#not naming Home State for searchability reasons

[tanadrin]

Tagging @theunitofcaring because you may find this of interest, though it’s tangential to your earlier posts

I was talking to my mother today, and I asked her to describe, as she sees them, the challenges facing child protection agencies in the U.S. She worked for many years, variously, as a guardian ad litem, a lawyer representing parents whose children had been taken into a custody, and as an attorney for the child welfare agency of my home state, which, during her tenure, was sued for the failures of its foster-care system specifically. The problems it faced (and continues to face) can be broadly grouped into funding, political dysfunction, and bureaucratic dysfunction, as perhaps they can for most government agencies.

In the 90s, Home State’s child welfare system was drastically reorganized, putting child protective services for the first time under the aegis of a single agency. That agency was underfunded and ineffectually led, and the dysfunction of its foster-care system specifically led to a lawsuit engineered with the cooperation of interested parties in Home State’s government, since it was widely acknowledged by those with firsthand experience that that was the only way to get the state legislature to adequately fund the necessary changes. This lawsuit resulted in federal oversight of Home State’s child welfare system, until 2015 when the system began to meet the targets determined by the settlement in the original case, although only as a result of the current leadership (over the protests of the legal arm of the child welfare service) doing their best to lie about the relevant statistics for a number of years. CPS in that state is still underfunded; the usual anti-pattern, especially in cases of child removal, is that a child is removed from the home on a short-term bases (for which the burden of evidence is quite low), nominally contingent on the parent or parents being provided certain social services to improve the condition of the home, but these services never appear because of bureaucratic or funding failures on the part of CPS, and the case drags on much longer than it should.

Political dysfunction is also extreme, especially in rural areas of Home State; corruption of the form of kickbacks by privately-owned institutions to juvenile court judges is one form of corruption. The general understanding I have of politics in Home State is that, especially but not only in rural regions, networks of patronage and nepotism are endemic in a way they are not in better-run regions of the U.S. or foreign countries. Sometimes this corruption reaches farcical levels, like one child welfare lawyer’s life being threatened by a juvenile court judge with friends in the local police department. (Said judge is now a lawyer in private practice, and as far as I know has never been charged criminally.) There is also a much closer interface between the area of juvenile justice and child welfare than most people probably think: in the case of Home State, since the federal lawsuit governing the behavior of CPS affected only the foster-care system, there was some incentive to essentially neglect minors (especially boys--boys in general and adolescent African American boys in particular face severe challenges other children in the foster care system seem not to face) to the point where their behavior became a criminal matter, meaning they went directly into the juvenile justice system rather than becoming part of the foster care system.

The legislature of Home State was and is mostly uninterested in the issue of child welfare. The normal situation is critical underfunding, resulting in overworked social workers and lawyers, who therefore lack resources even if their intentions are the best (which they usually are) and their training and leadership is good (much more hit and miss), especially because at the highest levels CPS in Home State is run by political appointees, and therefore political considerations and concerns over external appearance dominate. Part of this is the incentive toward defensive social work: if a child who CPS has had contact with dies in the custody of their parents, there is a strong CYA incentive for social workers to be much more likely to remove children from the home if the risks to that child seem at all to warrant it. This kind of attitude makes it much more likely a  child might be removed from the home due to circumstances, like poverty, that are not the fault of the parent.

Many of these factors generalize to other parts of the U.S. The two factors my mother named which seemed in our discussion to be most deleterious to a well-run CPS organization in any state, though, are 1) the privatization of any component of the system, since that provides strong incentives for the people who are receiving state funds to care for children to keep the children in the system as long as possible (costs go down the longer a child is in the system; Home State essentially had to destroy the profit motive of private providers by reviewing the status of every child in their care every 30 days), and 2) the state of the healthcare system in general. Much of what CPS agencies provide or should provide is essentially highly-targeted mental health services. As a general rule, of course the provision of these services is woefully inadequate across the United States; one of the crucial differences, as she understands it, between the ability of the U.S. to have a decent child welfare system versus other developed countries is the poor provision of these services.

Despite improvements made for a time in Home State’s CPS agency as a result of the federal lawsuit, the system is currently not much better than it was in the late 90s. The last change in state administration provided a strong incentive to exit the settlement agreement by meeting the targets it set, and therefore to lie about whether those targets were being reached. Although Home State was once a national leader in some respects w/r/t its child welfare system, it is currently middle of the pack at best, which is to say doing abysmally by any objective standard.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Dead, broke

Of all the moving, wrenching accounts of death during the pandemic, Molly McGhee’s “America’s Dead Souls,” for The Paris Review stands out: haunting, furious and sad, an rude awakening of the status quo that denies any possibility of inaction.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2021/05/17/americas-dead-souls/

I’ve known McGhee a long time, since she worked on my book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE from McSweeneys, a professional association we renewed when she landed at Tor.

During the pandemic crisis, I’ve had two different connections to her: on the one hand, the consummate professionalism of her emails as we published my novel ATTACK SURFACE in the middle of the lockdown.

On the other hand, I knew her through her wrenching and deeply personal Twitter account of the personal tragedies she’s endured over the same period. Her Paris Review essay brings those tragedies into sharp focus and uses them to pin a huge and heretofore ill-defined feeling.

McGhee’s mother died during the crisis, but the death was the culmination of years of hardship: “[earning] less than $10,000 a year. Suffering from debilitating depression while caring for her aging parents…chronically unemployed, undermedicated, and overstressed.”

Her mother’s debts were on public display through searchable databases, and her life was haunted by both con artists and bill collectors who carpet-bombed her with calls, letters and emails.

She was too poor to fight back: her wages were garnished by the IRS “for back taxes calculated from a years-old misfiling they refused to correct.” McGhee sent her months of her salary, but it wasn’t enough.

She had no answer for her mother’s rhetorical questions, “Why are these people harassing me? What good does it do them?”

Because the answer is obvious and insufficient: “The people in power don’t care if we live or die, as long as they get paid.”

It only took two days after McGhee’s mother died for her creditors to begin harassing her for her mother’s debts. The state of Tennessee seized the house, but Wells Fargo expected her to make good on the mortgage.

The hospital where McGhee’s mother died wanted a quarter of a million dollars. McGhee, not even 26, was staring down the barrel of the weapon that had been trained on her mother, the inheritor of nothing but debt.

The debt-machine is efficient. Bill collectors found out about McGhee’s mother’s death before McGhee’s own family got word. And they’re remorseless, immune to McGhee’s “pleading, bargaining, reasoning, denying, uploading, scanning, begging, faxing, and crying.”

McGhee compares it to Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” a surreal tale of a grifter named Chichikov who buys dead serfs’ souls to sell for profit.

It’s only surreal if you’ve never been in the debt system’s crosshairs, “where one day of lost wages can compound into houselessness.”

We live in a system of winners and losers. The winners’ winnings come from debt, shielded from the system’s cruelty by “professionalism and bureaucracy” that insulate them — and their functionaries — from “feelings of culpability, not to mention empathy or curiosity.”

Poor people have less money, but the system is firmly focused poor people, because people with money can defend themselves. When McGhee went into debt to hire a lawyer, a single letter on official letterhead instantly reduced all that debt by 90% — more than $250k, poof.

It’s expensive to be poor. Take Community Health Systems, one of the largest hospital chains in America. It sues the shit out of poor people. When those people can afford lawyers, CHS loses, because it is chasing debts it is not entitled to collect.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/18/unhealthy-balance-sheet/#health-usury

CHS itself owes $7.6 billion. It turned its first profit in 2020, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars in state and federal subsidies, and its executives pocketed millions in “performance bonuses” for a performance that consisted of getting bailed out by the public.

The Trump stimulus handed trillions to the richest people and biggest companies in America. Those companies “leveraged up” their handouts to raise trillions more and went on spending sprees, buying up struggling businesses.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

They loaded these companies up with debt, declared “divi recaps” (where you take out a loan on a company you bought on credit and put that money in your own pocket as a “special dividend”) and crashed the companies, destroying jobs and communities.

Plutes know there are three kinds of debt: workers’ debts (which must be repaid), owners’ debts (to be “restructured” away) and government debt (not debt at all, but still handy for terrifying normies with stories of “mortgaging our kids’ futures”).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/17/disgracenote/#false-consciousness

Forty years of this approach has turned the economy into a shambling zombie, dependent on the fiction that “consumer” debts — repackaged as bonds through financialization — will be repaid, somehow.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

As an ever-larger share of the world’s wealth has shifted from the workers’ side of the balance sheet to the owners’, the ability of workers to buy things to keep businesses afloat as vehicles for debt-leveraging has only declined.

Wage-theft and stagnation, unions in retreat, monopoly, monopsony, tax-preferencing for home-owners over renters, for capital gains over wages, spiraling housing, health and education costs, worker misclassification — wages are annihilated before they’re even deposited.

With no wages left over to fund consumption, there’s only debt, and as Michael Hudson says, “Debts that can’t be repaid, won’t be repaid.” CHS can comfortably carry billions in debts, but the sick people it sues for $201 have to choose between rent and medical debt.

Every loan-shark knows how this works. The chump with $500 who owes you $500 and owes the bank $500 needs an incentive to pay you ahead of the bank. To assert the primacy of your claims, you need an arm-breaker.

The digital world has given us all kinds of fantastic new arm-breakers: digital repo men who can brick your car or your phone. It’s automated the once rare practice of evictions, creating eviction mills that run with devastating efficiency.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Creating a debt-instrument — a bond grounded in the payments from other peoples’ debts — requires that you convince investors and bond-rating agencies that your arm-breaker will terrorize the debtors into paying you instead of child-support or grocery bills.

“The cruelty is the point” isn’t ideology, it’s pure description. The system — an artificial life-form constituted as immortal colony organism that uses us as gut flora — runs on competing claims to your debt, and victory consists of terrorizing you more than any rival.

The financiers who practice leveraged buyouts destroy real businesses, ruin lives and hollow out communities. They are feted as “job creators.” The workers who must borrow to close the gap they leave are “deadbeats.” Leveraged buyouts are back, baby.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

If you fret that forgiving student loans and making college free will “saddle our kids with debt,” then you’ve been suckered.

Look. Replacing a system that starts all but the richest children with unserviceable debt with one that doesn’t is liberation, not bondage.

Since Reagan, we’ve been hiking tuition, killing deductions for interest, and shielding student debt from bankruptcy.That’s how you can borrow $79k, pay $190k, still owe $236k, and have 25% taken from every paycheck AND Social Security until you die.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/04/kawaski-trawick/#strike-debt

Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be paid. Student debts do get forgiven, but only for those highly educated, (potentially) highly productive people who can prove that they have been so thoroughly destroyed by debt that they have no future.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/20/sovkitsch/#student-debt

And as McGhee reminds us, the tragedy isn’t merely that we educate people on the pretense of betting on America’s future, but really, the principle use that the system makes of the educated is as collateral for securitized loans.

If the arm-breakers who chased her mother wanted to understand that woman’s humanity, McGhee says they should start here:

“Her humor and her rage were unmatched. In the evenings, against the setting Tennessee sun, she liked to drink red can Cokes in the garden while snuffing cigarettes out against the yard’s ant colonies. She could reckon with anyone just by looking them in the eye. Men were terrified of her, rightfully so. She was sweet. In the last week of her life, when she couldn’t understand where she was or who she was talking to, she greeted everyone the same: ‘Hi, pal. Hope you’re doing okay. When can you come pick me up?’”

Take a second. Re-read that.

[creek-cryptid-deluxe]

So, It’s been awhile. There’s a reason. The last week or so has been... a week. jesus christ. I shall regale you of my tale, not in chronological order necessarily because that’s how I roll. BUT if you suffer through it, you shall be rewarded with an outdoor plant update post after. Bribery. 

So. Early last week, The Spawn sat down with me and presented a proposal, a well researched proposal, advocating for her starting her own residential cleaning business because she finds it incredibly satisfying and relaxing to clean stuff and she does quite well. So we sat and brainstormed, researched, and talked about how she planned to advertise. She needed a business gmail (and all the tools that come with that), logo, business social media, website, and flyers. 

Being her age, she doesn’t have the skill or knowledge to do these things. So, I volunteered to help with these things so that she didn’t have to spend money hiring someone. I created the email account, put all the brainstorm stuff into a google doc that saved to the biz drive, which included a to do list and the basic info needed. I created a logo. (At which point, she called me a wizard while watching me do so.) I helped her try to create a biz facebook account, but facebook immediately flagged it as breaking the rules. like literally as soon as I created it. So I appealed it & The Spawn wanted to wait to see what came of that before I went further. So she took me with her to shop for the things on her supply list, and we decided to go grab some of the smaller stuff still needed for J’s appt at the same time. This was Friday. 

Saturday, I got a text from J in the early afternoon saying that he needed me. I quickly packed a ‘just in case’ bag, since I didn’t know what to expect or how long I would be there. Now, you have to understand that in the 7 years we’ve been friends, while he has discussed things with me via phone or text, in person he is like me, incredibly stoic. Hell even via text or phone, he always insists that he’s fine and responds to my reminders that i’m here if he needs someone, and to just let me know, he responds “I appreciate it, but I won’t”. So him reaching out like that is a MASSIVE thing. I showed up, let myself in, and he just walked up to me, wrapped his arms around me and started sobbing. I stayed the night, alternating between being comforting and being distracting. It was extremely disarming to see such raw emotion from him repeatedly over the course of the night and to hear him say the things that he is usually uncomfortable articulating. 

The next morning he seemed better, thanked me for coming (to which I responded “Of course I came. I’ve not ever been lying when I’ve said that I’d come if you needed me, day or night, but you have to let me know.”) and apologized for ‘being a mess’. I told him every time he apologized (which happened quite a bit over the course of the night) that there was no need for an apology because this wasn’t something to be sorry for. He was struggling, as people do, and rather than embrace the darkness or fight it alone, he asked for help from someone he trusts and loves that he knows reciprocates. That i know how hard it is for him to do that and that I am proud of him. 

Sunday afternoon the kids (The Spawn and The Bf) picked me up because she needed to take him home but didn’t want to leave the dogs alone. I got in the car after The Bf got into the back, insisting I take the front seat. We hadn’t even gotten out of the parking lot of the apartment complex when The Spawn casually asked “So are ya’ll fucking?” 

that’s how I learned that I was the subject of a bet. Apparently, The Bf asked where I was when he came over and out of convenience, not wanting to really explain the relationship, The Spawn said I was at my boyfriend’s. I guess he went on about how how come I’m never hanging out with him, etc, so The Spawn explained the actual nature of our relationship. At the end The Bf said “Nah, they fuckin’ but your mom isn’t telling you.” The Spawn said, “No, she’d tell me because when I started high school I asked her about her past encounters and asked about what stuff was, if she’d done it, and if she enjoyed it, and she was always honest with me. That’s how I know she likes it up the butt.” He insisted that J and I were banging so The Spawn, knowing the truth, took advantage of this and made a bet. It was an easy win for her. SO...

I get asked this question & I look at her, eyebrows raised because she knows how our relationship is (granted if I were physically able and he was willing, I would definitely jump back up on that horse) and said, “No. Mom is no longer physically capable of fucking without risk of severe injury. Plus, despite having ridden that horse previously, I’m not into endangering our besties status. I would go into further detail and commentary but I don’t want to make The Bf uncomfortable. These are things you know, so why do you ask?” She told me of the bet, Then i promptly text J about it because I knew he’d get a laugh out of it. And I was right. 

By the end of Sunday, she recieved an email stating that facebook was upholding the ban, so she and I talked and decided to make a webpage via WIX and after getting a few clients, she could upgrade her account with them to get extras that are offered, including her own domain (rather than the name.wix address) and a lack of wix ads on her page.  And then it all went downhill from there.

Monday through Wednesday (yesterday) had The Spawn breathing down my neck more than any boss I’ve ever fucking had about when her business shit would be done. On top of what I’d already done, between Monday and Wednesday I:   set up her google voice account for a business number, wrote her a “first time client” script, created a google sheets quick reference client database, created a google forms for detailed client records (all in a folder together that is searchable by client name, which would be the title of the form), set up the calendar, downloaded and edited/collaged her before and after photos she took via cleaning some of our spaces, and built her a 7 page website including the photos, facts, and little blurbs that go along with it. It went live at the end of yesterday. 

Throughout this process, rather than just checking in and thanking me for doing it all to save her money, she asked me every couple hours what still needed to be done. When I was not as far along as she felt I should be, she got progressively more hostile. Yesterday morning she had the balls to text me “What all do we still need to do before I can get rolling?” I responded with “ ‘We’? hahahahaha *I* still need to [list].” 

I’m sure you’re saying to yourself, “Am I missing something? Did you forget to list something in the list of stuff you did between Monday and Wednesday? You mentioned flyers....” You are correct. But yesterday while I was being driven to my 2nd vax appointment by my father, I basically told him that I’m fried. If a flyer just included facts, I’d be fine, but the part where I need the potential customers to be drawn in and want to learn more is not happening. The creative well has run dry to the point that it is reminiscent of the dust bowl. And I reminded him that there is a reason I no longer do this type of shit for a living. I mentioned that thinking about The Spawn’s company is making me stress puke and that any time The Spawn approaches me to talk about anything, I immediately feel incredibly nauseated. 

Now it should be noted that when I mentioned this in a multi paragraph text earlier, he responded with “Just take a step back from it for awhile, then go back to it.”    

and everyone wonders why on earth I don’t speak up when I hit my limits and why I just push onward despite the damage it does to me. THIS. THIS IS WHY. Everyone is all for me not pushing myself too hard... until it is inconvenient for them. So I basically screamed in the car. On the way back he said he’d help. Ok. cool. 

