Round Tale

HP, a global technology solutions provider, has joined HostingCon 2010 as a Gold Sponsor and exhibitor. While at the show, they will address questions, such as, “How can you leverage Software as a Service (SaaS) and what value does it bring?” and, “How will cloud computing and SaaS impact your IT organization?”

According to their Events Team, “HP has introduced the HP Extreme Scale-Out (ExSO) portfolio, designed to deliver a new magnitude of cost and resources savings for businesses involved in hosting and cloud computing, typically a large numbers of servers. At HostingCon we will illustrate how HP products and other solutions can be deployed to meet the very challenging demands of these environments.”

HostingCon is just three months away! If you are interested in becoming a Sponsor for HostingCon, please contact us now to learn more about the benefits to your business. You can also check out the exhibiting at HostingCon 2010 page to learn about all of the current exhibitor opportunities.

To learn more about HP, please visit: www.hp.com

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For all the latest HostingCon news and information, visit HostingCon – The largest gathering of hosted services professionals in the world.

One of the first and most annoying things that can happen to a new web site owner is being blasted with spam.  There is a dilemma presented when wanting to have potential customers or clients contact you or your company.  Either your email has to be publicly posted or you will need to enable a form to allow quick and easy contact.  When you do implement either choice, spammers will come and they will do as much damage as is possible.

Email link – bad idea

The first thing that should be done is to toss out the idea of publicly placing your email address in any form that can be clicked as a link.  Using a linked email address publicly is an open invitation to spammers.  Nothing can be more unpleasant than having to start off your business day wading through hundreds upon hundreds of spam content in your email in-box.  If you must use this route, simply place your email in text only – this will make it harder for a potential spammer as they will have to physically copy and paste your address into any email.  Inconvenience is the bane of the spammer.

Contact form – can be attacked

If you’ve decided to place a contact form anywhere within your web site, you’ll want to enable some type of security to ensure that an actual human is utilizing the form.  This sounds simple enough because, after all, the purpose of the form is to gather human information.  However, most email forms have a standard “name”, “email”,  “subject”, “content” style to them that is easily recognized and exploited by spammers.  Using this standard information, spammers use automated systems to attack a contact form – computer to computer.  What can stump them is requiring something that only a human can input or answer and that isn’t part of the standard email form.  This is where Captcha comes in.

Contact form with Captcha – better idea

Captcha is a type of test that is used to ensure human interaction.  The premise behind Captcha is that computers should not be able to solve something that requires human input.  The very early implementations of Captcha were simple generations of a word or series of letters with some small amount of warping.  However, spammers quickly adjusted to this warping and this initial Captcha implementation had to be abandoned.  Modern Captcha uses two to three regular words that are segmented and have lines through the words making it much more difficult to automatically guess via a computer system.

This all culminates into a small bit of either PHP or Javascript that is placed within your form before the submit button coding.  After filling out the rest of the form, a user must then enter the correct words generated within the Captcha coding.  You can set the form to lock out a user after a certain number of errors thus staving off the possible attack of spammers for yet another day.

Conclusion

Of course, the simplest way to avoid spammers at all is by not allowing any sort of email contact within your site.  But this is not a feasible option – after all, you have your web site online for the purpose of contacting new and old customers or clients.  So, before putting your email form online, use a bit of quick security and incorporate Captcha.

The latest feature rolled out by Twitter is lists.  This new offering by Twitter allows users to create lists of specific Twitter users.  Believe it or not, Twitter lists can be helpful to the business web site owner.  After all, social media has been proven to be a boon to the online business owner.

How Twitter works for business

As social media outlets go, Twitter is quickly becoming one of the more popular micro-blogging sites around.  The list of businesses currently using Twitter in one fashion or another is constantly growing.  Comcast, JetBlue, and Dell are just a few companies that realized early on that Twitter has great potential to help them get in contact with and support their customers.  Comcast is a perfect example of how a business can use a micro-blogging service to give fast and courteous service to their existing customers as well as garner new business by word of mouth from happy and support customers.

How Twitter lists work for business

Once a business has set up their Twitter account, it is very easy to start racking up the number of users being followed.  At last count, the official support Twitter account for Comcast has over 32,000 users it’s following.  Trying to keep track of that many conversations at once is completely impossible.  So, what is the solution?

Simple – Twitter lists.  Creating a list is a very quick and easy process.  Log into Twitter and click on the “New list” link found on the right-hand side of the web site.  A new window will open up where a name can be typed in as well as the type of list it should be (private or public).  Once the list is created, it’s then a simple matter of going through the “following” list of the account and adding members to the newly created list.

One great example for a business use for a Twitter list is a company that has offices and customers across the states.  If this business wished to group its customers by area, lists such as “northwest_customers” or “Oregon_clients” could be created.  Then, support teams could have direct access to specific customers based on geographic location.

Taking it one step further

Twitter has made it convenient to include user lists within web sites.  By going to the Goodies – Widgets area, one can find the easy to customize Twitter list widget.  Once customized, the code then can be grabbed and integrated easily within a business web site.  This widget provides a quick way to keep tabs on customers and makes it very simple for new customers to join in on the conversation.  The list widget can be placed on a front page of a web site or even within a support section.  Either way, including this bit of coding is a perfect way to generate more business.

Conclusion

Including Twitter within a social media campaign is a smart move.  Twitter is continuously adding new features to make the experience of micro-blogging easier.  The latest addition of Twitter lists is a splendid way to monitor topics and people who matter most and a great way to keep in contact with and give support to customers and clients.