The people of the U.S. might just be happier than ever before. We have super stores that give us the lowest prices possible for food, clothes and every other household good you can imagine, from toilet bowl cleaner to flat screen televisions.  Meanwhile, the super nation of the world is facing a debt crisis like never before and our government is wading through the possibilities of bankruptcy and credit default, none of which will come without penalty to the American people. This circumstance is a signal that our fiscal situation is unsustainable and it is apparent that neither party of Congress can agree where to make budget cuts. No doubt attempting to finagle numbers to fit into a budget that is in the trillions is a task that is more than difficult so let’s look at something that is less difficult to understand, or at least agree on.

Money is Power

The U.S. is the most powerful nation. For now.  This is figured on a concept called Comprehensive National Power. The Chinese, the second most powerful nation, developed the concept. I can only imagine why they wanted to figure out such a formula to begin with. The CNP concept is based on three main factors: GDP, technological advancement and number of think tanks. For now we are going to consider the link between free trade and GDP and then we will see how technological advancement can also be affected by free trade.

What is Free Trade?

Free trade is practiced in the spirit of entrepreneurship and competition. If anyone, anywhere, can make something the people need and can do it the most cheaply, then why shouldn’t the people have access to it? Well, the people did experience free trade for a short time but governments quickly realized the fiscal impact it had on their own domestic production and imposed taxes on trade across national boundaries to balance competition. We don’t in fact experience free trade in its true form today, but to identify global trading in contrast to trading within a country,  we will use the term “free trade” because in essence, other nations are indeed free from any of our own domestic regulations for the production and manufacturing of products.

Free trade has allowed the super nation of the world to fill its super stores with products mainly from China. People are able to get low prices on all of their household goods which account for 85% of the U.S.’s GDP. Americans have more choices than ever and people who have smaller incomes can still buy more things because these things are cheaper, thus making resources seemingly more evenly dispersed. Not only are Americans able to buy more stuff, but free trade also causes interdependency among nations by dispersing national resources and assuming trade agreements, though nations have certainly broken trade agreements in the past to enter into a war. Altogether, free trade can have some tempting realities to offer.

Nothing Comes without a Cost

But when free trade forces the blows of unfair competition and businesses are forced to shut down or set up manufacturing overseas in countries like China where labor and environmental regulations are loose, unenforced, or non-existent, jobs are lost, production declines and our nation’s GDP is driven down because we are forced to import more goods than we are exporting. The largest portions of these goods are imported from China, which drives their GDP up. When a country pays more for its imports than it earns in exports, red numbers hit the bottom line. We can agree that if you pay a man more money than you earn, you are in debt. Yes?

Free trade not only has the ability to create an imbalance in imports and exports but it also creates mobilized capital. The concept of globalized money is so complex and I cannot begin to explain it here. Currency can most easily be visualized like waves that slosh around the world; constantly in motion, dollars being spent again and again in an endless cycle. The most significant problem with this type of mobilized global capital is that most of the sloshing happens on paper and numbers can often create seemingly magical equations. It’s not until close scrutiny happens, if it happens at all, that the trick can be seen, and this is how free trade enables money laundering which allows corporations to commit tax evasion among a host of other monetary schemes of which affect the overall fiscal health of a nation.

We can see how the free trade relationship the U.S. has with China has a massive impact on dollars coming into our country just by GDP alone. We are also familiar with the fact that China is known to impose little consequence for illegal behavior such as environmental degradation and unethical human treatment but the Chinese don’t stop there. China is famous for intellectual property theft which can affect the advancement of technology. When businesses place themselves within the boundaries of another nation, exploiting people and the environment for the purpose of a competitive advantage, the integrity of the company brand and its proprietary information is at risk.

It’s surprising that the U.S. has the capability to formulate software applications that aid our military in some of the most advanced operations. We have the thinkers behind NASA and some of the most advanced medical research in the world. It seems that with some relatively basic math application, it could be possible to study a relationship between the United States’ trade deficit and the national debt. Is the U.S. willing to step down as the super power of the world for the sake of consumerism at the cheapest price possible? Does our government understand that this is happening? Is it the individual monetary interest that politicians have in corporations that unites the governements in the advancement of free trade and the ignorance about the cause of our national debt? The relationship between the U.S.’s trade deficit, the GDP and our national debt crisis has never yet been studied and it certainly deserves attention.

Google +1 is a new product that was launched March 2011 in Beta to select users. Now it is out of Beta and you will find ads for it within Adsense and other places on the web.

Google +1 is Google’s version of Facebook’s Like button. It allows the sharing of recommendations with online connections  and it’s all integrated into Google search results.  Check out the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Google Adsense prompted me to add a Plus 1 button to my websites. Set up is easy, only two small code snippets need to be pasted into the site template file(s). There is also a WordPress Plugin for Google Plus 1, but hopefully a newer version which, makes installation simpler, will be introduced.