Except that every fucking idea he had legit just tripled the amount of work I was going to have to do. I mentioned being burned enough that I was considering just paying a freelancer to do it. This motherfucker chimes in with “Oh! [Cool Ex Employee Who Left to be a Stay at Home Mom with her First Baby] does stuff like that. Let me reach out to see if she’d be willing to.” BRUH. That should have been the first thing out of your mouth after my original texts! Jesus Christ. I agreed but with the caveat that HE had to tell The Spawn and say it was his idea because he sees me getting overly stressed and has put his foot down. And he had to do it that night because I knew that if he didn’t, the first thing I’d hear today was “So when are my flyers going to be done?” and I am absolutely not dealing with that shit. The only thing I am doing from this point forward is showing her how to use her database/client files/calendar and I will be happy to answer questions or give advice, but that’s it. This isn’t my company and I’m not employed by her, so I’ve already put in far more work than should have been expected of me, with very little thanks outside of after I finished her logo and a couple times she came down and watched, then told me I’m a fucking wizard. 

Really It was good in a way because I had been doing that thing lately where I wonder if I’m just being dramatic because admin type stuff isn’t that hard and if I could do it from home, I should be able to manage... but this put me back down on earth, where I absolutely am not being dramatic and I cannot fucking do that shit 40 hrs a week for some random asshole. Shit, this was for my own child and I was ready to give up, stab her, then tell her to go fuck herself.

so...that’s been my last week and a half for so. Also, my only side effects from Vax 2 (pfizer) is feeling more tired/run down than usual and a bit of extra joint pain... but those might actually be related to the stress and hell I just went through. who knows. 

as always, don’t steal my shitshow. get your own shitshow. suffer through your own crap. 

[hunterstream591]

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Just because you’re a Mac person doesn’t mean you have to settle for less with your accounting software. Check out these 6 great options.

A few years ago, we published an article on the best accounting software options for Mac users. This is an update of that article, but here’s the thing: There’s no such thing as “accounting software for Mac” anymore.

Sure, there’s plenty of accounting software that you can use on your MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, etc. But while there used to be Mac software and PC software, it’s now virtually all the same with the ever-increasing expansion of cloud-based software that works seamlessly in any browser.

In other words, you’d have a much harder time finding accounting software that doesn’t work on your Mac than a program that works only on Macs. In fact, with more than 100 million active Mac users, if you found an accounting program that somehow wasn’t compatible with Mac, that alone would be cause for alarm.

Cloud software is here to stay, and the market is only getting bigger. Gartner predicts that by 2022, 28% of enterprise IT spending will have shifted to cloud applications, up from 19% in 2018. (Full report available to Gartner clients.)

Less Accounting: Features and Functions: Another very easy to use free accounting software for Mac users. It is specifically meant for accountants or freelancers who are new to their work and are not much aware about accounting. Wave is a free, Canadian-made online software suite for managing small business finances. The free tools include accounting, invoicing, receipt scanning and personal finance, with features like unlimited bank connections, estimates/quotes, recurring invoices and accountant-approved (double-entry) reports. The Best Free Business Software app downloads for Mac: Microsoft Office 2011 Microsoft Office 2016 Preview Google Workspace Microsoft Excel 2016 Micro. MARG ERP 9+ Accounting Software. MARG ERP 9+ is widely acclaimed accounting software for. Osfinancials accounting and business processing software osFinancials is a free accounting package, easy to install Stock control and point of sales integrated with good support and plugins. Import from osCommerce, virtue-mart magento zenchart etc. Full reportdesigner reportman and all reports are made in reportman so can be adjusted to your needs.

6 user-friendly accounting software options for Mac

Rather than giving you a generic list of accounting software that works on Macs (which would basically just be our accounting software directory), I decided to determine which top factors users have for choosing Mac over PC and then find accounting software that best suits those users.

Macs are typically high-end machines with consistently strong reviews from users, so I included only accounting tools with an overall rating of 4.5/5 stars or higher in our directory (based on verified user ratings) and with at least 100 reviews.

In general, Macs are considered easier to use than PCs, so I’m including only products with an ease-of-use rating on our site of 4.5/5 or higher.

Finally, I included only products with a native iOS app with a user rating of 4/5 or better on the App Store, since Mac users typically use iPhones and iPads as well as their desktop or laptop computers.

With those factors in mind, here’s what I found, listed in order of rating and reviews from highest to lowest:

Jump to:

QuickBooks

FreshBooks

Accounting by Wave

Zoho Books

FreeAgent

Kashoo

1. QuickBooks

User rating: 4.5/5.0 Ease-of-use rating: 4.5/5.0 Reviews:14,700+

It’s no surprise that the big name in accounting software is available on Mac operating systems. QuickBooks has even had a desktop-only (not cloud-based) option available for Macs since at least the mid-1990s, making the company something of a pioneer for cross-platform functionality.

Now, any of QuickBooks’ cloud-based offerings will work fine on your Apple device, and Intuit even still offers a desktop version for Mac. The desktop version for Mac even has a few features designed specifically for Mac users:

QuickBooks for Mac 2020 takes advantage of the Mojave OS Dark Mode.

You can upload text searchable images with the iPhone scanner.

Documents can be automatically shared through iCloud.

Pros

Cons

QuickBooks is available on virtually every device, so whether your team has Macs, PCs, or smartphones, you know that everyone can use it together.QuickBooks has very attractive entry-level pricing, but it doubles after three months.With hundreds of integrations, QuickBooks is highly customizable.QuickBooks is an enormous company, and some reviewers find that the customer service isn’t as hands-on as they’d like.

How much does QuickBooks cost?

QuickBooks Online starts at $25/month. QuickBooks Desktop for Mac is a one-time payment of $299.

What about the iOS app?

The QuickBooks iOS app has a 4.7/5 rating on more than 100,000 reviews. It allows users to create invoices, manage expenses, and view reports.

The QuickBooks Online dashboard (Source)

2. FreshBooks

User rating: 4.5/5.0 Ease-of-use rating: 4.5/5.0 Reviews:3,000+

Designed specifically for small businesses and the self-employed, Toronto-based FreshBooks has been around for more than 15 years. FreshBooks also has Mac users in mind. They say that their easy-to-use accounting software works on any device—desktop, mobile, or tablet—and “plays nicely” with Mac.

Pros

Cons

Users rave over FreshBooks’ customer support, and the company stakes their reputation on it.If your company is rapidly growing—for example, if you plan on going public—you may quickly outgrow FreshBooks.Even though it’s targeted at smaller companies, FreshBooks has all the important accounting features you would need, so it can handle much more than lemonade stands.Freshbooks does a great job of keeping your books clean, but if you love forecasting and crunching numbers, it’s a little skimpy on the reporting side.

How much does FreshBooks cost?

FreshBooks starts at $15 per month for five clients and goes up to $50 per month for 500 clients. *At the time of writing, FreshBooks has a fall sale of 60% off for six months on all plans.

What about the iOS app?

The FreshBooks app has a 4.8/5 rating on almost 8,000 reviews. It allows you to run invoices, record expenses, track time, and accept payments, all while you’re away from your computer.

The Invoices dashboard in FreshBooks (Source)

Simple Bookkeeping Software For Mac

3. Accounting by Wave

User rating: 4.5/5.0 Ease-of-use rating: 4.5/5.0 Reviews:800+

Accounting by Wave is one of the youngest tools on this list, having launched out of Toronto in 2010 before being acquired by H&R Block earlier this year. Its biggest differentiator is that it has a completely free version, as long as you don’t need to use it to accept payments or run payroll (those are optional, paid features).

So what makes Wave an attractive option specifically for Mac users? As mentioned, it’s free, so it’ll help you save for the next iPhone or MacBook upgrade. It also scores high for ease of use, making it fit in nicely with the intuitive Mac ecosystem.

Pros

Cons

It’s free without limitations on users or transactions as long as you don’t need to accept payments or run payroll.Wave is missing an audit trail feature, leaving it vulnerable to fraudulent employees.Wave offers above-average reporting features for a free tool.The free version offers only email support, and even if you pay for payments or payroll you still only get access to chat support (no phone support).

How much does Wave cost?

Wave is free. Payments are 2.9% + 30 cents per credit transaction, or 1% per bank transaction. Payroll starts at $20 per month plus $4 per employee.

What about the iOS app?

Invoice by Wave passes the user review test, clocking in at 4.6/5 with almost 2,000 reviews. It doesn’t completely replace the web version of Wave, but it does allow you to keep an eye on your business finances wherever you are. The biggest complaints that users have seem to be related to customer service, which is not unique to the app.

Recent transactions in Accounting by Wave (Source)

4. Zoho Books

User rating: 4.5/5.0 Ease-of-use rating: 4.5/5.0 Reviews:380+

If you’re looking for the peace of mind of an established, international company offering Mac-friendly accounting software and you’re trying to avoid QuickBooks for whatever reason, Zoho Books might be for you. Zoho has been releasing business software since 1996, and Zoho Books is specifically tailored for Mac users, as it is designed to work with iMessage, Apple Maps, Siri, and 3D Touch. It even has an app for the Apple Watch.

Pros

Cons

Zoho Books is one of the most user-friendly options out there. In fact, it placed fourth—better than any other option on this list—on our Top 20 Most User-Friendly accounting software report earlier this year.Zoho Books offers integrated payroll in California and Texas for now, but if you’re in any other state you’ll have to use a separate payroll app.Starting at $9 per month, Zoho Books is one of the best values in accounting software this side of Wave, which is free. And unlike Wave, Zoho has almost universally praised customer service.Zoho Books is optimized for use with Zoho’s customer relationship management system, Zoho CRM, so if you’re already using a different CRM, it won’t work as efficiently.

How much does Zoho Books cost?

Zoho Books starts at $9 per month or $90 per year for 50 contacts and two users and goes up to $29 per month or $290 per year for unlimited contacts, 10 users, and more features.

What about the iOS app?

As mentioned above, the Zoho Books iOS app takes full advantage of iOS-specific features such as messaging and voice assistant, and users love it, giving it a 4.7/5 rating on almost 150 reviews. While some accounting software apps have minimal features, allowing you to basically just check balances and view transactions, Zoho Books allows you to create and send invoices, manage expenses, track time, view reports, and share numbers with your accountant.

Managing invoices in Zoho Books (Source)

5. FreeAgent

User rating: 4.5/5.0 Ease-of-use rating: 4.5/5.0 Reviews:110+

FreeAgent accounting software is based in the U.K. and originally designed for British businesses, but they also have versions customized for U.S. and global businesses, and the software has full multicurrency support. Like any good cloud-based software, FreeAgent works like a breeze on the Mac platform, and its iOS app is a fan favorite.

Pros

Cons

Users are quite pleased with FreeAgent’s recurring invoice and receipt scanning features, which help take repetitive tasks out of small business accounting.FreeAgent is designed for small businesses, so if you’re growing fast, you could outgrow it relatively quickly.Users also have good things to say about FreeAgent’s customer service, which is available by email or phone.FreeAgent is 50% off for your first six months, but after that it’s $24 per month, which is a little high compared to other options on this list.

How much does FreeAgent cost?

FreeAgent has a flat-rate of $12 per month for everything (unlimited users and clients) for the first six months, then goes up to $24 per month after that.

What about the iOS app?

FreeAgent’s iOS app has an average rating of 4.7/5 on 20 reviews. It allows you to view your accounts, manage expenses by snapping pictures of receipts, create and send invoices, and track time.

The main dashboard in FreeAgent accounting for iPad (Source)

6. Kashoo

User rating: 4.5/5.0 Ease-of-use rating: 4.5/5.0 Reviews:110+

Once you’ve stopped giggling about the name, you’ll see that Kashoo is a comprehensive accounting tool that is easy to use right from the start on any web-connected device, including Macs. One of Kashoo’s standout features is their customer support: You get free phone and web support with your subscription, which is much easier than standing in line at the Genius Bar.

Pros

Cons

The free phone and web support is a real plus for those of us who like to have some expert guidance.Kashoo integrates with Square for payments and Paychex for payroll in the U.S. (and PaymentEvolution in Canada, where it’s based) but beyond that, it doesn’t have much to offer as far as customization.Kashoo has a flat rate, so you get every feature in the basic plan.Some users have reported issues syncing multiple bank accounts with Kashoo, so it’s a good thing they have easily accessible customer support.

How much does Kashoo cost?

Kashoo is $19.95 per month, or $16.58 per month if you pay for an entire year up front ($199).

What about the iOS app?

Kashoo’s iOS app has a 4.3/5 rating on more than 50 reviews. It allows Kashoo users to view reports, manage and send invoices, accept payments, and scan receipts.

The tax management interface in Kashoo (Source)

What’s your favorite accounting software for Mac?

Are you an accountant (either accidental or professional) and a power Mac user? If so, what’s your weapon of choice, whether it’s listed above or something else? (There are plenty of other options out there with iOS apps, as you can see by filtering for iOS deployment in our accounting software directory.)

I’d love to hear what you use and why you use it so I can recommend it to others. Just let me know in the comments or connect with me on Twitter @AndrewJosConrad.

Note: Listed pros and cons are derived from features listed on the product website and product user reviews on Gartner Digital Markets domains (Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice). They do not represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Capterra or its affiliates.

Note:The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They have been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.

Looking for Accounting software? Check out Capterra's list of the best Accounting software solutions.

Financial management can be very complicated in you do not have a clear understanding of how much money you are getting and how much is the expenses. If you want to maintain proper financial records then you will be able to use certain Business Accounting Software. These ERP Accounting Software are free to use and most of the Legal Accounting Software will have advanced tools that can be used for making the process easier.

Related:

Account Edge Pro

This premium software from Acclivity Group LLC is a complete accounting solution for small business and management tool that will have all the information regarding sales, purchases, inventory, etc.

Manager

Free Business Accounting Software For Mac

This is a comprehensive free accounting software that has many features like general ledger, expense claims, estimates, quotes, credit notes, purchase orders, cash management, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc.

Easy Books

This premium software can be used for tracking all the accounts, invoices, statements, and taxes. You can generate invoices in PDF format and email it to the customer and produce a full P&L and balance sheet.

Quickbooks

This premium software from Intuit Inc. will be useful for tracking expenses and sales, creating estimates, managing customers, creating professional looking invoices, managing payments and much more. It can be accessed from anywhere using multiple devices.

ZipBooks

This free accounting software from Zipbooks is used for its professional interface, simple invoicing and high-level time tracking abilities which will help businesses reach their financial goals. It has an intuitive user interface that can be used for all the aspects.

KashFlow

This premium software from KashFlow Software Ltd is an accounting software that can be used for organizing the company in a better way and managing all the financial aspects in one place.

Money Manager EX

This free and open source software from Money Manager EX has many features like account creation, currency conversions, tracking transactions, managing payee lists, repeating transactions, etc. Stocks, assets, budgets and attachments can be maintained in one place.

Express Accounts Accounting Software

Free Accounting App For Mac

This premium software from NCH software is a business accounting software that can be used by small businesses for documenting and reporting the incoming and outgoing cash flow including receipts, sales, purchases, and payments.

Wave

This free software from Accounting Inc. is secure and approved way of doing your accounting and invoicing. It is suitable for any freelancer, small business, consultant, and entrepreneur.

Sage Software

OSAS

Accountz

MoneyWorks

GNU Cash

Connected

Accounting Edge

Download Free Small Business Accounting Software For Mac

AcctVantage

Best Accounting Software For Mac

Xero – Most Popular Software

Home Accounting Software For Mac

This free software is very popular and it can be used by small business for managing all their financial tasks. Invoicing, bank reconciliation, bookkeeping and many more aspects can be maintained.

Business Accounting Software For Mac Free Download

How to install Accounting Software for Mac?

If you want to install any accounting software, then you should decide the software that you want by going through the reviews. The system requirements should be checked so that all the conditions like memory requirement, operating system, GUI requirement, etc. can be fulfilled. The readme text in the installation file can also be checked for this purpose. If it is a premium version, then the trial version can be used for learning about the features. The free version can be installed directly by using the links and following the instructions that are prompted on the screen. The software can be saved in any location and the language preferences can be set.

You will be able to track your sales and accounts receivable by using this software. Automatic records of recurring orders and invoices can be maintained and reports can be updated as and when an order comes in. You will be able to generate professional level quotes, invoices and sales orders.

Related Posts

[mamidimahesh-blog]

THIS IS MY FIRST BLOG

What is a Blog? – The Definition of Blog, Blogging, and Blogger

(Published on: April 8th, 2018 Last updated: July 29th, 2020)

Posted in:

Blogging

93 Comments

Written by

Anya Skrba

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Do you know what a blog is? If you don’t, then you’ve come to the right place. In 1994, when blogs began, a blog was more of a personal diary that people shared online. In this online journal, you could talk about your daily life or share about things that you were doing. Then, people saw an opportunity to communicate information in a new way online. Thus began the beautiful world of blogging.

Table of contents

Today, there are more than 600 million blogs on the web. The number of bloggers in the United States alone is set to reach 31.7 million users by 2020.

What is a Blog?

Definition of blog

A blog (a shortened version of “weblog”) is an online journal or informational website displaying information in the reverse chronological order, with the latest posts appearing first, at the top. It is a platform where a writer or a group of writers share their views on an individual subject.

What is the purpose of a blog?

There are many reasons to start a blog for personal use and only a handful of strong ones for business blogging. Blogging for business, projects, or anything else that might bring you money has a very straightforward purpose – to rank your website higher in Google SERPs, a.k.a. increase your visibility.

As a business, you rely on consumers to keep buying your products and services. As a new business, you rely on blogging to help you get to potential consumers and grab their attention. Without blogging, your website would remain invisible, whereas running a blog makes you searchable and competitive.

So, the main purpose of a blog is to connect you to the relevant audience. Another one is to boost your traffic and send quality leads to your website.

The more frequent and better your blog posts are, the higher the chances for your website to get discovered and visited by your target audience. This means that a blog is an effective lead generation tool. Add a great call to action (CTA) to your content, and it will convert your website traffic into high-quality leads. A blog also allows you to showcase your niche authority and build a brand.

