This month...

I’m covering three topics - one old, one that's been around awhile and one new one.  The old one is important because it keeps raising its head constantly and it's important for you to be aware of it.

• Hoaxes
• Keywords
• What is?

Hoaxes via Email

Time and again I see hoaxes being sent by well-intentioned people to a list of people.  Usually it's a topic that really pulls at the heart-strings and will involve either children and/or something that may have affected you personally or someone close to you, such as cancer. There is a real problem with this - apart from overloading other people's inboxes and being a nuisance value, it also causes problems for the people or organisations that the hoax mentions.

For example, there is a hoax about a little girl named Amy Bruce and it talks about how she has cancer and if the receiver of the email forwards it on to as many people as possible, the mentioned charity will donate xx cents to the cause. This not only causes problem for the charity mentioned because it's not true, but often the email is sent to a big list of people using the To: or CC: fields and exposes every person listed to possible spam or viruses because their email address was shared with a lot of others. Bulk email should always be sent using the BCC field so that only the receiver's address is viewed by the receiver.  If you are the recipient of such an email it really only takes a minute or two to type in the name of the person, or the sujbect heading, and add the word 'hoax' into your favourite search engine to find out the truth about the email.  Or, you could bookmark a site such as Hoax-Slayer and look through their alphabetical listing. Even if the email was sent to you by someone you trust, it will save you embarrassment, and save a lot of other people from perpetuating the problem by checking first.

Google Keywords

If you use Google's Adwords facility there is something you really need to be aware of - it's something I discovered a year ago when setting up my own Adwords listing.   And that's using the suggested keywords in Google's keyword tool function.  The keyword tool is useful because it will quickly build a list of suggested keywords you can use for your Adwords listing.  However, there is also a problem with this because it will suggest every word used for similar searches, and includes words or names that are trademarked.  This means that if you use the word in your keywords listing to get your Adword listing to show, you are effectively infringing on someone else's trademark.  So, it is well worth the time and effort to go through the list, even if there are over 1,000 words there, to make sure you are not using a word you are not familiar with, and therefore possibly the name of a company that has been trademarked.  You also need to check the list for known trademarks. There are pending lawsuits about this very thing currently so it's important you make sure you don't inadvertently add to the problem.   The fourth paragraph down on the pending lawsuits link above is particularly relevant.

Google "What Is...?"

I learnt a cool trick last week at my BNI meeting (thanks Rodney). I use the Google Toolbar so doing searches with that tool is very quick, I never have to go to their website first, but if you don't have the Google toolbar you can just call up Google to try this out. If you type in "What is" and then add a word of your choice, it will return the definition of that word at the top of the listings relating to that word.  Very useful and saves you leaving your desk to go find a dictionary - if it's not within easy reach. Depending on your web connection, it's probably a lot faster too. I tried out 'what is luck?'and it came up with:
fortune: your overall circumstances or condition in life (including everything that happens to you); "whatever my fortune may be"; "deserved a better fate"; "has a happy lot"; "the luck of the Irish"; "a victim of circumstances"; "success that was her portion"

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