Search Goolge Plus 1 and you will likely end up on the consumer end of things where you can join the experiment and start sharing your recommendations.

Is this going to be another Buzz kill? Tell us what you think?

Yahoo! announced that Delicious has been acquired by the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Delicious will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS.

Current Delicious users will need to agree to allow Yahoo! to transfer data over to AVOS. Yahoo said that the current Delicious platform will continue to function until July 2011.

You have probably already received an email from Yahoo! announcing the acquisition and inviting you to transfer your bookmarks. If you didn’t receive an email yet, simply login to your Delicious account and agree to the AVOS terms of service.

According to an article in the Washington Post, the transition is said to be seamless.

Hurley and Chen plan to improve the existing Delicious infrastructure and add new features to the platform. They also plan to integrate the platform into their new venture AVOS, an online social discovery service.

“We’re excited to work with this fantastic community and take Delicious to the next level,” said Chad Hurley, CEO of AVOS. “We see a tremendous opportunity to simplify the way users save and share content they discover anywhere on the web.”

When using WordPress there are to 2 ways to add content to your WordPress CMS, WP Posts and WP Pages. I commonly receive the following questions regarding WP Pages vs WP Posts:

• What’s the difference between WP Pages and WP Post?
• What is better from a search engine marketing point of view, WP Pages or WP Post?

For the first part of this 2 post series we’ll cover the first question; What’s the difference between WP Pages and WP Post?

The Difference Between WP Pages and WP Posts

The main difference is pages are static and posts are dynamic. Another to way I like to say this is pages are stationary and posts have legs. What this all means is that pages are meant for long term content that should be regularly accessible. For example, an About section on a website is a great use of WP Pages. Why? Because it doesn’t need legs to proliferate out into the internet to be commented on or interacted with.

WordPress posts which have legs are able to have their content pushed around the internet so people can consume it via Ping O Matic, RSS Feeds, Facebook Profiles or Pages, Twitter, Stumble Upon… and the list goes on. This content gets consumed, interacted with and hopefully shared with others.

Another way to look at WP Pages Vs WP Posts is to regard pages as making up the nuts and bolts of your website, your homepage, your about page, contact page, products or services pages. Then use posts as your PA system to send updates, important dates, articles, product releases, business news, etc. These posts will go out and begin filtering into and through the social media spheres.

Have more questions about working with WordPress? Check out some of our tutorials hosted at CMS with WordPress or contact us today for a consultation on how Search Friendly Web Design can help.

Comic credit goes to Blaugh.com

According to the SBA, 50% of small business start ups fail within 5 years. Two of the top reasons for failure is undercapitalization and poor management. Although business accelerators are not a new idea,  Start Up Boot Camps are a possible solution to the knowledge gap between entrepreneurship and running a successful business.

Venture capitalist organizations that are based on a mentoring program are all the rave for start up companies looking for investment capital. They offer small amounts of cash to chosen start up companies while giving them tons of hands on experience. For more than five years investors have been opting to place their seed funds into this type of accelerator model and researchers have seen more than 50 new start up accelerator companies pop up in 2011 alone. This accelerator model is working so well that many venture firms are networking together to create affiliates in different states.

Investors and experienced entrepreneurs are attempting to speed entrepreneurial business growth through this business accelerator model that creates exponential business growth over a short period of time. Owners of start ups are put through intense training that usually lasts for about 8 weeks. This model of venture capitalism promotes the idea of failing fast and with little loss, then kicking it up to start over again with learned experience.  After start up entrepreneurs complete the required training they receive an opportunity to pitch their business to a group of private investors also known as angel investors.

I would imagine the start up companies would receive core business knowledge, a condensed version of some people’s full-time fall term while receiving a business degree. In particular, I see the nature of management, organization, teamwork and communication. It’s obvious that a start up business would need to have a solid management team if anyone was to invest money in their business since poor management is a top reason for failure of a new business.  Developing an organization culture, something that is formed at the birth of any business makes quality mentorship and peer groups a valuable resource in developing core business values. Accelerator boot camps also encourage innovative ideas in a group setting which can help breed currents ideas into even better ideas, giving their business a competitive advantage over other like businesses.

Entrepreneurs can certainly develop a successful management system without attending a start up accelerator but Jon Tozzi, author of the article Start Up Boot Camps Seek Army of Entrepreneurs, claims that business accelerators provide knowledge and expertise to businesses that don’t otherwise need millions to start up. With the Internet giving people the ability to forgo brick & mortar stores, inventory and possibly a large employee base, large capital for start-up is indeed a thing of the past where quick knowledge and a fast lane to success in a competitive world makes the difference between success and failure. The accelerators mentioned here are specialized venture capital firms catering to smaller businesses who don’t need millions of dollars. The people who need millions probably don’t need the start up accelerators, which would make sense to me. In small start-ups, owners need to have a wide breadth in their business knowledge if they expect to reach their full profit potential and start up accelerators that offer intensive training do indeed seem to be filling a gap of knowledge.