When you use your niche knowledge for creating informative and engaging posts, it builds trust with your audience. Great blogging makes your business look more credible, which is especially important if your brand is still young and fairly unknown. It ensures presence online and niche authority at the same time.

Blog structure

The appearance of blogs has changed over time, and these days blogs include a wide variety of items and widgets. However, most blogs still include some standard features and structure.

Here are common features that a typical blog will include:

Header with the menu or navigation bar.

Main content area with highlighted or latest blog posts.

Sidebar with social profiles, favorite content, or call-to-action.

Footer with relevant links like a disclaimer, privacy policy, contact page, etc.

The above example is the basic structure of the average blog. Each item has its own importance and helps visitors to navigate through your blog.

Blogs and websites

Many people still wonder if there is any difference between a blog and a website. What is a blog and what is a website? It’s even more challenging to differentiate between the two today. Many companies are integrating blogs into their websites as well, which further confuses the two.

What differentiates blogs from websites?

Blogs need frequent updates. Good examples of this include a food blog sharing meal recipes or a company writing about their industry news.

Blogs also promote reader engagement. Readers have a chance to comment and voice their different concerns and thoughts to the community. Blog owners update their site with new blog posts on a regular basis.

Read more: How to Start a Blog (in 2020): The Free Beginner’s Guide

On the other hand, websites consist of the content presented on static pages. Static website owners rarely update their pages.

Read more: How to Make a Website (in 2020): The Beginner’s Guide

Key elements that identify a blog post from a static website page include a publishing date, author reference, categories, and tags within a byline. While not all blog posts have all of those byline elements, static website pages do not have any of these items. From a visitor perspective, the content on a static site will not change from one visit to the next. However, depending on the blog owner’s publishing schedule, the content on a blog will offer something new each day, week, or month.

What is blogging?

In the early 2000s, blogging emerged in a variety of forms when several political blogs were born. Blogs with how-to manuals also began to appear. Established institutions began to note the difference between journalism and blogging.

Definition of blogging

Blogging is a collection of skills that one needs to run and supervise a blog. This entails equipping a web page with tools to make the process of writing, posting, linking, and sharing content easier on the internet.

Why is blogging so popular?

It’s important to mention that the popularity of blogging grows with each passing day! To answer the question ‘what is blogging’, we need to look at the factors behind its rise.

In the early stages, blogs became mainstream, as news services began using them as tools for outreach and opinion forming. They became a new source of information.

Through blogging, businesses saw a positive way to improve their customer’s level of satisfaction. Blogs assist companies in keeping clients and customers up to date. Also, the more people that visit your blog, the more exposure and trust your brand gets.

Personal and niche bloggers saw the potential to reach more people interested in specific topics. Through a blog, visitors can comment and interact with you or your brand which helps you to create a network of loyal followers.

Did you know that you could earn money through blogging? Once your blog receives enough attention and fans, you can investigate ways of monetizing your blog. Through the blog, you can offer your services and sell products.

Who is a blogger?

In recent times, bloggers have become famous for various reasons. Blogging has become an alternative career or side gig to many. Seeing this, even more people are choosing to join the blogging ranks.

So who are bloggers? Bloggers are individuals who love sharing parts of their lives with you. They post on various topics from arts, home designs, carpentry, and finance articles. Bloggers are mobile and don’t need to be in one place. They live on the internet!

Definition of a blogger

A blogger is someone who runs and controls a blog. He or she shares his or her opinion and knowledge on different topics for a target audience.

Why are many people blogging today?

Would you want to have a blog of your own? Yes!

Most people today are creating blogs for a variety of reasons. Every human being has their own story to tell. Through the internet, bloggers can communicate to a massive number of people.

Why is blogging so popular?

Blogs allow you to talk about any topic you are interested in and express your opinion. You’ll find some bloggers writing on every activity that took place during their day. These activities may range from small things like waking up to major issues like human rights and climate change! Remember that as a blogger running your own blog, you need to focus on the topics that you are passionate about and through that focus strive to become one of the best blogs on the web.

Are bloggers getting paid?

Bloggers do earn money, but this is not a get-rich-quick kind of profession. Before you can start monetizing your blog, you need to build both your Google SERPs ranking and your niche influence. Those tasks take a lot of time and quality content. Money-making opportunities won’t present themselves until you’ve gained some credibility in the field. So, get down to business.

Here’s how you can make good money as a top-ranked niche blogger:

Selling ad space on your blog privately or via Google AdSense.

Becoming an affiliate partner privately or through ad networks.

Selling your own digital products such as eBooks and tutorials.

Selling memberships for access to exclusive content or advice.

Using your blog as a content marketing tool for your business.

If you’re starting a blog as a way to market and boost your existing business, you probably won’t be selling ad space or memberships. However, you can create and start offering exclusive digital products such as eBooks, guides, or online courses as a lead capturing tool in exchange for visitors’ email addresses. That way, you’ll nudge them one step further down your sales funnel.

Want to start a blog on your own?

Creating your own personal blog takes a few steps. First, you need to decide on a name for your blog, also called a domain name. Then, you need to choose the best blogging platform for your needs. We recommend going with a self-hosted platform. There are a few choices when it comes to self-hosted platforms, but the most popular is WordPress.org.

The next step is to choose a web hosting service. For new bloggers, we strongly recommend Bluehost, a company that powers over 2 million websites worldwide. You will get a Free domain name when you sign up with them and if you don’t like their services, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Disclosure: FirstSiteGuide is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. We test and try all the products that we recommend.

Recommended tool:

Type in the desired domain in the “new domain” box and BlueHost will show you whether it’s available or not. If not, it will provide you with a list of similar names for you to choose from.

Conclusion

We hope that you’ve learned some helpful information about the world of blogging. If you’ve managed to start a blog, then your next step is to work on your blog content in order to keep your future readers satisfied and engaged. Feel free to check out our extensive list of blogging resources which will help you to run and grow your new blog!

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Blogging

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.Additional Reading

Blogger Icon Set by FirstSiteGuide.com

What Is Copywriting? Who Is a Copywriter?

What Is Blog Marketing?

Ten Characteristics of a Blog and a Quality Blog Post

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START YOUR OWN BLOG

This guide is an introduction to mastering the art of blogging. It provides easy to follow steps to start, maintain, and grow your blog.

Read the guide

93 comments on “What is a Blog? – The Definition of Blog, Blogging, and Blogger”

Terrence McKennaJuly 27, 2020 at 4:54 amReply

Deon ChristieJuly 25, 2020 at 11:12 amReply

FrankJanuary 16, 2020 at 6:19 amReply

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mazegyptOctober 21, 2014 at 11:41 pmReply

Hi Anya. I really like the way you explain how to start a blog on your website firstsiteguide. In particular, the pictures of the basic blog structure. I wanted to get your permission to use it in my class as I am a teacher, developing a unit on how to start a blog for my grade 6 students. It would be part of their year 6 English curriculum.

Anya SkrbaJuly 28, 2020 at 9:08 amReply

Hi Terrence, it’s not a problem at all. A simple credit would be appreciated. Thanks!

Outstanding post. Well done Anya! And I couldn’t agree more with Bluehost, and then simply install WordPress as the site builder. In fact, over the years I have eventually moved all my domains to Bluehost. I have also started using the Gutenberg Blocks Editor plugin for WordPress. Works really well to make your content more understandable to both readers and search engines. And seeing that user experience along with site load speed are major SEO ranking factors? The Gutenberg WP Blocks Editor really contribute hugely to user experience.

Nice post and I really appreciate your hard work. Blog commenting is also the best medium to share our views. Nice article you have shared.

Anya SkrbaJanuary 17, 2020 at 10:07 amReply

John SteveJanuary 17, 2020 at 3:04 pmReply

I appreciate your support Frank. Thanks!

You can also start your own social media marketing business and start earning from Instagram marketing and Youtube marketing.

A blog is a great platform to learn a lot and your articles are great

Anya SkrbaJanuary 10, 2020 at 2:28 pmReply

Thanks a lot Robin!

Robin BellJanuary 14, 2020 at 12:04 pmReply

Glad you can reply to me, I am very happy, your website design is very beautiful, I like it very much!

I was so happy to finally have my blog published then decided to take it down. My big mistake I didn’t do a lot of research. I used wix and found out they don’t have a working comment feature that will not allow visitors to log in. I’m late for 14days for full refund so I was charged for full year tried to ask for partial refund got denied. Wix is easy to use but stay away from them. I’m trying to learn how to use wordpress coz last time I made website was during college years

Anya SkrbaJanuary 10, 2020 at 2:22 pmReply

Thanks for your comment Tess. Let me know if you need any help with WordPress. All the best with your blogging journey!

Thank you for the article. I have been meaning to start a blog for a long time.

Thank you so much for this valuable post. This is what I was actually looking for. I will also bookmark this page for future help.

Anya SkrbaDecember 17, 2019 at 3:25 pmReply

Thanks for reading it Ryan, and thank you for your kind words.

I love the Star Wars style picture for this post! Very creative!

Anya SkrbaDecember 17, 2019 at 3:32 pmReply

Thanks Wayne!

Very good blog! Do you have any helpful hints ffor aspiring writers? I’m planning to start my own siite soon but I’m a little lost on everything. Would you recommend starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid option? There are soo many options out there that I’m completely confused .. Any ideas? Thanks a lot!

Anya SkrbaNovember 12, 2019 at 2:27 pmReply

BillDecember 1, 2019 at 12:15 pmReply

Hi Notizie,

Self-hosted platforms allow you to run a blog using your own domain. Aside from following your domain registrar and web hosting company’s rules, you’re fully in charge of your blog and its contents. You have a number of choices when it comes to self-hosted systems (also called a Content Management System or CMS). The most popular is WordPress.org.

Start with using a spell checker and a grammar checker.

Time + good content + honesty + a fresh attitude = a readable blog.

Start where you are. Write every day, find someone to edit your stuff.

The sooner you start, the quicker you fail and failures is where we learn about successes.

Anya SkrbaDecember 17, 2019 at 3:31 pmReply

Good points Bill!

Thanks for the content…it really helped me in school!

Nice Article, I love the way, you have written such a excellent post!! Perfect design!!

Anya SkrbaOctober 29, 2019 at 8:38 amReply

Thanks Aman!

Thank you for this great article on what blog is and the entire process of blogging. Indeed this helped me a lot as I am a very new person to blogging. The article gave me a clear insight of the blog and it will help me in an online course where I am supposed to participate in a blog discussion. Eventually, I will think of establishing my own blog.

Cheers

Salome

Anya SkrbaOctober 29, 2019 at 8:40 amReply

You’re welcome Salome. Good luck with your online course.

I think this is one of the most significant information for me. And i’m glad reading your article. I really enjoyed this post. Big fan, thank you!

Anya SkrbaOctober 11, 2019 at 8:25 amReply

Thanks James! Glad you like it.

Very impressive!

Anya SkrbaSeptember 23, 2019 at 9:35 amReply

Thanks a lot!

Hi! I have been wanting to start a blog. My roadblocks are being afraid of failure as I know I need to constantly create new content, but I guess my question is how often? (every day? once a week?) and I also need a niche. I would like a lifestyle blog that I can blog about being a military wife with a job and everything that is going on in my life etc, which can include almost everything. But I don’t want to seem too scattered at the same time. I would also want to create new content that is engaging! help! 🙂

Anya SkrbaAugust 23, 2019 at 9:23 amReply

Hey Sarah,

I think it’s great that you want to start a blog! I like the idea of a lifestyle blog – we have a great guide that can lead you through the entire process of starting a lifestyle blog (with a few great examples of lifestyle blogs you can find inspiration from)! Or we can do it for you for free – if you’re interested in that write to use at hello@firstsiteguide.com

Regarding your question about content creation – you need to know that this is going to be YOUR blog, which means YOU decide how much content you want to publish and what kind of content you’re going to create! Your first post should be about you – give your future readers a little introduction about yourself, your idea behind the blog, etc and later you can let the story leads you further. Experiment a bit, write about different things that you find to be valuable for sharing. In the beginning, you don’t have to have a content publishing schedule – whenever you feel like writing do it and press publish. Just feel free to practice – it’s your first time being a blogger, the world of blogging is a new thing for you and making mistakes is just fine! No blogger started without making mistakes and no blogger exists without making mistakes because you learn from them 🙂

Your blog is YOUR online space – you have total freedom on doing whatever you wish with it and from all of us here at FirstSiteGuide you have full support! 🙂

Goodluck with your blog Sarah, and if you need any help we’re always here for you!

PS. see blogs of other military wives like The Frugal Navy Wife, The Military Wife and Mom, Army Wife 101, etc

This was a fantastic blog. A lot of very good information given, I had no idea what a blog was or how to start one. I will definitely use this information in the very near future. I have saved this link and will return in a couple of months, when I need to build my first blog. Thank you for the information.

Hi, Thank you for the useful tips on how to start a blog. I especially agree with the sentence, “Every human being has its story to tell”. Blogging is a lot of work but what a great way to record your story and share with others. Thank you for sharing!

Great post, blogging is hard. We run a travel blog and I think the most important thing we tell people is to travel with a purpose, Do not just wander around the world aimlessly. So many travel blogs do not really have a purpose or a niche. Niche is key and many miss out on that because they want to cover and do it all. Do not just start a blog because you think you will get rich quick and be able to travel the world. It takes a lot of work and lots of time.

it is a very useful article……now I’m gonna create a blog.

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 12, 2019 at 12:53 pmReply

Good luck Aneesha!

Fantastic piece, well tailored…. You sort of cleared my phobias… Now I can give it a shot… I pray I don’t run out of contents!…a big kudos

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 12, 2019 at 12:54 pmReply

Good luck!

Thank you so much. This article cleared my basic confusions about the blog. It is very helpful in learning basic concepts.

This is the best article on the concept of blogging. I am writing on blogging and I wanted insight. That, I got. The scope of the article is valid. Well done. Will revisit soon.

Hello, Bravo! This is a very valuable article. I will now start my blog without any difficulty. Thank you…

Thanks for sharing information about “Blog” & “Blogging”, can you please also guide me about Academic Blog Writing? Or what tips/rules should I follow to increase my viewers on my Academic blogs? I really appreciate it as you made blogging easier. Keep sharing such informative articles.

DeeApril 3, 2019 at 9:33 pmReply

Thanks, really helpful

I think I should start blogging, thanks for your awesome post.

Thanks for these useful tips.

I want to start a blog .. thank you

Nice post shared here. Good work and keep it up. Wishing you a very warm and blessed Happy New Year 2019.

Clean and nice explanations, thank you!

I am planning to start Blog, Nice article it helps lot. Thank you

Thanks for your article. Really helpful.

Good article. Great to know.

Very useful 👍

Thank you for sharing this great information. This information is very helpful for me.

Really helpful article for newbie and I’m too.. Your article is very productive to create a blog…All the steps are very important for the structure of a blog. Thank you for sharing this post. Now I will share this post…

Good article. All the points and steps are very clearly explained. It is very informative and interesting to read.

Nice article, very informative. Keep the good work going.

Hi Admin. Great Article, Thanks For Sharing.

Great Post! All the points and steps are very clearly explained. It is very informative and interesting to read.

It was so fun reading your article and have provided much information needed for the industry.

Iam using Blogspot as my professional platform. I love it, it is simple and easy to use. Plus benefit is Blogspot is owned by Google so basically, u have more chances to rank ur site in google. Thanks for the post mate. keep posting such kind of stuffs.

Thanks for this, it is informative for new ones.

mark coApril 25, 2018 at 4:30 pmReply

Definitely a Good guide for bloggers. I would recommend this article to beginners and experts in their field.

This is something great and perfectly described. These tips and way of explanation will surely help those newbies. Keep posting such kind of kinds of stuff, Thanks a lot mate!

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 13, 2018 at 9:10 amReply

Thanks Komal for your kind words!

Thanks for this, useful tips to get started

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 13, 2018 at 9:11 amReply

Thanks Craig.

Hey Admin, your blog post is very useful and informative, especially for those who are new in the blogging field and don’t know much about blog writing.

Waoo Coool

So, blogging turns 18 this year :)) yeah, everyone wants to start blogging, until they start blogging 🙂 it’s not all fun&games, you need to keep a regular posting schedule, post quality (educational) content, engage with your readers…

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 11, 2018 at 2:19 pmReply

Mrs AMarch 19, 2019 at 3:45 pmReply

Good points Jonathan. Thanks!

Love that you shared those three simple do’s, Johnathan. I’m going to keep those as my focus weekly.

Your list of blogging ideas is practically inexhaustible! 😀 It will take me ages to go through all the blogs you mentioned there but I’m sure that after that I’ll know everything there is to take this exciting online journey called blogging 🙂

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 11, 2018 at 10:44 amReply

Good luck with your blogging journey!

Thanks to the people who blog, I found so many amazing people with similar interests like mine. There were so many situations they helped me get out of the limbo when I was stuck and I try whenever I can to do the same for those who a little push. That’s the true power of blogosphere if you ask me 🙂

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 10, 2018 at 9:59 amReply

I agree…it is a true power of the blogosphere. Thanks for following our blog!

If you ask me, if there were no blogs – there would be no Internet :)))) ps. BTW, love that you listed a few blogging ideas here!

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 9, 2018 at 3:12 pmReply

Glad that you like the post Janis.

Thanks for sharing these amazing tips! I was looking for a side-job idea for a while now and thanks to you my search is now ended 🙂

This is great, I haven’t realized blogging has been around for that long. That Bradley’s video cleared up some things for me!

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 9, 2018 at 2:29 pmReply

Thanks for your comment, Daniel. Glad that you liked the video!

Useful article for future bloggers!

Ogi DjuraskovicApril 9, 2018 at 2:29 pmReply

Thanks Mike. Glad you find it useful!

