The major review sites are:

• Yelp!, the 800 pound gorilla in the review world.
• Google Places has integrated the former Hotpot into the site and are adding reviews rapidly.
• Judy’s Book is another popular site that has over one million user reviews.
• Angie’s List is a user paid site that concentrates on service businesses.
•  Yahoo Local is similar to Google Places with over 50 million reviews.
• Merchant Circle is a smaller site with less accurate searches.
• Citysearch has more editorials than reviews and concentrates on restaurants and bars.
• Insider Pages, owned by Citysearch covers service businesses that Citysearch does not.

All of these sites let you claim your business listing for free and most let you respond to reviews and some like Google and Yahoo! let you add many marketing tools to their sites.

All of these sites that are applicable to your business need to be claimed and nurtured to help you create and maintain your online reputation.

For more information about these sites see the following article from PC World.

Beyond Yelp: Which user review services matter?

How can your business or organization use the power of social sites like Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, and more? Ask us how.

Click Here to read the entire AP mobile news item (this article formatted for smart phones)

I hope that you are not one of the millions of people using easy passwords to guess like the top 25 most popular and therefore worst passwords of 2011 which according to http://www.splashdata.com  are:

1. password
2. 123456
3.12345678
4. qwerty
5. abc123
6. monkey
7. 1234567
8. letmein
9. trustno1
10. dragon
11. baseball
12. 111111
13. iloveyou
14. master
15. sunshine
16. ashley
17. bailey
18. passwOrd
19. shadow
20. 123123
21. 654321
22. superman
23. qazwsx
24. michael
25. football

NASA came up with a recommendation list for creating passwords to protect its rocket science. Their guidelines are:

• It should contain at least eight characters
• It should contain a mix of four different types of characters – upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters such as !@#$%^&*,;” If there is only one letter or special character, it should not be either the first or last character in the password.
• It should not be a name, a slang word, or any word in the dictionary. It should not include any part of your name or your e-mail address.

The problem with complicated passwords is that people can not remember them.

A great way to fix that problem is to turn a sentence or phrase into a password that you can remember. An example is for an attorney they could use something like “I litigate all day!” which would turn into something like Ilitig8Ad!. This uses no dictionary words and uses upper/lowercase letters and numbers/symbols. It does put the special character at the end but is better than the 25 options above.

Using these tips you won’t have your email hacked like two business acquaintances did just this past week.

I have two clients, one a local company, another a national franchise that are seeing great success using Yodle as part of their online marketing. Call us today to find out how Yodle, an INC 500 company for the past two years, can integrate with your online marketing strategy.

Use this link to read the first chapter of the book. You can order the full book online from Amazon using the link below.  There is also a Kindle version for you ebook readers.

Google is at the forefront of the online decision  making phenomenon and has a new initiative called The Zero Moment of Truth or (ZMOT).  Zero Moment of Truth is a powerful new eBook by Jim Lecinski, Google’s Managing Director of US Sales & Service and Chief ZMOT Evangelist.

To find out more about this initiative and to download your on copy of the eBook as a PDF, a Kindle,  Nook, or Android ereader file, or a Sribd or Google books format follow this link.

You can also complete their online survey to help them as they explore this new concept.

Ever wanted to run your desktop version of Word or create and show a PowerPoint presentation on your Apple iPad? Now You can!

OnLive Desktop will be available soon on the iTunes App Store for the iPad and gives you access to a full Windows 7 desktop, including access to Microsoft Office applications – Word, Excel, PowerPoint. A free account gives you  2GB of cloud-based storage and upcoming premium accounts will provide up to 50GB of document storage.

And for you iPhone, Android tablet and phone users, versions for these devices are coming soon. Check out the video at http://desktop.onlive.com/ for more information.

The newest tablets are from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, offering the new 7″ Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet, respectively. These two new tables are designed to appeal to the eReader crowd that want to do more than just read books. Both tablets are based on the companies’ custom version of Android. The Kindle Fire will access Kindle’s app store and the Nook Tablet will access the Barnes and Noble app store.

The advantage that the new Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet have is that they are being offered at $200 and $250 respectively, half the price of an iPad 2 tablet.  Although the new 7″ offerings from Amazon and Barnes and Noble do not offer 3G access like the iPad 2. They are wi-fi only devices, which means they are designed to consume content at home or at wi-fi hot spots. Limiting their usefulness as a fully portable computing device, but still great for reading books, listening to music, or watching a downloaded video. You just will not be able to surf the web while you are at the beach.

The Nook Tablet has a slight advantage over the iPad 2 or Kindle Fire in that it includes an external SD card slot, allowing you to add storage for downloads or documents where the iPad2 and Kindle Fire do not. The Kindle Fire has 8GB storage and the Nook Color has 16GB, plus the ability to add up to 32GB more with the card slot, hence it’s $50 higher price tag.

If you are an Amazon Prime subscriber the Kindle makes a great tablet because it allows you  to easily access all of your content from the custom User Interface (UI) that Amazon has placed on to of the base Android operating system. Although you should be able to add the Kindle Android Reader app onto your Nook tablet to read books from Amazon. The Nook Tablet also claims 9.5 hours of video watching compared to 7.5 hours for the Kindle.

If you are not a big eReader or are looking for a tablet with more complete capabilities with access to a full range of third-party apps, then you should look at devices like the new Transformer Prime, the iPad 2, or the BlackBerry PlayBook.

If you go with the iPad 2, you get Apple’s App Store built into iTunes while the new Transformer Prime from ASUS takes advantage of  into the Android Market. The ASUS device also offers something none of the current tablets do at this time and that is a quad-core processor. The iPad 2 sports a dual-core processor. While there is not much content at this time that would require the use of four cores the ability to play higher  performance games or to do faster video editing on the ASUS Prime might appeal to many people.

The ASUS Prime is expected in stores this December at $500-$600 which allows it to compete on features alone, head-to-head with the iPad 2 and in the case of raw processing power even surpass it.

So whatever your tablets needs may be, it looks like this year you will have a number of useful options to choose from. My suggestion is to go and try out each one to see of you prefer the larger 10″  screen size or the more portable 7″ size and be sure to go online and check out the app stores for each to see if the applications and content you are looking for are available.

Better yet optimize your sites for mobile. If you need help be sure to ask us how.

Note: This post was made from my Android mobile phone.

If you want to know for sure check out this website where your email address can be checked against a list of cracked email addresses that have been publicly posted on the web.

https://pwnedlist.com/

Don’t worry your email address will not be added to any lists and your test is entered over a secure connection, note the https at the beginning of the URL.

If you find out your email address is on the list you need to immediately change your email password. And if you do change it be sure and make it secure, not easy, you don’t leave your front door open to make it easier for a burglar do you?

Make sure your passwords include letters (both upper and lower case), numbers, and special characters. And make it at least eight characters long.

That means password123, changeme, abc123, etc. are not good options. And yes these are passwords people actually use.