Are you ready to get serious about your business ideas and put them into action? Robert Shedd compiled a list of start up accelerator companies by state. See if there is one close to you.

Are you using Facebook through a secure internet connection? If not, you should be. We all know there are tons of hackers and other tyrannical people trying to gain access to your online world, including your Facebook account. This may be old news to some people but if you aren’t already aware of the options available in your Facebook account settings that will force a secure connection when you use Facebook, you should learn about them. When this option was rolled out by Facebook development they set the default option to OFF. This means if you want a secure connection you have to do it yourself.

How To Tell If You Have A Secure Connection to Facebook

Look in the address bar at the top of your browser where it reads http://www.facebook.com. If the url includes “http” you are NOT secure and if it says “https://,” you are.  Something else to look for is a padlock next to the url or in the lower right hand corner.

How to Enable A Secure Facebook Connection

To enable a secure Facebook connection go to the “Account” menu in Facebook and click “Account Settings”. On the Account settings page look for “Account Security” – click “Change”. Next, check the box under secure browsing and click “Save”.

There are other optional settings which will notify users if their Facebook account is logged into from an unknown internet connection or computer. Email and text message are two options for receiving notifications.

I was working with Cart66 today for the first time. Cart66 is the next generation of PHPurchase Shopping cart plugin for WordPress.

After installing and setting up a few products I attempted to test the cart and received the following fatal error:

Fatal error: Cart66::initCart() [cart66.initcart]: The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object. Please ensure that the class definition “Cart66Cart” of the object you are trying to operate on was loaded _before_ unserialize() gets called or provide a __autoload() function to load the class definition in /home/xxxxx/public_html/xxxxx/wp-content/plugins/cart66/models/Cart66.php on line 360

I was advised by Cart66 support to look for a conflicting plugin. The site I was working with is small and only had 5 plugins activated, one of which was WordPress Maintenance Mode. Considering I only use that plugin periodically I deactivated it and that fixed my problem.

How To Find A Conflicting Plugin

I got lucky in this case with Cart66. Typically WordPress sites can have 15 or more plugins running. In this scenario the way to find the conflicting plugin is to deactivate all your plugins. Once deactivated, reactivate 1 plugin at time, testing the site every round until the conflict happens again.

Good luck and happy blogging!

As I stumbled upon PHPurchase Shopping Cart plugin, lo and behold I was then introduced to yet another great premium WordPress plugin – Gravity Forms.

Gravity Forms is a very elegant and very customizable form generator plugin. Lot’s of options, built in logic, auto-responder emails and more.

If you want to see a working example check out my contact us page and send me a message. This is a very simple example of what Gravity Forms can do.

Hope you enjoy!

I happened to log into Facebook to change a setting and I found my way over to Web Trends blog. I’d never read anything over there before but they kept my attention and spurred this blog post.

I was reading an article “Like” Should Be “Follow“. A lot of folks especially marketers were pretty upset with Facebook for switching out the Fan Button and replacing it with the Like button. My 2 cents on the matter is this…

Just being able to click the Like Button is too simple and it is confusing because they have 2 like buttons.. one for Facebook Pages and one for Web Pages and they are not entirely the same. You can find out the difference in this other article I was reading, also at Web Trends “Think Before You Like“.

It’s too simple because you only get to like or unlike something. Why can’t we “Dislike” an item? And being that Liking = Following, both inside FB and out I have to agree with Marko Z Muellner of Web Trends, that is a little weird that I like a blog post and get signed up to follow the publishing source.

If I had a say in how things were engineered.. One would be able to Like, Unlike AND Dislike something, an item like a post or comment. I would also allow the option to become a Fan of something like a company or a brand so I can follow them and receive ALL their updates, because after all I am a fine.

Thoughts, reactions, comments? Leave them below.

Man am I glad I found this shopping cart plugin for WordPress. PHPurchase has made my job easy when clients call and ask for eCommerce solutions.  The first store we setup using PHPurchase was our brand new WordPress Web Hosting site.

It sets up in a snap. What I really like is it’s ability to integrate with another premium plugin.. Gravity Forms. You can literally have a small store up and running in an hour or two. Integrates with PayPal & Authorize.net. And it has reliable support.

If you are looking to set up an ecommerse website using WordPress, I recommend PHPurchase.

Need / Want help up setting up this WordPress shopping cart plugin? Contact me directly or post a comment below.