Vivek SinghApril 11, 2018 at 9:48 amReply

good

Clear explaination 👍

Bookmarking the blog for future reference.

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Great and useful post, Thanks for sharing

Vivek SinghApril 11, 2018 at 7:35 amReply

good

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What is a Blog? – The Definition of Blog, Blogging, and Blogger..

Do you know what blogs are? If you don’t, then you’ve come to the right place. In the beginning, a blog was more of a personal diary that people shared online, and it goes back to 1994. In this online journal, you could talk about your daily life or share things you do. But, people saw an opportunity to communicate any information in a new way. So began the beautiful world of blogging.

What is a Blog?

Definition of blog

A blog (shortening of “weblog”) is an online journal or informational website displaying information in the reverse chronological order, with the latest posts appearing first. It is a platform where a writer or even a group of writers share their views on an individual subject.

What is the purpose of a blog?

There are many reasons to start a blog for personal use and only a handful of strong ones for business blogging. Blogging for business, projects, or anything else that might bring you money has a very straightforward purpose – to rank your website higher in Google SERPs, a.k.a. increase your visibility.

As a business, you rely on consumers to keep buying your products and services. As a new business, you rely on blogging to help you get to these consumers and grab their attention. Without blogging, your website would remain invisible, whereas running a blog makes you searchable and competitive.

So, the main purpose of a blog is to connect you to the relevant audience. Another one is to boost your traffic and send quality leads to your website.

The more frequent and better your blog posts are, the higher the chances for your website to get discovered and visited by your target audience. Which means, a blog is an effective lead generation tool. Add a great call to action (CTA), and it will convert your website traffic into high-quality leads. But a blog also allows you to showcase your authority and build a brand.

When you use your niche knowledge for creating informative and engaging posts, it builds trust with your audience. Great blogging makes your business looks more credible, which is especially important if your brand is still young and fairly unknown. It ensures presence and authority at the same time.

Blog structure

The appearance of blogs changed over time, and nowadays blogs include different items. But, most blogs include some standard features and structure. Here are common features that a typical blog will include:

Header with the menu or navigation bar

Main content area with highlighted or latest blog posts

Sidebar with social profiles, favorite content, or call-to-action

Footer with relevant links like a disclaimer, privacy policy, contact page, etc.

Feel free to use this template on your site

The above example is the basic structure of the blog. Each item has its own importance and helps visitors to navigate through your blog.

Blogs and websites

A majority of people still wonder whether there is any difference between a blog and a website. What is a blog and what is a website? It’s even more challenging to differentiate between the two today. Many companies are integrating blogs into their sites to perform the same function.

What differentiates blogs from websites?

Blogs need frequent updates. Good examples include a food blog sharing meal recipes or a company writing about their industry news.

Blogs promote perfect reader engagement. Readers get a chance to comment and voice their different concerns to the viewer. Static websites, on the other hand, consists of the content presented on static pages. Static website owners rarely update their pages. Blog owners update their site with new blog posts on a regular basis.

Key elements that identify a blog post from a static page include a publishing date, author reference, categories, and tags within a byline. While not all blog posts have all those byline elements, static website pages do not have any of these items. From a visitor perspective, the content on a static site will not change from one visit to the next. The content on a blog, yet, has the potential to offer something new each day, week, or month. Depending on the blog owner’s publishing schedule.

What is blogging?

In the early 2000s, blogging emerged in all different phases when several political blogs were born. Also, blogs with how-to manuals began to appear. Established institutions began to note the difference between journalism and blogging. The number of bloggers in the United States is set to reach 31.7 million users in 2020.

Definition of blogging

Blogging is the set of many skills that one needs to run and control a blog. Equipping web page with tools to make the process of writing, posting, linking, and sharing content easier on the internet.

Why is blogging so popular?

It’s important to mention that blogging grows with each passing day! Hence, to answer the question ‘what is blogging’ we need to look at the factors behind its rise.

In the early stages, blogs became mainstream, as news services began using them as tools for outreach and opinion forming. It became a new source of information.

Businesses saw a good way to improve the customer’s level of satisfaction. Through blogging, companies keep clients and customers up to date. The more people visit your blog, the more exposure and trust your brand gets.

Personal and niche bloggers, saw the potential to reach more people interested in specific topics. Through a blog, visitors can comment and interact with you or your brand which helps you create a network of loyal followers.

Did you know you could earn money through blogging? Once your blog gets enough attention and fans, you can look into ways of monetizing your blog. Through the blog, you can offer your services and sell products.

Who is a blogger?

In recent times, bloggers have become famous for various reasons. An alternative career or job to many, more people are choosing to join the ranks. So who are bloggers? These are individuals who love sharing parts of their lives with you. They post various topics from arts, home designs, carpentry, and finance articles. Bloggers are mobile and don’t need to be in one place. They live on the internet!

Definition of blogger

A blogger is someone who runs and controls a blog. He or she shares his or her opinion on different topics for a target audience.

Why are many people blogging today?

Would you want to have a blog of your own? Yes! Most people today are creating a blog for various reasons. Every human being has its story to tell. Hence, through the internet, bloggers can communicate to a larger group of people.

Why is blogging so popular? Blogs allow you to talk about any topics and express your opinion. You’ll find some bloggers writing on every activity that took place during the day. These may range from small issues such as waking up, to major issues like human rights and climate changes! Remember that as a blogger running your own blog, you need to rely on the topics that you love and strive to become one of the best blogs on the web.

Are bloggers getting paid?

Bloggers do earn money, but this is not a get-rich-quick kind of profession.

Before you can start monetizing your blog, you need to build both your Google SERPs ranking and your niche influence. And that takes plenty of time and quality content. Money-making opportunities won’t present themselves until you’ve gained some credibility in the field. So, get down to business.

Here’s how you can make good money as a top-ranked niche blogger:

Selling ad space on your blog privately or via Google AdSense.

Becoming an affiliate partner privately or through ad networks.

Selling your own digital products such as eBooks and tutorials.

Selling memberships for access to exclusive content or advice.

Using your blog as a content marketing tool for your business.

If you’re starting a blog as a way to market and boost your existing business, you probably won’t be selling ad space or memberships. But you can create and start offering exclusive digital products such as eBooks, guides, or online courses as a lead capturing tool in exchange for visitors’ email addresses. That way, you’ll nudge them one step further down your sales funnel.

Want to start a blog on your own?

Creating your own personal blog takes a few steps. First, you need to decide on a name for your blog also called a domain name, and choose the best blogging platform. We recommend going with the self-hosted platform. There are few choices when it comes to self-hosted platforms but the most popular is WordPress.org.

Then you need to choose a web hosting service and for new bloggers, we strongly recommend Bluehost, a company that powers over 2 million websites worldwide. You will get a Free domain name when you sign up with them and if you don’t like their services, they offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Step One

Click on this link and you will go to the “Exclusive Offer” page reserved for our fans. Once you get there click on “Get Started Now”.

Step Two

If this is your first hosting account ever, you should start with the basic plan, because you will need time to determine your needs and options. The basic plan has everything any beginner needs to set up a new blog. Consider other plans later when your blog takes off and your needs become greater.

Step Three

Your domain name will play a vital role in the future development of your blog and this is why it is important to take your time and figure out a good domain name. Once you’ve done that, enter the name in the “new domain” column and choose your Top-Level Domain.

Recommended tool:

Just type in the desired domain in this “new domain” box and BlueHost will show you whether it’s available or not. If not, it will provide you with a list of similar names for you to choose from.

Conclusion

We hope that you’ve learned something important when it comes to the world of blogging. If you’ve managed to start a blog then your next step is to work on your blog content in order to keep your future readers satisfied and engaged. Feel free to check out our extensive list of blogging resources which will help you run and grow your new blog.

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The Best SEO Tips For Quick And Fast Results

If you’re looking for the best SEO tips to get you started down the path towards quick results and efficient website strategy then here’s what you need! I’ve put together the best information, gathered from years of hands-on experience, testing different tactics and trying various strategies. These are the best practices that will enable you and your website to reach a new level, or to get off the ground running right away.

Our best SEO tips

1. Keyword Basics: The most important thing with keywords for your website is that you have to begin the process with proper research. Take advantage of free tools and services at your disposal such as the Google Adwords tool, and consider paying for more advanced and detailed programs.

Remember that keyword density is a thing of the past, there is no density you should be opting for. Instead, focus on natural inclusion of your targeted keywords, working them in where possible without doing it excessively.

Note: The fastest results are seen in targeting a larger number of lower level competitive terms.

2. Create Great URLS: There are many steps that go into creating great URLs. Starting from the beginning, you should pick a domain name that is short, memorable and includes your most important keyword phrase. While hyphens are acceptable, more than two begins to get excessive and spam-like.

For your individual page names, also include a relevant keyword, so that each URL looks something like www.your-main-keyword.com/targeted-page-keyword.html. When possible, avoid using session IDs and other dynamic page variables that add a lot of unnecessary junk to your page URLs.

Note: If you already have a site that you cannot adjust the page structure to accommodate keywords in your URLs, then consider buying additional domains (building mini sites) to support various segments within your niche. These additional mini sites will drive traffic to your main domain.

3. Find Long Tail Keywords: Long tail keywords often are the secret to great search engine rankings. Long tail keywords include at least three words, and when you find ones related to your niche you will be facing much less competition. Additionally, the traffic you see as a result will be much more effectively targeted, ensuring you see better results.

Note: Add longer tail keywords into your URL will help as well (see #2). Do a quick search and you will see most “experts” agree that the buyers are found with the Long Tail Terms. Boost your earnings through driving more of the right type of traffic….buyers!

4. Use Latent Semantic Indexing: Latent semantic indexing, or LSI, is the process of including related keywords and phrases to your main phrases in order to boost your site’s value in the search engines. So if your site was about coffeemakers, you can include other related words, ranging from coffee makers to iced coffee and organic coffee and on down the list to help boost your rankings. This will also keep your site from appearing as spam, as you won’t just be reusing the same keywords over and over again.

Secrte best SEO tips: The more content you have on your site about the general topic, the better your site will do for the specifics within that niche. That’s how a site becomes an authority on a topic.

5. Get Smart with Internal Links: Many websites don’t properly use their internal links to their own advantage. However, it’s an easy way to help each of your pages gain a higher and more targeted ranking in the search engines. Be sure to include each page’s main targeted keyword or phrase in internal links pointing to it, and always be sure to reference your other pages with links within your site’s content when appropriate.

Example: You sell a type of Coffee maker. Make sure that anyplace that keyword is found on your site that it is linked to the specific product profile page. This helps the individual profile page rank higher in the search engines.

6. Dive into PPC: Whereas other SEO strategies take time to work, pay-per-click advertising is a great way to see instantaneous results. Start running a campaign for your website, backed up with all of the keyword research you have already done. Begin small, as costs can quickly get out of hand if you don’t know what you’re doing. Experiment with different ads, different bidding strategies and different targeted keywords until you start to see consistent results, then pick up the pace and run larger campaigns.

Note: One sure way to confirm that the keywords you’re targeting with your SEO efforts will drive the right type of traffic is to pay to get them their 1st. If they don’t buy then target a different keyword phrase.

7. Optimize your Images: Always include an ALT tag for your images that describes what the image is – with targeted keywords and phrases. This ensures that people who can’t see images see something in their spots, but this also helps you get found in image based searches. Additionally, try naming your images with a keyword in the filename, as in, targetedkeyphrase1.jpg.

Note: Don’t overdo it. Some people will read that and then force a bunch of keywords in every image on their site. The idea is to do what you would typically do but this time do it “right”. If the image is relevant – name it something relevant. Oh, and also, if it is a button or something else that isn’t relevant to your niche, name it something with numbers, as in, 1010101.jpg.

8. Optimize your Title Tag: Many people think that anything they put in their title tag will be sufficient but this couldn’t be farther from the truth. Your page title provides an excellent opportunity to boost your rankings, as well as draw people into your site to see more visitors.

To begin with, your title should be kept short, no more than 60 or 70 characters in length. Also, ensure that every page has its own unique title, instead of merely listing your site’s name on all of them. Work your targeted keywords into the title and be sure to be more descriptive and exciting than just labeling a page as “Home” or “About Us”.

Secret best SEO tips: When giving each page its own title, try and include product model or product names to help drive targeted traffic..

9. META Tag Notes: The META Keywords tag is no longer used by Google for ranking, although other search engines may still make use of it. More important are the META Title and META description tags. Keep your title to 70 characters or less, and keep your META description to 160 characters or less, anything more will just get cut off by the search engines. Of course, remember to include your targeted keywords in these META tags.

Secret best SEO tips: The META description is what the searcher will read in the organic listing so try and make it sound compelling and give the searcher a reason to click on your site.

10. Link Building, What Not to Do: Many people go in the entirely wrong direction when it comes to link building. For example, buying links or participating in a link farm is a strategy that’s doomed from the get-go. You should also avoid low quality, spammy directories and you must understand that tactics like link exchanges, blog commenting and forum posting have all been devalued as compared to how they used to be viewed. Also remember that when you build thousands of links in a few days, you will stand out as unnatural.

Note: It’s best to build links over time from high value sites. Think of sites that are in your niche that you consider the highest value and work directly with them to get a link to your site (can link out to them – see below).

11. Link Building, What you Should Do: Submitting to high quality, respected directories such as DMOZ (it’s very hard to get accepted), Best of the Web and others can pay huge dividends. You should link out to your niche authorities to help boost your own reputation, and you should focus on providing catchy, unique and engaging content that serves as “link bait” for your site. Social networks can be beneficial when used in the right fashion.

Secret best SEO tips: Link Bait is content that is so good that people want to talk about it. One way to do this is provide content that is controversial.

12. Don’t Forget Canonicalization: If you want to maximize your search engine results while also improving your ability to track your site’s traffic, then you need to ensure that your pages aren’t being counted more than once. Your home page may be coming up in different ways as http://yourdomain.com, http://www.yourname.com and http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html. This can confuse the search engines and impact your tracking stats. Use 301 redirects to move your pages to one home page, and fix any issues with other pages on your site as well.

Secret best SEO tips: Talk to your techie about implementing this strategy. WordPress has a great plug-in for this that makes it really easy….yet another reason why I LOVE WordPress.

13. Stick with HTML: The benefits of JavaScript and other program languages are lost when they aren’t searchable in the search engines. Everything you do you want to be helping your cause of ranking highly, which means sticking to easily accessed HTML for your website. Avoid overcomplicating your site with excess forms, frames of any kind, or any code that isn’t searchable.

Note: As I stated in #12, I love WordPress. Why, well one of the main engineers at Google said it best, “WordPress does 80-90% Google loves without changing a setting”. If you haven’t already I would look for ways to use WordPress in your business.

Like I said at the start of this list. Go through each item and check it off. If you are doing each of these then you’re doing most of what’s required to get good SEO scores. Stay tuned for our next email with more tips and strategies on what you can do to boost your SEO rankings!

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Two LPU MCA Students Made a Government Scheme Alert App!

Good things indeed take time. And, the lockdown has undoubtedly served the purpose well for the LPU geeks, as they have got plenty of time to explore and master the skills learned by them in the university curriculum. The Vertos being at home developed many applications of various genres and hosted them on the Google play store. And this time, the application developed by two of our #ProudVertos has gained massive popularity in PAN India.

Usually, people tend to miss the notifications of the Government schemes and alerts that could be beneficial for them and their society. Also, at times it happens that we can’t find the right path to look for the government schemes and notification alerts. Thus, aiming for a solution to this problem, two of our Vertos, Pratik Sachaniya, and Sudhanshu Kansal, have made a Government Scheme Alert app for the citizens of India, available on the Google play store by name ‘सभी सरकारी योजनाएं 2020-21 All Government Schemes.‘

The application intends to deliver information about all government schemes and notification alerts on a single platform. Thus, enabling users to save their time and figure out the right opportunity for themselves. The application has Hindi as its primary language, making the interface user friendly even for the rural people and the farmers who usually face difficulty with the foreign language. The application ‘सभी सरकारी योजनाएं 2020-21 All Government Schemes’ ranked #1 on the ‘Sarkari Yojana’ keyword, which is the most searchable keyword all across India for knowing all government schemes at play store. And to our surprise, with 10K+ downloads in just a few months of uploading and a 4.8-star rating, this application has become the most loved application for getting all government schemes related information in India.

Application Features

A perfect app for all government schemes in one place.

Full description and detailed information about every government schemes

Timely updating the new government schemes.

Accurate and precise information.

Provides a direct link to apply in the government scheme.

Why should one download this app?

You should download this wonderfully designed informative app because this app contains every government yojana that might be beneficial for you. The application saves your time by notifying you whenever a new scheme comes, thus sparing you from the hectic task of checking different websites daily. Also, the application provides a direct video link for detailed information about the government schemes and a link for applying to them.

From the developers’ desk!

Pratik Sachaniya and Sudhanshu Kansal are first-year students pursuing MCA from LPU. Talking about the application designing and the idea for the same, they mentioned how they struggled to find the right links for the government schemes and opportunities that they could have grabbed if been notified on time. They also thanked LPU for providing them with ample opportunities and equipping them with the best infrastructure to aid in healthy learning. Both Vertos stated how their faculties have been supportive throughout their journey and admitted that Lovely Professional University has got many reasons to be loved endlessly. Both the Vertos are highly motivated after this milestone.

I congratulate Pratik Sachaniya and Sudhanshu Kansal and urge you all to download this Government Scheme Alert App and please give your valuable feedback regarding this app. Your feedback and support will encourage the young creative minds of LPU to achieve many more milestones in life.

