanksgiving dinner because people were searching for things like butterball turkey, deviled eggs, green bean casserole recipe, apple pie, sweet potato casserole, turkey gravy, cranberry orange relish, candied yams, and sweet potato pie. Using Google Insights for Search, we can filter … [Read more...]
XKCD hits the Nail On The Head for Troubleshooting
A long-time problem to anybody that has tried to solve their own problems by looking online is that there are often suggested solutions but rarely confirmations. If you land on a forum where somebody was complaining about the exact same problem you're dealing with now, it's nice to have the confirmation that the same problem exists for somebody else out there as well. The … [Read more...]