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Reunite Lost Pets with Their Families

When the Unthinkable Happens, New “Petco Love Lost” Database Uses Breakthrough Facial Recognition Technology to Find Missing Cats and Dogs in Citrus County Citrus County Animal Services Adopts Innovative Technology from Petco Love to Help Reunite Lost Pets with Their Families on National Lost Dog and Lost Cat Awareness Day On April 23rd, National Lost Dog and Cat Awareness Day, Citrus County Animal Services is proudly joining forces with Petco Love, formerly known as the Petco Foundation, a national non-profit working to lead and inspire change for animals, and animal welfare groups across the country, on a shared mission to help reunite lost pets with their families should they ever go missing. According to industry statistics, sadly, one in every three pets will go missing in their lifetime. Petco Love Lost is a new, searchable national database that uses patented facial recognition technology to make finding lost pets quicker and easier. Beginning today, this simple-to-use tool will be easily accessible to participating animal organizations nationwide, as well as any pet parent or person who finds a lost pet. Uploaded photos of a missing dog or cat are immediately scanned to determine whether the lost pet is at a participating shelter or with a neighbor in the community. “We see firsthand how quickly a pet can go missing, whether they were curious, following a scent, wandered through an open gate or became scared during a storm,” said Colleen Yarbrough, Citrus County Animal Services Director. “We work tirelessly to care for pets, whether they’re awaiting their forever home or lost and need help getting back to their families. There’s nothing more rewarding than reuniting families with their beloved pets and with Petco Love Lost, we’re confident it can lead to many more happy reunions, right here in Citrus County.” “We know that one in three pets goes missing in their lifetime, an estimated 10 million pets each year, and we’re not ok with that,” said President of Petco Love, Susanne Kogut. “That gives us 10 million reasons why we created Petco Love Lost, because we believe nothing is more important than keeping people and pets together for a lifetime of love. Together with Citrus County Animal Services, our goal is to keep pets where they belong - at home, with you.” For more information about Citrus County Animal Services, visit www.citrusbocc.com/departments/community_services/animal_services or call (352) 746-8400. If you’ve lost or found a pet, Petco Love Lost is here to help get them home. Visit www.petcolovelost.org or join the conversation @PetcoLoveLost on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter via hashtags #PetcoLoveLost and #LoveandFound. About Citrus County Animal Services Citrus County Animal Services is the County's only animal shelter. The open-admission shelter takes in approximately 5,000 animals annually regardless of capacity or reason for surrender. The shelter staff and its volunteers work tirelessly to find these animals loving and forever homes. Citrus County Animal Services relies heavily on the help of staff and volunteers to extend its resources and budget. Volunteers perform tasks such as dog walking, cat cuddling, grooming, cleaning kennels, dishes and laundry, data entry, receptionist duties, photography, animal fostering, obedience training and adoption outreach events, just to name a few. In addition to animal sheltering, the shelter offers low-cost vaccination clinics to allow citizens to provide basic wellness care to their pets and encourages compliance with state and local laws. Microchipping and heartworm testing is offered in this clinic service. Lastly, the Animal Services staff is responsible for maintaining a Pet-Friendly Evacuation shelters in the event of a declared emergency or disaster. About Petco Love (Formerly Petco Foundation) Petco Love is a nonprofit changing lives by making communities and pet families closer, stronger, and healthier. Since our founding in 1999 as the Petco Foundation, we’ve empowered animal welfare organizations by investing nearly $300 million in adoption and other lifesaving efforts. We’ve helped find loving homes for more than 6.5 million pets in partnership with Petco and organizations nationwide. Today, our love for pets drives us to lead with innovation, creating tools animal lovers need to reunite lost pets, and lead with passion, inspiring and mobilizing communities and our more than 4,000 animal welfare partners to drive lifesaving change alongside us. Is love calling you? Join us. Visit www.petcolove.org to be part of the lifesaving work we’re leading every day Read the full article

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10 ways to provide adequate housing in the COVID-19 era

Overcrowded housing is a key COVID-19 offender. (Nazish Mirekar/Unsplash)

COVID-19 is a well being, social, financial and political emergency. It is usually a housing emergency.

With the intention to forestall the unfold of COVID-19, greater than 3.9 billion individuals — half of the Earth’s inhabitants — have been requested or ordered to remain at house. However for a 3rd of the world’s city dwellers, that’s not a useful command.

Too many individuals can’t practise bodily distancing due to overcrowded residing circumstances. Many Indigenous communities haven’t any entry to wash water. Renters are threatened with eviction due to precarious employment.

In Canada, COVID-19 instances and deaths have been concentrated in nursing houses, homeless shelters and different overcrowded housing conditions.

Globally, the pandemic’s well being and financial impacts have compounded disparities based mostly on gender (together with elevated charges of violence in opposition to girls), race and disabilities. However a rising tide of activism has led to new housing packages and approaches.

As housing consultants impressed by a name for housing researchers to “help speedy policy-making that’s achieved nicely,” we’ve organized a collection of worldwide roundtables over the previous two months. Members from all continents recognized greater than 50 doubtlessly good practices that may encourage higher motion. We produced a COVID-19 Housing Coverage Database that’s searchable by location, kind of intervention and goal inhabitants group.

We used steering notes from the previous United Nations Particular Rapporteur on the Proper to Housing, Leilani Farha, and proposals on “slum well being” from researchers centered on the International South to research 10 classes of actions that may sluggish the unfold of COVID-19 and enhance well being outcomes and housing circumstances for probably the most marginalized.

A volunteer disinfects an overcrowded housing complicated to forestall the unfold of coronavirus in Sale, close to Rabat, Morocco. (AP Photograph/Mosa’ab Elshamy)

10 areas for enchancment

The primary three classes hinder the unfold of COVID-19 by means of housing-related measures:

Reply to the expressed wants of residents in encampments and casual settlements, together with sufficient water, sanitation and distancing.

Shield these residing in shelters and different housing with shared bogs and cooking amenities.

Assist self-help measures like entry to well being care and group resistance to evictions.

The subsequent three classes enhance well being outcomes of marginalized people and households:

Shield renters and mortgage-holders from eviction, foreclosures or utility cut-offs.

Present monetary help to renters and mortgage-holders with lowered earnings, together with rental or earnings help, and help with utility funds.

Introduce measures to entry justice. These embrace making certain distancing in shelters, stopping stealth or unlawful evictions and foreclosures and impartial monitoring of presidency coverage for adherence to targets.

The ultimate 4 search to “construct again higher” by utilizing COVID-19 as a wakeup name to enhance sufficient housing:

Higher intergovernmental co-ordination amongst native, regional, First Nations, nationwide and worldwide authorities.

Purchase properties and land for social or rent-regulated reasonably priced housing.

Shield land and housing from predatory financialization.

New or improved methods: elevated targets, funding or packages for brand spanking new social and reasonably priced housing.

Change can occur with political will

Our international scan suggests a number of developments.

Many governments have moved quickly, although quickly, to supply homeless individuals with higher shelter, demonstrating how rapidly change can occur with adequate political will. 1000’s of homeless individuals in England had been provided resort rooms, whereas South Africa commandeered faculties and stadiums as shelters.

In instances the place sufficient shelter was promised however not delivered, homeless individuals have voted with their toes. New casual settlements have arisen in cities starting from Winnipeg and Toronto to Cape City.

A homeless encampment in Toronto is seen in November 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Younger

In Rio de Janeiro, community-led public training, well being care and micro-loans had been supplied in favelas, however there is no such thing as a long-term authorities dedication to help primary companies in these areas.

Brief-term eviction bans have been lifted in most jurisdictions, leaving accrued tenant debt that have to be paid whereas unemployment remains to be excessive. Canada’s Emergency Response Profit was a superb short-term measure, supplemented within the case of British Columbia with further help for low-income renters. However a common primary earnings could be preferable in the long run, accompanied by extra rent-regulated housing and eviction safety for tenants.

Learn extra: Easy methods to construct a greater Canada after COVID-19: Rework CERB right into a primary annual earnings program

Everlasting housing approaches embrace the sudden resurrection of a stalled undertaking to show a resort into girls’s housing in Yellowknife.

This hotel-to-home conversion precedent impressed Canada’s new Speedy Housing Initiative, which permits municipalities and non-profit housing suppliers to quickly purchase properties for everlasting supportive housing for homeless individuals. Governments have taken over the administration of personal nursing houses the place circumstances had been grossly insufficient.

There are thrilling new coverage instructions. A brand new California legislation was impressed by the activist group Moms4Housing. It’s geared toward stopping large-scale actual property funding trusts from taking on foreclosed housing, evicting renters and elevating rents. It permits tenants, households, native governments and non-profit housing suppliers 45 days to beat one of the best public sale bid to purchase the property and the state authorities has pledged US$600 million for that goal.

Many European cities are banning short-term leases like Airbnb and expropriating vacant properties to be used as public housing.

These are all of the sorts of higher, long-term decisions that have to be made by all ranges of presidency in an effort to redress international systemic housing inequalities which were each uncovered and amplified by COVID-19.

Carolyn Whitzman and Penny Gurstein obtained funding from the Peter Wall Institute of Superior Studying and the BC Actual Property Basis for this analysis.

Penny Gurstein receives funding from SSHRC.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/10-ways-to-provide-adequate-housing-in-the-covid-19-era/ via https://growthnews.in

[airdropsandcryptonews]

The cryptocurrency sector is overflowing with dead projects

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The cryptocurrency sector is overflowing with dead projects

In 2017, when everything concerned with cryptocurrency and blockchain still looked fresh and interesting, it seemed that there would be no day without a new “revolutionary” project or idea. Decentralized financial system, decentralized torrent tracker, decentralized office documentation system. Decentralized, decentralized, decentralized.

The overuse of terms like “transparent,” “distributed” and “blockchain-based” soon made most press papers look generic. The closer we got to the peak of the Bitcoin price at the end of 2017, the more absurd the names of new projects became: “Ethereum-based payment system for slaughterhouse industry workers,” “decentralized blockchain-based dwarf horse breeding platform,” “peer-to-peer personal banking service for divorced blind people,” and so on.

Who would ever need any of that, one might ask. Well, in many cases, nobody. Of the several thousand cryptocurrencies launched since the spread of blockchain technology, only about 30 are currently of any investment interest.

Following cryptocurrencies, many crypto exchanges launched on the wave of blockchain popularity are dying — they just have nothing to trade anymore. The situation is especially visible on review platforms, which store cards of hundreds of closed projects, often together with angry user reviews.

Let’s take a look at a few projects and analyze the reasons for their failure.

Telegram Open Network, or TON

In late 2017 to early 2018, it was first reported that Telegram was planning to launch its own blockchain platform and native cryptocurrency.

Also known as Grams, the TON coins were intended to be based on Telegram Open Network, with the TON blockchain at the core of the platform. In the project white paper, the developers presented this future coin as a potential standard cryptocurrency that could be used for the regular exchange of value in daily life.

It was stated that while Bitcoin (BTC) was considered “digital gold” and Ethereum was a platform for token crowd sales, this new TON cryptocurrency would be a substitute for traditional money and traditional payment systems such as Visa and Mastercard. According to the white paper, other cryptocurrencies lacked the qualities required to attract a mass consumer. In its turn, Telegram would be able to implement a system eligible for mass use, given its expertise in encrypted distributed data storage, experience in creating user-friendly interfaces, and an enormous user base.

While the company did have a point in part of its claims, to me all of it looked like a huge PR campaign. Why should Telegram implement this new financial system and not some corporation with experience in the financial services industry? How would it be able to distinguish this new currency from other, similar products? How would it be any better than traditional financial systems being implemented by a large centralized company?

No answers were given. However, the Telegram initial coin offering, launched in 2018, was a huge success. The company was able to raise $1.7 billion from investor funds in two private token sale rounds, and that was really promising.

Related: Exclusive: New report reveals details of Telegram’s TON blockchain

But it didn’t end well. On May 12, 2020, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram would officially terminate its involvement with the project after a long legal battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Surely, the company didn’t have the legal resources necessary for implementing such an ambitious idea. Most likely, technical difficulties and strong competition on the market also played a role.

Related: SEC vs. Telegram: Part 1 — Key takeaways for now

For me, this case epitomizes the whole cryptocurrency hysteria of 2018 — a company that gets involved in an enterprise for which it is not ready, either legally or technologically, without a clear positioning of the product. The end result is failure.

Petchains

Petchains was presented as the future global information management system and trading platform for the pet market. According to its press papers, the system would allow its users to maintain and keep data of the animals living in homes and shelters. The presented project goal was to create a community of pet owners, experts, professionals, institutions, service providers and volunteers. The system was intended to be developed using blockchain and big data technologies as usual. The initial funding was going to be gathered through the process of an initial coin offering.

It’s a good question if the world really needs a blockchain-based information and trading platform for the pet market. I wouldn’t say there are many problems with over-centralization there. Pet shops are usually chosen by customers after analyzing brand reputation and online presence.

Some problems that customers on this market may face include unreliable information about the acquired animal’s health or previous owners. However, these difficulties comprise not a technical, but a legal problem that is unlikely to be solved using blockchain technology.

Moreover, since animal welfare laws vary between different countries, creating a unified international platform in this field is a legally challenging task, hardly suitable for a small technological startup.

The Petchain project team consisted mainly of no-names who had no proven experience in any serious projects. It was not even possible to say for sure whether these were real people — some of the project advisors turned out to have been presented with fake photos.

Despite some marketing efforts, no serious funding was attracted to the project. At the moment, the official website of the project is inactive and its social media accounts haven’t been updated for more than a year. The link that used to lead to the project’s white paper now contains a text describing in general terms the reasons for failures in the cryptocurrency industry.

Wiki token

One more dead project with an incoherent, not thought-through idea at the base of it.

Wiki token (WIKI) was an Ethereum-based, ERC-20 compatible token designed to be used as a means of payment at the so-called Crypto University. This future platform, built around the Bitcoin Wiki project, was described as a totally independent, decentralized, censorship-free educational system.

The learning courses for Crypto University were meant to be created by members of the project community. For writing articles and creating courses, these members would get the previously mentioned ERC-20 Wiki tokens. These tokens would be listed on various crypto exchanges and could be spent on other Crypto University courses.

I first noticed this project in 2018, and it didn’t make much sense right from the beginning. First of all, what kind of secret knowledge is there in the cryptocurrency industry that it should be distributed using token-based payment systems? How would it compete with other content, available for free?

Theoretically, it’s possible to create a platform similar to Coursera based on blockchain. Crypto University, like Coursera, could become a platform that brings together creators and consumers of educational materials. But here, some difficulties arise.

The value of an educational product is usually based on the reputation of its creators. Most of the courses at Coursera are university education programs created by well-known, highly reputable institutions. These courses include interaction with a teacher, who is also a well-known education professional. Upon completion of a course, students usually receive certificates recognized by companies and educational institutions. All these factors add up to the value of the course, and it’s thanks to them that people are willing to pay for it.

In its turn, the Wiki token project could hardly offer any of the above. No collaboration with large institutions or renowned educators. Moreover, the highly specialized area of ​​expertise (cryptocurrency and blockchain) chosen did not imply the presence of educational professionals who could potentially create valuable educational content. Why would it be any better than free YouTube videos or easily searchable internet articles?

What we see here is just another technical embodiment of a dubious business idea. Having neither a well-thought-out concept nor a product, the team rushed to implement it using fashionable technology. The result is a technical wrapper with no content and no interest outside of blockchain hysteria.

As of October 2020, the project’s website is no longer available and its social media accounts have been dead for a couple of years.

Conclusions

The projects listed above did not in fact offer anything except technical execution that was fashionable at the time. Hastily launched on the wave of blockchain popularity, with no market or audience research, they were unable to offer any meaningful value to a potential customer.

One of the key marketing rules: Sell the problem to be solved, not the product you offer. Product developers should always think about consumer needs first. Otherwise, they risk ending up in the same way as the developers of the projects mentioned above — creating only product packaging that has no intrinsic value.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Bert Kozma is a writer and an associate editor at Cryptogeek.info. Previously a sales and marketing expert, he has been an author covering cryptocurrency and financial markets for the last decade. He holds a bachelor’s degree in international business from Saimaa University of Applied Sciences.

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[suzanneshannon]

Chapter 4: Search

Previously in web history…

After an influx of rapid browser development following the creation of the web, Mosaic becomes the popular choice. Recognizing the commercial potential of the web, a team at O’Reilly builds GNN, the first commercial website. With something to browse with, and something to browse for, more and more people begin to turn to the web. Many create small, personal sites of their own. The best the web has to offer becomes almost impossible to find.

eBay had had enough of these spiders. They were fending them off by the thousands. Their servers buzzed with nonstop activity; a relentless stream of trespassers. One aggressor, however, towered above the rest. Bidder’s Edge, which billed itself as an auction aggregator, would routinely crawl the pages of eBay to extract its content and list it on its own site alongside other auction listings.

The famed auction site had unsuccessfully tried blocking Bidder’s Edge in the past. Like an elaborate game of Whac-A-Mole, they would restrict the IP address of a Bidder’s Edge server, only to be breached once again by a proxy server with a new one. Technology had failed. Litigation was next.

eBay filed suit against Bidder’s Edge in December of 1999, citing a handful of causes. That included “an ancient trespass theory known to legal scholars as trespass to chattels, basically a trespass or interference with real property — objects, animals, or, in this case, servers.” eBay, in other words, was arguing that Bidder’s Edge was trespassing — in the most medieval sense of that word — on their servers. In order for it to constitute trespass to chattels, eBay had to prove that the trespassers were causing harm. That their servers were buckling under the load, they argued, was evidence of that harm.

eBay in 1999

Judge Ronald M. Whyte found that last bit compelling. Quite a bit of back and forth followed, in one of the strangest lawsuits of a new era that included the phrase “rude robots” entering the official court record. These robots — as opposed to the “polite” ones — ignored eBay’s requests to block spidering on their sites, and made every attempt to circumvent counter measures. They were, by the judge’s estimation, trespassing. Whyte granted an injunction to stop Bidder’s Edge from crawling eBay until it was all sorted out.

Several appeals and countersuits and counter-appeals later, the matter was settled. Bidder’s Edge paid eBay an undisclosed amount and promptly shut their doors. eBay had won this particular battle. They had gotten rid of the robots. But the actual war was already lost. The robots — rude or otherwise — were already here.

If not for Stanford University, web search may have been lost. It is the birthplace of Yahoo!, Google and Excite. It ran the servers that ran the code that ran the first search engines. The founders of both Yahoo! and Google are alumni. But many of the most prominent players in search were not in the computer science department. They were in the symbolic systems program.

Symbolic systems was created at Stanford in 1985 as a study of the “relationship between natural and artificial systems that represent, process, and act on information.” Its interdisciplinary approach is rooted at the intersection of several fields: linguistics, mathematics, semiotics, psychology, philosophy, and computer science.

These are the same fields of study one would find at the heart of artificial intelligence research in the second half of the 20ᵗʰ century. But this isn’t the A.I. in its modern smart home manifestation, but in the more classical notion conceived by computer scientists as a roadmap to the future of computing technology. It is the understanding of machines as a way to augment the human mind. That parallel is not by accident. One of the most important areas of study at the symbolics systems program is artificial intelligence.

Numbered among the alumni of the program are several of the founders of Excite and Srinija Srinivasan, the fourth employee at Yahoo!. Her work in artificial intelligence led to a position at the ambitious A.I. research lab Cyc right out of college.

Marisa Mayer, an early employee at Google and, later, Yahoo!’s CEO, also drew on A.I. research during her time in the symbolic systems program. Her groundbreaking thesis project used natural language processing to help its users find the best flights through a simple conversation with a computer. “You look at how people learn, how people reason, and ask a computer to do the same things. It’s like studying the brain without the gore,” she would later say of the program.

Marissa Mayer in 1999

Search on the web stems from this one program at one institution at one brief moment in time. Not everyone involved in search engines studied that program — the founders of both Yahoo! and Google, for instance, were graduate students of computer science. But the ideology of search is deeply rooted in the tradition of artificial intelligence. The goal of search, after all, is to extract from the brain a question, and use machines to provide a suitable answer.

At Yahoo!, the principles of artificial intelligence acted as a guide, but it would be aided by human perspective. Web crawlers, like Excite, would bear the burden of users’ queries and attempt to map websites programmatically to provide intelligent results.

However, it would be at Google that A.I. would become an explicitly stated goal. Steven Levy, who wrote the authoritative book on the history of Google, In the Plex, describes Google as a “vehicle to realize the dream of artificial intelligence in augmenting humanity.” Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would mention A.I. constantly. They even brought it up in their first press conference.

The difference would be a matter of approach. A tension that would come to dominate search for half a decade. The directory versus the crawler. The precision of human influence versus the completeness of machines. Surfers would be on one side and, on the other, spiders. Only one would survive.

The first spiders were crude. They felt around in the dark until they found the edge of the web. Then they returned home. Sometimes they gathered little bits of information about the websites they crawled. In the beginning, they gathered nothing at all.

One of the earliest web crawlers was developed at MIT by Matthew Gray. He used his World Wide Wanderer to go and find every website on the web. He wasn’t interested in the content of those sites, he merely wanted to count them up. In the summer of 1993, the first time he sent his crawler out, it got to 130. A year later, it would count 3,000. By 1995, that number grew to just shy of 30,000.

Like many of his peers in the search engine business, Gray was a disciple of information retrieval, a subset of computer science dedicated to knowledge sharing. In practice, information retrieval often involves a robot (also known as “spiders, crawlers, wanderers, and worms”) that crawls through digital documents and programmatically collects their contents. They are then parsed and stored in a centralized “index,” a shortcut that eliminates the need to go and crawl every document each time a search is made. Keeping that index up to date is a constant struggle, and robots need to be vigilant; going back out and re-crawling information on a near constant basis.

The World Wide Web posed a problematic puzzle. Rather than a predictable set of documents, a theoretically infinite number of websites could live on the web. These needed to be stored in a central index —which would somehow be kept up to date. And most importantly, the content of those sites needed to be connected to whatever somebody wanted to search, on the fly and in seconds. The challenge proved irresistible for some information retrieval researchers and academics. People like Jonathan Fletcher.

Fletcher, a former graduate and IT employee at the University of Stirling in Scotland, didn’t like how hard it was to find websites. At the time, people relied on manual lists, like the WWW Virtual Library maintained at CERN, or Mosaic’s list of “What’s New” that they updated daily. Fletcher wanted to handle it differently. “With a degree in computing science and an idea that there had to be a better way, I decided to write something that would go and look for me.”

He built Jumpstation in 1993, one of the earliest examples of a searchable index. His crawler would go out, following as many links as it could, and bring them back to a searchable, centralized database. Then it would start over. To solve for the issue of the web’s limitless vastness, Fletcher began by crawling only the titles and some metadata from each webpage. That kept his index relatively small, but but it also restricted search to the titles of pages.

Fletcher was not alone. After tinkering for several months, WebCrawler launched in April of 1994 out of the University of Washington. It holds the distinction of being the first search engine to crawl entire webpages and make them searchable. By November of that year, WebCrawler had served 1 million queries. At Carnegie Mellon, Michael Maudlin released his own spider-based search engine variant named for the Latin translation of wolf spider, Lycos. By 1995, it had indexed over a million webpages.

Search didn’t stay in universities long. Search engines had a unique utility for wayward web users on the hunt for the perfect site. Many users started their web sessions on a search engine. Netscape Navigator — the number one browser for new web users — connected users directly to search engines on their homepage. Getting listed by Netscape meant eyeballs. And eyeballs meant lucrative advertising deals.

In the second half of the 1990’s, a number of major players entered the search engine market. InfoSeek, initially a paid search option, was picked up by Disney, and soon became the default search engine for Netscape. AOL swooped in and purchased WebCrawler as part of a bold strategy to remain competitive on the web. Lycos was purchased by a venture capitalist who transformed it into a fully commercial enterprise.

Excite.com, another crawler started by Stanford alumni and a rising star in the search engine game for its depth and accuracy of results, was offered three million dollars not long after they launched. Its six co-founders lined up two couches, one across from another, and talked it out all night. They decided to stick with the product and bring in a new CEO. There would be many more millions to be made.

Excite in 1996

AltaVista, already a bit late to the game at the end of 1995, was created by the Digital Equipment Corporation. It was initially built to demonstrate the processing power of DEC computers. They quickly realized that their multithreaded crawler was able to index websites at a far quicker rate than their competitors. AltaVista would routinely deploy its crawlers — what one researcher referred to as a “brood of spiders” — to index thousands of sites at a time.

As a result, AltaVista was able to index virtually the entire web, nearly 10 million webpages at launch. By the following year, in 1996, they’d be indexing over 100 million. Because of the efficiency and performance of their machines, AltaVista was able to solve the scalability problem. Unlike some of their predecessors, they were able to make the full content of websites searchable, and they re-crawled sites every few weeks, a much more rapid pace than early competitors, who could take months to update their index. They set the standard for the depth and scope of web crawlers.

AltaVista in 1996

Never fully at rest, AltaVista used its search engine as a tool for innovation, experimenting with natural language processing, translation tools, and multi-lingual search. They were often ahead of their time, offering video and image search years before that would come to be an expected feature.

Those spiders that had not been swept up in the fervor couldn’t keep up. The universities hosting the first search engines were not at all pleased to see their internet connections bloated with traffic that wasn’t even related to the university. Most universities forced the first experimental search engines, like Jumpstation, to shut down. Except, that is, at Stanford.

Stanford’s history with technological innovation begins in the second half of the 20th century. The university was, at that point, teetering on the edge of becoming a second-tier institution. They had been losing ground and lucrative contracts to their competitors on the East Coast. Harvard and MIT became the sites of a groundswell of research in the wake of World War II. Stanford was being left behind.

In 1951, in a bid to reverse course on their downward trajectory, Dean of Engineering Frederick Terman brokered a deal with the city of Palo Alto. Stanford University agreed to annex 700 acres of land for a new industrial park that upstart companies in California could use. Stanford would get proximity to energetic innovation. The businesses that chose to move there would gain unique access to the Stanford student body for use on their product development. And the city of Palo Alto would get an influx of new taxes.

Hewlett-Packard was one of the first companies to move in. They ushered in a new era of computing-focused industry that would soon be known as Silicon Valley. The Stanford Research Park (later renamed Stanford Industrial Park) would eventually host Xerox during a time of rapid success and experimentation. Facebook would spend their nascent years there, growing into the behemoth it would become. At the center of it all was Stanford.

The research park transformed the university from one of stagnation to a site of entrepreneurship and cutting-edge technology. It put them at the heart of the tech industry. Stanford would embed itself — both logistically and financially — in the crucial technological developments of the second half of the 20ᵗʰ century, including the internet and the World Wide Web.

The potential success of Yahoo!, therefore, did not go unnoticed.

Jerry Yang and David Filo were not supposed to be working on Yahoo!. They were, however, supposed to be working together. They had met years ago, when David was Jerry’s teaching assistant in the Stanford computer science program. Yang eventually joined Filo as a graduate student and — after building a strong rapport — they soon found themselves working on a project together.

As they crammed themselves into a university trailer to begin working through their doctoral project, their relationship become what Yang has often described as perfectly balanced. “We’re both extremely tolerant of each other, but extremely critical of everything else. We’re both extremely stubborn, but very unstubborn when it comes to just understanding where we need to go. We give each other the space we need, but also help each other when we need it.”

In 1994, Filo showed Yang the web. In just a single moment, their focus shifted. They pushed their intended computer science thesis to the side, procrastinating on it by immersing themselves into the depths of the World Wide Web. Days turned into weeks which turned into months of surfing the web and trading links. The two eventually decided to combine their lists in a single place, a website hosted on their Stanford internet connection. It was called Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web, launched first to Stanford students in 1993 and then to the world in January of 1994. As catchy as that name wasn’t, the idea (and traffic) took off as friends shared with other friends.

Jerry and David’s Guide was a directory. Like the virtual library started at CERN, Yang and Filo organized websites into various categories that they made up on the fly. Some of these categories had strange or salacious names. Others were exactly what you might expect. When one category got too big, they split it apart. It was ad-hoc and clumsy, but not without charm. Through their classifications, Yang and Filo had given their site a personality. Their personality. In later years, Yang would commonly refer to this as the “voice of Yahoo!”

That voice became a guide — as the site’s original name suggested — for new users of the web. Their web crawling competitors were far more adept at the art of indexing millions of sites at a time. Yang and Filo’s site featured only a small subset of the web. But it was, at least by their estimation, the best of what the web had to offer. It was the cool web. It was also a web far easier to navigate than ever before.

Jerry Yang (left) and David Filo (right) in 1995 (Yahoo, via Flickr)

At the end of 1994, Yang and Filo renamed their site to Yahoo! (an awkward forced acronym for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle). By then, they were getting almost a hundred thousand hits a day, sometimes temporarily taking down Stanford’s internet in the process. Most other universities would have closed down the site and told them to get back to work. But not Stanford. Stanford had spent decades preparing for on-campus businesses just like this one. They kept the server running, and encouraged its creators to stake their own path in Silicon Valley.

Throughout 1994, Netscape had included Yahoo! in their browser. There was a button in the toolbar labeled “Net Directory” that linked directly to Yahoo!. Marc Andreessen, believing in the site’s future, agreed to host their website on Netscape’s servers until they were able to get on steady ground.

Yahoo! homepage in Netscape Navigator, circa 1994

Yang and Filo rolled up their sleeves, and began talking to investors. It wouldn’t take long. By the spring of 1996, they would have a new CEO and hold their own record-setting IPO, outstripping even their gracious host, Netscape. By then, they became the most popular destination on the web by a wide margin.

In the meantime, the web had grown far beyond the grasp of two friends swapping links. They had managed to categorize tens of thousands of sites, but there were hundreds of thousands more to crawl. “I picture Jerry Yang as Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times,” one journalist described, “confronted with an endless stream of new work that is only increasing in speed.” The task of organizing sites would have to go to somebody else. Yang and Filo found help in a fellow Stanford alumni, someone they had met years ago while studying abroad together in Japan, Srinija Srinivasan, a graduate of the symbolic systems program. Many of the earliest hires at Yahoo! were given slightly absurd titles that always ended in “Yahoo.” Yang and Filo went by Chief Yahoos. Srinivasan’s job title was Ontological Yahoo.

That is a deliberate and precise job title, and it was not selected by accident. Ontology is the study of being, an attempt to break the world into its component parts. It has manifested in many traditions throughout history and the world, but it is most closely associated with the followers of Socrates, in the work of Plato, and later in the groundbreaking text Metaphysics, written by Aristotle. Ontology asks the question “What exists?”and uses it as a thought experiment to construct an ideology of being and essence.

As computers blinked into existence, ontology found a new meaning in the emerging field of artificial intelligence. It was adapted to fit the more formal hierarchical categorizations required for a machine to see the world; to think about the world. Ontology became a fundamental way to describe the way intelligent machines break things down into categories and share knowledge.

The dueling definitions of the ontology of metaphysics and computer science would have been familiar to Srinija Srinivasan from her time at Stanford. The combination of philosophy and artificial intelligence in her studies gave her a unique perspective on hierarchical classifications. It was this experience that she brought to her first job after college at the Cyc Project, an artificial intelligence research lab with a bold project: to teach a computer common sense.

Srinija Srinivasan (Getty Images/James D. Wilson)

At Yahoo!, her task was no less bold. When someone looked for something on the site, they didn’t want back a random list of relevant results. They wanted the result they were actually thinking about, but didn’t quite know how to describe. Yahoo! had to — in a manner of seconds — figure out what its users really wanted. Much like her work in artificial intelligence, Srinivasan needed to teach Yahoo! how to think about a query and infer the right results.

To do that, she would need to expand the voice of Yahoo! to thousands of more websites in dozens of categories and sub-categories without losing the point of view established by Jerry and David. She would need to scale that perspective. “This is not a perfunctory file-keeping exercise. This is defining the nature of being,” she once said of her project. “Categories and classifications are the basis for each of our worldviews.”

At a steady pace, she mapped an ontology of human experience onto the site. She began breaking up the makeshift categories she inherited from the site’s creators, re-constituting them into more concrete and findable indexes. She created new categories and destroyed old ones. She sub-divided existing subjects into new, more precise ones. She began cross-linking results so that they could live within multiple categories. Within a few months she had overhauled the site with a fresh hierarchy.

That hierarchical ontology, however, was merely a guideline. The strength of Yahoo!’s expansion lay in the 50 or so content managers she had hired in the meantime. They were known as surfers. Their job was to surf the web — and organize it.

Each surfer was coached in the methodology of Yahoo! but were left with a surprising amount of editorial freedom. They cultivated the directory with their own interests, meticulously deliberating over websites and where they belong. Each decision could be strenuous, and there were missteps and incorrectly categorized items along the way. But by allowing individual personality to dictate hierarchal choices, Yahoo! retained its voice.

They gathered as many sites as they could, adding hundreds each day. Yahoo! surfers did not reveal everything on the web to their site’s visitors. They showed them what was cool. And that meant everything to users grasping for the very first time what the web could do.

At the end of 1995, the Yahoo! staff was watching their traffic closely. Huddled around consoles, employees would check their logs again and again, looking for a drop in visitors. Yahoo! had been the destination for the “Internet Directory” button on Netscape for years. It had been the source of their growth and traffic. Netscape had made the decision, at the last minute (and seemingly at random), to drop Yahoo!, replacing them with the new kids on the block, Excite.com. Best case scenario: a manageable drop. Worst case: the demise of Yahoo!.

But the drop never came. A day went by, and then another. And then a week. And then a few weeks. And Yahoo! remained the most popular website. Tim Brady, one of Yahoo!’s first employees, describes the moment with earnest surprise. “It was like the floor was pulled out in a matter of two days, and we were still standing. We were looking around, waiting for things to collapse in a lot of ways. And we were just like, I guess we’re on our own now.”

Netscape wouldn’t keep their directory button exclusive for long. By 1996, they would begin allowing other search engines to be listed on their browser’s “search” feature. A user could click a button and a drop-down of options would appear, for a fee. Yahoo! bought themselves back in to the drop-down. They were joined by four other search engines, Lycos, InfoSeek, Excite, and AltaVista.

By that time, Yahoo! was the unrivaled leader. It had transformed its first mover advantage into a new strategy, one bolstered by a successful IPO and an influx of new investment. Yahoo! wanted to be much more than a simple search engine. Their site’s transformation would eventually be called a portal. It was a central location for every possible need on the web. Through a number of product expansions and aggressive acquisitions, Yahoo! released a new suite of branded digital products. Need to send an email? Try Yahoo! Mail. Looking to create website? There’s Yahoo! Geocities. Want to track your schedule? Use Yahoo! Calendar. And on and on the list went.

Yahoo! in 1996

Competitors rushed the fill the vacuum of the #2 slot. In April of 1996, Yahoo!, Lycos and Excite all went public to soaring stock prices. Infoseek had their initial offering only a few months later. Big deals collided with bold blueprints for the future. Excite began positioning itself as a more vibrant alternative to Yahoo! with more accurate search results from a larger slice of the web. Lycos, meanwhile, all but abounded the search engine that had brought them initial success to chase after the portal-based game plan that had been a windfall for Yahoo!.

The media dubbed the competition the “portal wars,” a fleeting moment in web history when millions of dollars poured into a single strategy. To be the biggest, best, centralized portal for web surfers. Any service that offered users a destination on the web was thrown into the arena. Nothing short of the future of the web (and a billion dollar advertising industry) was at stake.

In some ways, though, the portal wars were over before they started. When Excite announced a gigantic merger with @Home, an Internet Service Provider, to combine their services, not everyone thought it was a wise move. “AOL and Yahoo! were already in the lead,” one investor and cable industry veteran noted, “and there was no room for a number three portal.” AOL had just enough muscle and influence to elbow their way into the #2 slot, nipping at the heels of Yahoo!. Everyone else would have to go toe-to-toe with Goliath. None were ever able to pull it off.

Battling their way to market dominance, most search engines had simply lost track of search. Buried somewhere next to your email and stock ticker and sports feed was, in most cases, a second rate search engine you could use to find things — only not often and not well. That’s is why it was so refreshing when another search engine out of Stanford launched with just a single search box and two buttons, its bright and multicolored logo plastered across the top.

A few short years after it launched, Google was on the shortlist of most popular sites. In an interview with PBS Newshour in 2002, co-founder Larry Page described their long-term vision. “And, actually, the ultimate search engine, which would understand, you know, exactly what you wanted when you typed in a query, and it would give you the exact right thing back, in computer science we call that artificial intelligence.”

Google could have started anywhere. It could have started with anything. One employee recalls an early conversation with the site’s founders where he was told “we are not really interested in search. We are making an A.I.” Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the creators of Google, were not trying to create the web’s greatest search engine. They were trying to create the web’s most intelligent website. Search was only their most logical starting point.

Imprecise and clumsy, the spider-based search engines of 1996 faced an uphill battle. AltaVista had proved that the entirety of the web, tens of millions of webpages, could be indexed. But unless you knew your way around a few boolean logic commands, it was hard to get the computer to return the right results. The robots were not yet ready to infer, in Page’s words, “exactly what you wanted.”

Yahoo! had filled in these cracks of technology with their surfers. The surfers were able to course-correct the computers, designing their directory piece by piece rather than relying on an algorithm. Yahoo! became an arbiter of a certain kind of online chic; tastemakers reimagined for the information age. The surfers of Yahoo! set trends that would last for years. Your site would live or die by their hand. Machines couldn’t do that work on their own. If you wanted your machines to be intelligent, you needed people to guide them.

Page and Brin disagreed. They believed that computers could handle the problem just fine. And they aimed to prove it.

That unflappable confidence would come to define Google far more than their “don’t be evil” motto. In the beginning, their laser-focus on designing a different future for the web would leave them blind to the day-to-day grind of the present. On not one, but two occasions, checks made out to the company for hundreds of thousands of dollars were left in desk drawers or car trunks until somebody finally made the time to deposit them. And they often did things different. Google’s offices, for instances, were built to simulate a college dorm, an environment the founders felt most conducive to big ideas.

Google would eventually build a literal empire on top of a sophisticated, world-class infrastructure of their own design, fueled by the most elaborate and complex (and arguably invasive) advertising mechanism ever built. There are few companies that loom as large as Google. This one, like others, started at Stanford.

Even among the most renowned artificial intelligence experts, Terry Winograd, a computer scientist and Stanford professor, stands out in the crowd. He was also Larry Page’s advisor and mentor when he was a graduate student in the computer science department. Winograd has often recalled the unorthodox and unique proposals he would receive from Page for his thesis project, some of which involved “space tethers or solar kites.” “It was science fiction more than computer science,” he would later remark.

But for all of his fanciful flights of imagination, Page always returned to the World Wide Web. He found its hyperlink structure mesmerizing. Its one-way links — a crucial ingredient in the web’s success — had led to a colossal proliferation of new websites. In 1996, when Page first began looking at the web, there were tens of thousands of sites being added every week. The master stroke of the web was to enable links that only traveled in one direction. That allowed the web to be decentralized, but without a central database tracking links, it was nearly impossible to collect a list of all of the sites that linked to a particular webpage. Page wanted to build a graph of who was linking to who; an index he could use to cross-reference related websites.

Page understood that the hyperlink was a digital analog to academic citations. A key indicator of the value of a particular academic paper is the amount of times it has been cited. If a paper is cited often (by other high quality papers), it is easier to vouch for its reliability. The web works the same way. The more often your site is linked to (what’s known as a backlink), the more dependable and accurate it is likely to be.

Theoretically, you can determine the value of a website by adding up all of the other websites that link to it. That’s only one layer though. If 100 sites link back to you, but each of them has only ever been linked to one time, that’s far less valuable than if five sites that each have been linked to 100 times link back to you. So it’s not simply how many links you have, but the quality of those links. If you take both of those dimensions and aggregate sites using backlinks as a criteria, you can very quickly start to assemble a list of sites ordered by quality.

John Battelle describes the technical challenge facing Page in his own retelling of the Google story, The Search.

Page realized that a raw count of links to a page would be a useful guide to that page’s rank. He also saw that each link needed its own ranking, based on the link count of its originating page. But such an approach creates a difficult and recursive mathematical challenge — you not only have to count a particular page’s links, you also have to count the links attached to the links. The math gets complicated rather quickly.

Fortunately, Page already knew a math prodigy. Sergey Brin had proven his brilliance to the world a number of times before he began a doctoral program in the Stanford computer science department. Brin and Page had crossed paths on several occasions, a relationship that began on rocky ground but grew towards mutual respect. The mathematical puzzle at the center of Page’s idea was far too enticing for Brin to pass up.

He got to work on a solution. “Basically we convert the entire Web into a big equation, with several hundred million variables,” he would later explain, “which are the page ranks of all the Web pages, and billions of terms, which are the links. And we’re able to solve that equation.” Scott Hassan, the seldom talked about third co-founder of Google who developed their first web crawler, summed it up a bit more concisely, describing Google’s algorithm as an attempt to “surf the web backward!”

The result was PageRank — as in Larry Page, not webpage. Brin, Page, and Hassan developed an algorithm that could trace backlinks of a site to determine the quality of a particular webpage. The higher value of a site’s backlinks, the higher up the rankings it climbed. They had discovered what so many others had missed. If you trained a machine on the right source — backlinks — you could get remarkable results.

It was only after that that they began matching their rankings to search queries when they realized PageRank fit best in a search engine. They called their search engine Google. It was launched on Stanford’s internet connection in August of 1996.

Google in 1998

Google solved the relevancy problem that had plagued online search since its earliest days. Crawlers like Lycos, AltaVista and Excite were able to provide a list of webpages that matched a particular search. They just weren’t able to sort them right, so you had to go digging to find the result you wanted. Google’s rankings were immediately relevant. The first page of your search usually had what you needed. They were so confident in their results they added an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button which took users directly to the first result for their search.

Google’s growth in their early days was not unlike Yahoo!’s in theirs. They spread through word of mouth, from friends to friends of friends. By 1997, they had grown big enough to put a strain on the Stanford network, something Yang and Filo had done only a couple of years earlier. Stanford once again recognized possibility. It did not push Google off their servers. Instead, Stanford’s advisors pushed Page and Brin in a commercial direction.

Initially, the founders sought to sell or license their algorithm to other search engines. They took meetings with Yahoo!, Infoseek and Excite. No one could see the value. They were focused on portals. In a move that would soon sound absurd, they each passed up the opportunity to buy Google for a million dollars or less, and Page and Brin could not find a partner that recognized their vision.

One Stanford faculty member was able to connect them with a few investors, including Jeff Bezos and David Cheriton (which got them those first few checks that sat in a desk drawer for weeks). They formally incorporated in September of 1998, moving into a friend’s garage, bringing a few early employees along, including symbolics systems alumni Marissa Mayer.

Larry Page (left) and Sergey Brin (right) started Google in a friend’s garage.

Even backed by a million dollar investment, the Google founders maintained a philosophy of frugality, simplicity, and swiftness. Despite occasional urging from their investors, they resisted the portal strategy and remained focused on search. They continued tweaking their algorithm and working on the accuracy of their results. They focused on their machines. They wanted to take the words that someone searched for and turn them into something actually meaningful. If you weren’t able to find the thing you were looking for in the top three results, Google had failed.

Google was followed by a cloud of hype and positive buzz in the press. Writing in Newsweek, Steven Levy described Google as a “high-tech version of the Oracle of Delphi, positioning everyone a mouse click away from the answers to the most arcane questions — and delivering simple answers so efficiently that the process becomes addictive.” It was around this time that “googling” — a verb form of the site synonymous with search — entered the common vernacular. The portal wars were still waging, but Google was poking its head up as a calm, precise alternative to the noise.

At the end of 1998, they were serving up ten thousand searches a day. A year later, that would jump to seven million a day. But quietly, behind the scenes, they began assembling the pieces of an empire.

As the web grew, technologists and journalists predicted the end of Google; they would never be able to keep up. But they did, outlasting a dying roster of competitors. In 2001, Excite went bankrupt, Lycos closed down, and Disney suspended Infoseek. Google climbed up and replaced them. It wouldn’t be until 2006 that Google would finally overtake Yahoo! as the number one website. But by then, the company would transform into something else entirely.

After securing another round of investment in 1999, Google moved into their new headquarters and brought on an army of new employees. The list of fresh recruits included former engineers at AltaVista, and leading artificial intelligence expert Peter Norving. Google put an unprecedented focus on advancements in technology. Better servers. Faster spiders. Bigger indexes. The engineers inside Google invented a web infrastructure that had, up to that point, been only theoretical.

They trained their machines on new things, and new products. But regardless of the application, translation or email or pay-per-click advertising, they rested on the same premise. Machines can augment and re-imagine human intelligence, and they can do it at limitless scale. Google took the value proposition of artificial intelligence and brought it into the mainstream.

In 2001, Page and Brin brought in Silicon Valley veteran Eric Schmidt to run things as their CEO, a role he would occupy for a decade. He would oversee the company during its time of greatest growth and innovation. Google employee #4 Heather Cairns recalls his first days on the job. “He did this sort of public address with the company and he said, ‘I want you to know who your real competition is.’ He said, ‘It’s Microsoft.’ And everyone went, What?“

Bill Gates would later say, “In the search engine business, Google blew away the early innovators, just blew them away.” There would come a time when Google and Microsoft would come face to face. Eric Schmidt was correct about where Google was going. But it would take years for Microsoft to recognize Google as a threat. In the second half of the 1990’s, they were too busy looking in their rearview mirror at another Silicon Valley company upstart that had swept the digital world. Microsoft’s coming war with Netscape would subsume the web for over half a decade.

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[nightking101-blog]

How to Compare Online Casinos

Whether gaming on the internet is just actually really a serious pastime for either you personally or perhaps even a casual hobby, then choosing between your countless internet casinos available on the web now can be quite intimidating. After every internet gamer gets their own distinctive personality, likes, dislikes and favorite games. As every player differs, are casinos that are online. Below are the fundamentals to think about when doing your research for an internet casino which may fulfill your gaming demands and then some.

It is All About the Games

If it comes to internet casinos, I really come to play with and I really like to succeed. But first of all, I really come to playwith. Which usually means you're not planning to stay playing with a match that you never appreciate. Even in the event that you play with a match shared to casinos such as poker, even if the port is feeble you might be guaranteed to earn an easy"exit."

As on the web casinos simply contain games at which wagers are included, you could think that the choices are somewhat limited, however you mightn't be further from the reality. Many businesses pride themselves thinking beyond the box also offering fresh and advanced games which improve the bar concerning images, sound and playability. It's a great idea to obtain an notion which online casinos take matches that you're thinking about playingwith. Businesses like Rival and Cryptologic are simply a couple of many top internet casino software providers which push the envelope with every match they released.

Additionally understand that every program provider has their particular personality. Rival, as I mentioned previously, has leading matches, but has a tendency to appeal for the younger audience of internet casino players. They focus more on games and graphics which attract"video gamers" significantly more than anybody. Where-as Cryptologic has a knack for shooting classic matches and making them exciting and fresh .

Banking Features

Needless to say people when playing on the web, one really wants to be certain they can get into their cash as quickly and conveniently as you can. Most online casinos provide simple depositing procedures where you deposit money into an account for used in that specific 토토사이트. Still, maybe not every casino functions exactly the exact same way. RTG and Playtech feature their very particular applications techniques to take care of money while Cryptologic uses"Ecash."

Start Looking to Peer Reviews

An internet casino will say everything and anything for one to gamble in their own online casino. Would you blame them? They would like to create money. It's in their own very best interest to market their internet casino while the largest and the most useful. For that reason, your best choice on re searching an internet casino would be to hunt for customer reviews on gaming review sites.

Online gamers are enthusiastic about the casinos that they poisonous and love towards people they despise. Before investing in a dime, it compels one to learn a few reviews and take advantage of the ability of the others. There are many web sites on the market that offer topnotch, 3rd party reviews of internet casinos. Though you're going to be gaming at the casino, then it's best never to bet to an internet casino.

Watch out for Sign Up Bonuses

Subscribe to bonuses so much as I'm concerned will be the candies a dishonest stranger uses to tempt a youngster to a van. They state nothing to get the internet casino game play or customer services. I'll make use of another simile. They have been just like a A D incentive out of an car dealer ship create there to draw on suckers in to the clutches of sales man. The point is, almost always there is a grab. From the aforementioned scenarios you get kidnapped or possess the older"switcharoo" pulled and wind up paying a lot more than you ever desired to get a vehicle.

Online casinos really are not any different. Frequently the join bonus offer some extreme number of free dollars. That is exactly what it says at first glance. However, what they don't really explain to you is that in the event you would like to have that money to cover off, you might need to pay for a level more excessive amount in wagers and soon you meet with your minimum which allows you out cash. . .if you get any winnings which is.

Are You Currently Really a Mac or a PC?

While every internet casino is PC friendly, the exact same can't be said for Macintosh computers. But, Onlinecasino managers are not blind and many allow us platforms which can be appropriate for PC and the rising amount of Mac users. Therefore, if you are on a Mac, your pick is rather limited. If you are on the PC, the internet casino world is your oyster.

ECOGRA Certified Casinos

There really certainly are a range of thirdparty internet casino watchdogs on the market, every one them tracking the casinos to realize they are playing fair. The very trusted of these is eCogra (short for eCommerce Online Gaming Regulation and Assurance). There's no solution to be certain any internet casino is totally fair 100 percent of their time. But simply because a casino has been currently certified with eCogra could be your very ideal method to know play would be as fair as they could be.

There are additional names on the market, however, not one as professionally trusted as eCogra. Although some might undoubtedly perform their job and better than eCogra, their own standing is unquestionably strongest. Theoretically, anybody can begin a watch dog company and generate a cachet. By visiting an eCogra certified casino, then you are aware they stake their reputation on the very fact your gaming experience is going to soon be a reasonable one.

Know the Law

Though it really should not be, on the web gaming is basically illegal in most places, the United States included. In many places where it's legal, it's highly regulated. For that reason, whether online gaming is legal in the town or perhaps maybe not, it's very crucial that you be aware of the law before you begin spending. An internet casino allowing you access will certainly not signify that their services are legal where you're. It's hard for authorities to regulate the web and frequently the gamer is usually the sole in danger. If your capital have been captured, the casino gets their money since it's valid for some casinos to just accept deposits. Thus prior to making a deposit, then explore online gaming laws specific about where your home is to get a searchable gambling experience.

[michiganprelawland]

Coronavirus Contact Tracing Apps vs. Personal Privacy

By Kate Wills, Michigan State University Class of 2023

May 29, 2020

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, leaders have begun to explore other options to track the disease. When the virus reached the United States, many governors chose to implement stay-at-home orders to achieve what leaders called “flattening the curve” of COVID-19 infections. Because this is the most urgent imperative of leaders, it is “crucial to know where public-health strategies like stay-at-home orders were working and where they were not” [1].

Along with examining where social distancing is (and isn’t) being practiced, an essential component to slowing the spread of this virus is contact tracing. Contact Tracing is the recording of infected people to identify (and inform) anyone who may have been in contact with an infected person so that they may quickly quarantine to avoid the spread of the virus.

Traditionally, this tracing is done in a private setting, with health care workers interviewing individuals to review their health and movements [1]. However, the method used previously could be slow at identifying where the infected person could have spread disease and who they could have infected.This method posed a problem to public health leaders – they needed a way to disperse this information quickly and accurately – but how?

The big tech industry had an answer. They would create apps that track people’s location and, when users logged their coronavirus diagnosis into the app, other app users that were in the same locations as the infected person would be notified. Because these apps would allow data to be presented in an accessible and searchable format, “the project would enable researchers and policy makers to see how members of the public move around their communities” as well as “guide policymakers as they grapple with when and where to lift stay-at-home orders” [1].

So far, these types of apps have yet to be widely implemented and used in the U.S. and have been voluntary for individuals to share the details of their location [2]. In China, however, these apps function more prominently and work differently than those proposed in the U.S. Each person who has signed up for the virus-tracking system by submitting their “personal information, recent travel, and health status” into the app receives a color code: green, yellow or red [3]. These colors indicate a person’s risk for infection, and “workers posted outside subways, offices, and malls stop anyone without a green code from entering’ [3].  While this method has produced positive results in slowing the spread of infection, there has been major backlash to suggestions of ranking citizens on a personal health index and warnings that this kind of tracking would be a violation of privacy and lead to discrimination against unhealthy people [3].

No matter where these apps will be implemented, there is concern over an invasion of privacy that they would bring. And, while contact tracing apps have not been widely used in the United States yet, Apple and Google have developed the technology to implement contact tracing apps in their most recent updates – the future of public health utilizing big tech is approaching quickly.

These major moves do not come without risks – although data is kept anonymous, “a number of studies have shown that they can be easily unmasked to reveal identities,” including “names, addresses, phone numbers,” and more [1].  Additionally, there are fears surrounding the submission of privacy fundamental to these apps – Senator Maria Cantwell wrote of this new technology that “rights and data surrendered temporarily during an emergency can become very difficult to get back” [1].

The COVID-19 pandemic brings unprecedented problems and unique combatants that haven’t necessarily been legally addressed. Location tracking has been dealt with primarily in criminal investigations, which shed some light on privacy rights but do not address other uses of location data.

Carpenter v. United States

The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to privacy against unreasonable searches or seizures. In Camera v. Municipal Court of City and County of San Francisco, it was determined that the main purpose of this amendment was to “safeguard the privacy and security of individuals against arbitrary invasions by government officials,” a concept used in the Supreme Court case Carpenter v. United States. Carpenter solidified the extension of privacy to include cell-site location information held by cell phone carriers. The court determined that, because individuals have a reasonable expectation to privacy in their physical movements, allowing government access to cell-site records without a warrant would be unconstitutional [4]. Similarly, Riley v. California required warrants for the government to search a person’s cell phone data [5].

Carpenter v. United States

Riley v. California

As of now, these apps remain voluntary, and it seems unlikely that this aspect of the apps will change. Although the precedent set by Carpenter v. United States and Riley v. California covered criminal investigations, the takeaway stands clear – the government cannot use location data from cell phones without a warrant.  Because of this requirement, it appears unlikely that these apps will be mandatory, as that would violate a person’s choice for their physical location to be shared.

Ravi Naik, legal director of the data rights agency AWO, Matthew Ryder QC, Edward Craven of Matrix Chambers, and Gayatri Sarathy of Blackstone Chambers drafted a legal opinion on these new apps, stating that “there would need to be a clear and detailed legal basis for a mandatory system, set out in specific legislation” [6]. They also argued that sharing data held by healthcare and private organizations to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic could create “a number of legal problems… resulting in potential illegality” [6].

Concerns with this new technology reach further than legality: “nearly 3 in 5 Americans say they are either unable or unwilling to use the infection-alert system,” and “approximately 1 in 6 Americans do not have smartphones” necessary to the use of these apps [7]. These statistics are concerning to public health officials, as Oxford University researchers have suggested that, in order to be successful in stopping the viral spread, 60 percent of a country’s population must participate [7].

These apps will likely appear in the U.S. sometime soon, as leaders increasingly look for more efficient ways to track and slow the spread of COVID-19. However, much is up in the air as to how they will be used – or if they will be helpful at all – dependent on the willingness and ability of Americans to participate. Based on legal precedent, it is unlikely that they will become mandatory without changes in legislation, so major political moves will need to be made if the government strives to ensure maximum usage of these coronavirus tracking tools. However, because there is no exact legal precedent for a pandemic and public health utilization of cell-site location information during this unique crisis, there may be room for adjustment.

________________________________________________________________

Kate Wills is an Honors College student in Michigan State University majoring in International Relations (James Madison College) and Economics with a minor in Arabic. She plans on attending law school after graduation in 2023.

 _______________________________________________________________

[1] “Can We Track COVID-19 and Protect Privacy at the Same Time?” Sue Halpern, 27 April 2020https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/can-we-track-covid-19-and-protect-privacy-at-the-same-time

[2]“Coronavirus tracking technology raises privacy concerns: ‘It’s a little scary’” CBS news, 14 April 2020 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-tracking-technology-privacy-debate/

[3]“China’s Virus Apps May Outlast the Outbreak, Stirring Privacy Fears” Raymond Zhong, 26 May 2020https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/technology/china-coronavirus-surveillance.html?auth=login-email&login=email

[4]Carpenter v. United States, 22 June 2018

[5]Riley v. California, 25 June 2014

[6]“Covid-19 tracking app must satisfy human rights and data laws” Owen Bowcott, 3 May 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/covid-19-tracking-app-must-satisfy-human-rights-and-data-laws

[7] “Most Americans are not willing or able to use an app tracking coronavirus infections. That’s a problem for Big Tech’s plan to slow the pandemic” Craig Timberg, Drew Harwell, AlaunaSafarpour; 29 April 2020 https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/04/29/most-americans-are-not-willing-or-able-use-an-app-tracking-coronavirus-infections-thats-problem-big-techs-plan-slow-pandemic/

[lunamanar]

Hey, Luna, are you still doing the ask thing? If so, I was wondering if you had any headcanons regarding the Leonhart and Heartilly extended families? As in, do Squall, Linoa or Ellone have other still living relatives? People always talk about the parental issues in this game, but the rest of their families possibly being around never gets brought up.

I’m always “doing the ask thing,” haha~ 

(pardon me I’m gonna ramble real quick and then I’ll answer your actual questions)

I actually used to do this quite a lot before I got a new job and had to move my entire family of three people and eight(8, VIII) cats 500 miles northbound. Which was…incredibly stressful, and I just had no energy or brainspace left at the end of each day to communicate much, if at all, with large groups of people. So this stuff was right out. It pretty much tore me away from tumblr for a year and a half. I’ve been really bummed about that and kept trying to “get back into it,” but my several meager attempts at jumping back in got sidetracked by life responsibilities, and especially with tumblr’s new restrictions on external links not being searchable, the whole trawling for art thing I used to do just isn’t as feasible at this point in time because I have to edit each post very carefully so it will still show up in a search. That’s time-consuming. Maybe when I go back to 3rd shift in December (I hope) I’ll be able to art-hunt “full time,” again, but I just have a limited space in which to do that, now. 

However, I can still do asks! And I really enjoy them, they’re fun and engaging and, hell I admit, I like it when people want to hear my opinion on things. But I was having a hard time, uh…asking for asks, haha. It felt too much like I was begging for attention. But then stuff happened and I had the worst pain spike I’ve had all year, and I kinda just broke down and said I needed a distraction. My chronic pain issues can be absolutely debilitating, and can lay me flat in bed for days (I had to take two days off work last week). But if I can manage to engross myself in something creative, it’s like a shot of cortisone. I think I get something of a rush, an adrenaline/endorphin kick out of it, and it does a lot to mitigate whatever the hell it is that causes my problem. I mean, that’s probably true of a lot of illnesses; you get attention and positive feedback and your brain rewards you with pleasant chemicals. But whatever, it worked and now I feel like I’m getting back in the game. I just have to keep the momentum up, now. 

*cough* Ahem. So you asked me a thing. I will answer. 

I do have headcanons about Squall’s extended family, specifically. I’ve not built out Rinoa’s yet…partially because it just never really comes up in the stories I’ve either plotted out or written. So I can’t answer that part of it–yet–but I can talk about Squall’s. 

Working backwards: starting with Laguna’s side, Laguna is the oldest of two siblings, and not one, but both of them are kinda “black sheep” in the family. Partially it was their upbringing; Their mother, Elga Loire, was overworked and underappreciated, often working two jobs to keep food on the table (which she did very well). She didn’t have a lot of time to spend with her kids because of this, and the main reason for it was that their dad, Sevren Jr., was…kind of a loser? I mean, no, that’s not a good word, but a lot of people would call him that. He was an inventor. And always, always on the verge of the one that would make it big, this time. Automated chocobo saddles, “sliding” shoes to make walking more efficient, paramagic-powered chairs….yyyeah. You get why they were broke all the time. Sevren often traveled to demonstrate his newest creations, so he was absent a lot of the time, too. But when he came back, he would always bring the boys–Laguna and River (you must see where I’m going with this double-entendre)–some new toy or strange item from whatever country or town he’d visited. 

This was fascinating to Laguna, in particular. Even as a kid, he dreamed of traveling the world. When he got older, joining the army seemed like the fastest way to do that, soooo….he roped his two best friends into joining with him. Heh. 

Now, River…wasn’t into that stuff so much. He thought it was silly. He preferred to help Elga when she was at home, and even when she wasn’t, he ended up doing a lot of the house chores while his older brother went out and nearly died repeatedly trying to do dumb things. River was ‘fine’ just keeping to himself, reading and listening to music when he could get the radio to pick something up. As he grew up, he became a bit of a…punk? Like, he would be listening to Bad Religion in 1992. On the other hand, maybe Dream Theater when he was feeling happy. I imagine him looking a lot like Leon in KH2, but with hazel eyes (Sevren’s were brown) and no Griever all over his clothes. He cut his own hair so it always looked a bit jagged and unkempt, and he left it semi-long. Just generally prescient. He became pretty resentful of authority because he saw how it treated his mother and conspired to keep them all poor, and him too, when he got old enough to get a job (Laguna never had one until the army). It made him all the more determined to help his mother (and father, to an extent) weather the storm until the tides changed. 

But then…well. They changed. But not for the better. Their dad died, and very suddenly, of an embolism. And, bitter as she was about having to support the family nearly single-handedly, Elga Loire loved Sevren quite a bit, and fell into some pretty deep broken heart syndrome. Inconsolable, she lost both her jobs. Laguna had already traipsed off to the army with his friends, and wouldn’t be aware of any of this for several weeks. River was left to care for their mother alone, and although they owned their small home, she had to sell it just to make ends meet. She moved in with a friend, and River…well, she sent him to the army, too. She insisted, thinking it was the best way to get both her sons out of this mess. Laguna already seemed to be doing well. 

River did not do so well. He survived boot camp, but deserted his first year in service. 

Laguna never heard from him, after that…and their mother passed away not too long afterward. 

So…that’s Laguna’s end of it. As far as anyone knows, River is still out there. But Laguna hasn’t seen him in nearly 30 years. So, Squall has a missing uncle out there, somewhere, maybe. 

Raine’s side…haha, geez, I might need to make a chart. In some ways, Raine is easier because she has no siblings and doesn’t know who her dad is. But I’ve traced her lineage back a bit further, and it gets…weird, in places. I might not be able to describe all of it, here. 

Raine’s mother’s name is Gale. Gale is still alive, and Squall does meet her, once. It’s a solemn, one-time meeting, more an acknowledgement than a reunion. But it’s good. Gale is very practical. She never married, and never told Raine’s father she was pregnant (she didn’t like him for a permanent fixture). She was also a businesswoman. She owned and ran a hotel in middletown Dollet for many years. That’s where Raine got a lot of her experience before setting out on her own. Gale has sandy brown hair that she keeps short, and looks a bit like a taller Ellone in business casual, haha. But, but–those blue eyes. She has those. Her relation to Squall is evident. 

It’s important to remember that although I enjoy both “he named himself” and “it’s Raine’s maiden name” theories, I’m pretty firmly in the camp of Raine’s last name being Leonhart. The story of Gale’s mother, Shiara (this is Arashi [storm] with the syllables reversed), depends on it, because she is the originator. I can’t detail the entire thing here–just too long–but the brief synopsis is that Shiara was a sorceress, in a time when sorceresses (”witches”) and “resistance” groups hell-bent on killing them all were in a state of cold war with one another. When Shiara became a sorceress, she panicked and ran away. She ended up being captured by one of these resistance factions, and had what I can only call a very complicated relationship with the faction’s leader, Dericho (this is the river Jericho with the first letter changed, making it phonetically very similar to Derecho, which is yet another type of storm). 

Dericho’s faction was called, yes, the Pride, and they operated under a familiar leonine emblem. Of all his ancestors, Squall probably most closely resembles Dericho facially. Dericho is slightly shorter, his hair is a bit darker, and his eyes are a bit more on the grey side, but his posture, the way he carries himself, his facial expressions, his voice, even the sweep of his hair and the length he tends to keep it are all very familiar. A lot of those qualities were apparently recessive and just skipped a couple generations before thy found a match and popped up again. 

How Shiara came to have Gale is a story I’d personally rather tell in prose, but I will say that it was Dericho who essentially named her, telling her in all his years of vetting people who want to be worthy of being called a Lion, Shiara was the only person he’d met with the heart of one. She carried that with her the rest of her life.

She is not, sadly, alive, having died at a ripe old age (and not terribly, since she was prepared with a willing successor nearby). She never actually told Gale about her powers, and to the very last, Gale never knew. The touch of sorcery ended there, seemingly. Dericho is also gone. 

But I’m not done yet. One more generation, and this time, Hyne’s power is quite evident. Dericho’s mother, Hanwei, was a sorceress, his father was her knight, and they were quite open about it, feeling safe with it in their particular neck of the woods. Dericho was very familiar with the touch of his mother’s magic–she used it with him the way any mother would use a gentle hand, soothing scraped knees, gently grabbing his arm to pull him out of trouble–from fifteen feet away. His father, Mael[strom], was quite happy in his service to his wife and sorceress, and both Dericho’s parents loved him very much. When they embraced him, he could feel their connections tangling around him, and it was a very comfortable, safe way to be a child. 

Of course, we can’t have that, can we?

When Dericho was about 5 or 6, they had been attending a fair that ran late into the night. Dericho started to nod off, so they went home early. It was a short distance, so they decided to walk instead of paying to ride a carriage to their home. Unfortunately, as you can probably guess, they were ambushed, by a particularly nasty faction called the Ridgebacks. Upon discovering Hanwei was a sorceress…well, let’s say the result was not pretty. At all. Dericho watched both his parents die, and his mother in particular, because she had no nearby successor. He was then “adopted” by the very faction who murdered his parents before his eyes. 

Without going into specifics, they took this traumatized child, a blank slate, and turned him into one of them. But…not quite. By 17, Dericho didn’t know any other way of existing than as part of the factions, anymore, but he knew he still hated the Ridgebacks for what they had done. He murdered his “mentor” of a dozen or so years, killed several people, and took several more boys near his age on his way out of that particular clan. He started his own faction, with his own rules, and one was a “special” way of dispatching witches without having to burn them to dust. The Pride made their name on this and other standards which set their bar just a tad higher. They’d been in operation for almost ten years when Shiara showed up. 

Then, as I said, things got complicated. 

I should also note that Shiara and Dericho both lived in Centra. It was not long after Shiara flew free that the fateful Lunar Cry occurred, which deposited the Crystal Pillar and destroyed a third of the continent. Shiara barely escaped that disaster with her life…and her newborn daughter. 

So….yeah, I think that’s about it, for now. If I ever get to working out my Rinoa’s tree, maybe I’ll put that up here as well, but for now, Squall’s all I’ve got, and his is hell in a handbasket. 

I hope you enjoyed it, though!

[sydelco-blog]

The Kid Behind the Keyboard

An IT nerd by day, dad joke comedian by night; a strong believer that pineapple does, in fact, belong on pizza; an extroverted introvert that can be found wherever the guac is during social gatherings. I’m Sydney.

Okay. Before I jump into introducing myself, I must come clean about one thing. The title to this first blog post may have been a tiny bit misleading. At 21 years old, I’m not exactly a “kid.” However, I am sitting behind a keyboard and at Christmas and Thanksgiving I still sit at the kid’s table. Plus, the alliteration from using the words “kid” and “keyboard” in the title was too good of an opportunity to pass up.

Deriving from the mitten state, I have learned to call Mount Pleasant, Michigan my home for almost the entirety of my life. *Holds up hand in the shape of a mitten and smacks index finger right in the center of my palm like any true Michigander, who is showing where they are from, would.* Having attended much of elementary and all of high school as a Mount Pleasant “oiler,” I quickly found myself falling in love with all of its quirky niches. Although the small town may appear boring or uneventful to some of the non-locals, I found Mount Pleasant’s charm inviting enough to stick through another four years of being a resident; I traded my navy and maize “oiler” apparel for some new maroon and gold  Central Michigan University “Chippewa” bearings and proudly wore the nickname “townie” (a name many students call the locals in Mount Pleasant.) Maybe it was the familiarity of old back roads that brought back nostalgic memories that kept me here; or maybe it was that my parents, little brother, and dogs were only a short ten minute drive away. I can’t quite pinpoint the exact reason for wanting to stay here throughout college but, going on my fourth and final year of my journey of being an Information Systems major and proud Chippewa, I can surely attest that this University has introduced me to some of the most genuine, giving souls I’ve ever met. As sappy as I get, I will admit that I bleed maroon and gold.

And I suppose I always will, despite my Google searches for future jobs that take me highways away from this small, college town. These search engine goals that fuel my ambition to turn in papers and fight off senioritis (read: not an actual medical condition per WebMD but on my most dramatic of Monday’s I pretend it’s a very real and severe condition), stem from wanting to land a job in Application and Web Design. Having been a technology freak since my diaper days, I have always known that my heart belonged to a field where I could continually innovate and design. I remember thinking when I was little that, like my parents, I should go into the medical field and become a doctor when college time came because that seemed like the only practical thing to do; after all, it was in my blood. But as my five year old fingers tore apart the guts of my Gameboy color, feeling its translucent purple body go lifeless in my hands, only to put the pieces back together again and watch it power back on, I realized that I was meant to operate on technological bodies. Not human ones. It wasn’t after I was a information technology computer support student technician at CMU did I realize my love for apps and design. Shortly after, I entered an app designing contest and won first place; this solidified my goal of wanting a future career that dealt with the same context.

Deliberating more on my love of apps and design, comes my love of the minds whom work inside the apps. For example, Jimmy John’s, a sandwich company, has quickly grew to a favorite company of mine in the app world, especially within their twitter presence. 

www.jimmyjohns.com

www.twitter.com/jimmyjohns

Jimmy John’s does a wonderful job of incorporating participation into their social media personality. They are constantly tweeting at users whom have used the term ‘Jimmy John’s’ in their tweet, regardless if their was a searchable hashtag or not. Their tweets to users often are comical, inclusive, and conversational, getting the user to feel a part of the company on a more personal level. Another way that users feel more connected to Jimmy John’s is through the company’s transparency and emergence. The company allows, and actually encourages, feedback on their food and service. As a company whom prides themselves off of their speediness in getting the job done, they also are quick to accept fault if an order is wrong and attempt to make things right by the customer. Never once have I seen Jimmy John’s not take responsibility or give a response to a complaint a customer has. I believe these two aspects play a part in why Jimmy John’s has such a strong community on twitter; from retweeting fan’s pictures of them eating Jimmy John’s, to tweeting at celebrity icons, to talking about relatable topics like a suffering bank account, Jimmy John’s has built a following who feels that they are, not only customers, but a part of brand.

Don’t just take my word for it; here are a few of my favorite Jimmy John’s tweets: