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Like last year’s Chronicles of Narnia, Charlotte’s Web is one of those stories that every kid (and as a result every adult) knows by heart. Most of us probably remember the musical 1973 animated version of Wilbur the pig and his caretaker spider Charlotte who determines to save his life. This new live action version uses state-of-the-art effects, has (thankfully) dropped the musical numbers, and casts all-star voice talent. It’s a decent movie, but not one that bears repeat viewing.

Farm girl Fern (Dakota Fanning) saves runt-of-the-litter pig Wilbur (voiced by Dominic Scott Kay) from her father’s axe. When he gets too big to manage at home, Fern moves Wilbur across the road to her uncle’s barn where he meets a whole group of new animals. His best friend is the spider Charlotte (voiced by Julia Roberts), who comes up with a plan to save Wilbur from his eventual destiny - the smokehouse.

Charlotte’s Web does an excellent job in combining live action, puppetry, and CGI work to form the seamless effect of animals that talk (much like 1995’s Babe only better). Charlotte is pure CGI, and she looks great. The animation is so crisp that she even gets close-ups, so you can see the color of her eyes (brown), all in striking detail.

It must have been easy to get a large budget for this movie (and thus excellent effects) considering all of the famous names that play the various critters in Wilbur’s barn. You get Robert Redford (Ike the horse), Oprah Winfrey (Gussy the Goose), Reba McIntyre (Betsy the cow), John Cleese (Samuel the sheep), and on and on. It’s a pretty impressive list, even if you do find all the familiar voices distracting from the story.

It’s a cute (and mildly touching) tale, and unless you grew up on a farm with little sympathy for livestock, you’ll identify with adorable Wilbur and his desire to live. There are nice themes of acceptance, friendship, and sacrifice that help propel the story and give it meaning. Comic relief comes in the form of Steve Buscemi’s rat Templeton who has all the best lines (“Bring on the filth!”), and two crows who keep trying to outlast that skinny guy in the cornfield who never leaves.

So what we have here is a perfectly fine children’s movie, that adults will probably like, but just barely. While it has its moments, Charlotte’s Web doesn’t quite break out of the demographic shell to appeal to everyone. That’ll do pig...

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Flickr is a Web2.0 Application and an online community where you can share photos and web service suites. You can use Flickr to share photos, but you can also use it as a blogger by using short blogs for your photo tags. Flickr has grown in popularity due to the fact you can tag photos, which can then be browsed using keywords. There are close to, if not more than, 1 million photos currently in Flickr now. This community was created by Ludicorp in Vancouver Canada, and launched in February of 2004. It was originally created for the MMOPG Neverending but was shelved when Flickr caught on by a multitude of other users.

Yahoo now owns Ludicorp and Flickr, the change caused all the information and photos there to being ruled by US federal law. In 2006, due to a serious need for more space by users, the upload limit was increased from 20 MB to 100 MB for free users and up to 2 GB for pro users. When Yahoo acquired Flickr, members were required to associate their accounts with a Yahoo ID.

Getting started with Flickr is simple enough and can be done in a few simple steps. Hit Sign Up and log in with your Yahoo ID, or if you are already logged into Yahoo, it will prompt for you to verify your password. That’s it, you are done. Once logged into your Flickr account, upload your photo and read the community guideline. After this simply begin exploring Flickr.

Using Flickr as part of your marketing plan is utilizing the value of a photograph. Here you can store important images such as your company logo and then tag it to create a market strategy. You can also use it to help your marketing team by keeping all your images in one location. Flickr is designed as an online photo manager and anyone Webmaster or anyone involved in Internet marketing will tell you that management and organization is a very real key to success.

Your images can be uploaded from your computer, sent in an email, or through your camera phone, or straight from your desktop using free third­party programs. You can create collections or sets to make a presentation from photos only, and add tags to them to make the show easier to find. If there are photos you want to share while others are private or for your customers only, you can use the group and privacy controls to determine which ones you share. If your business is based in a central location, you can take photos and then put them in your Flickr account, and let people know where they were shot. This will generate interest around your location as other photos taken from there are viewed. If you have a blog, you can even attach photos to it from your Flickr account.

Every good business needs a real marketing campaign and one of those is creating media kits, such as cards, photo books, framed prints, DVDs and more. You can create all of these marketing tools using your Flickr account and then have them either shipped to your home or for pickup at your local Target Store. This is currently only available in the United States. Plus keeping in touch has never been easier? you can talk to family, friends, and business partners all while sharing your photos.

By joining one of the many groups on Flickr, you can get together with people and businesses that share your interests or can reach a common goal together. It does not matter who you are and what you offer, you will find a group that fits your needs, and if not or you are looking for something more, simply start your own group.

Using Flickr as part of your Internet marketing or as a Webmaster simply makes good sense. No more worrying about your computer going down and you losing photos, or being on a different computer and needing one certain image. By using Flickr, you will have access to them all with a few keystrokes and a click or two of your mouse.

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Share Your Expertise Through E-Books & Content Articles

One way to increase your Internet presence is to show the world that you are an expert in your field. Although this is done by content written for your website, it is also successfully accomplished by publishing content on the web, on other websites, on Blogs, and by writing E-Books.

By putting your content on the web and at other websites, you are spreading the word that you are an expert. This is a common marketing strategy used in television media as well as promoting new actors, actresses, models, singers, etc. When a “promoter” or “agent” wants their new “star” to be recognized, they spread the word. A new song that is deemed to be a hit will get the most airplay. The key is to become a “household” word. Well, consider the Internet the world and websites are the homes. You want as many websites as possible to link to you, to write about you, to talk about you on message boards, to let the world know that you are an expert in your field.

This can be achieved by submitting your original articles to article directories. By creating these articles, web masters will request the use to reprint the article on their website. This is fantastic because every article will contain a resource box. This box will include your personal information, name and any plugs you feel like writing, as well as your web page address. This will drive traffic to your website and ultimately create more sales. You must clarify that the article may only be reprinted on their website if your URL is included as this is vital to your search engine placement and success. This will improve your rating in the search engines by improving what is known as your “linkability”.

You can also post messages proving your expertise on various message boards and discussion groups. Many of these group boards will allow you to place a URL to your website in your signature line. These group board messages are also frequently picked up by search engines and count as links to your main website.

Another option that you have available to use, is to take advantage of free websites. You have your main website full of affiliate programs and keyword rich content articles. There are many websites that will let you have free hosting, usually for allowing a pop up or banner ad. You can make dual sites, and put various content articles on these pages as well. When you link back to your main site, you are increasing your rating in the search engines. Just make sure that you don’t make “clones” of your main site, otherwise the search engines may see you as spamming and ban you. However, with a little ingenuity and creativity, you will find the benefits of these free sites, are invaluable and will help increase your web presence and traffic.

Remember, the more people that see you as an expert are likely to continue to visit your site. Keep your articles fresh and current and you will see your visitors continue to visit your site.

Writing E-books may seem an involved process, but with Adobe Acrobat it is a breeze. Everyone loves to download free E-Books and these can be distributed the same as with free content articles. Just remember that their resource box must include the URL of your main site, or else they cannot place your articles or E-books on their site.

Google’s Adsense Program Means More Income

Combining content articles and the power of Google is an option that has proved very lucrative. As you continually update your content and add more content articles, your Google Adsense ads will scan your content and adjust the ads to match your keywords. This alone, is priceless! You will not have to concern yourself with updating your Google Adsense ads; the program does it for you. Google will handle the entire affiliate-programming end of Adsense. All you need to focus on is improving your ranking and bringing visitors to your site. Once they are there, they will be targeted to the Google Adsense ads automatically.

You need great content articles to work hand in hand with Google Adsense revenue. Google can bring amazing results and income in the thousands per day. Keeping great content is crucial to Google’s Ad programs.

Advertising with Bylines & Resource Boxes

You’ve written your keyword rich content articles. We have already discussed the benefits of sharing your content articles as well as the power of linking partnerships. Well, when you create your content articles, and are sharing them freely, I must reiterate the importance of including your link in your bylines. Better than just having a link, is to have a keyword targeted URL for your link. If you include one of your top keywords in your URL, you are not only providing for a link back to your website, but you will increase your search engine ratings because of the keyword rich URL driving traffic to your site.

Imagine that you have just given your keyword rich URL to over 200 people. They are now all linking back to your website. Not only are your rankings increasing because of your link popularity, but now your keyword has also been linked (via your URL) to over 200 websites. This is a phenomenal way to increase your ranking and drive countless traffic to your website. It is one of the best-kept secrets in Internet Marketing today.

The content articles are given away freely, but you will be quick to reap in rich rewards as the traffic overflows into your website. Remember, that you must stress the importance of the condition that anyone using your articles or E-books may only do so as long as they keep your content rich URL HTML code in tact.

A solution for this is to create a “download” page where you offer your articles and Ebooks yourself. You can put the HTML code on your site and allow them to copy and paste it into their websites themselves. Not only are you gaining the reputation of “expert” in your field, but you are also ensuring that your byline will remain in one piece as it transfers to the other websites.

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The first goal of any hiring manager is not to find a candidate, but to ELIMINATE unqualified candidates. Most hiring managers reading your resume will take the pile of up to 500 letters they received and try to separate the definite “no's’ (Don’t Call) into one pile and the interesting resumes into the second pile (Might Call). They then go back and eliminate again until what they have is a manageable pile (5-10 max) of pre-qualified candidates (To Call).

Getting into the second pile (Might Call) is your first goal. The first cut may take you from a stack of 500 resumes to a smaller yet still intimidating stack of 20.

At 20 resumes, the reader will spend 2-3 minutes on each resume versus just a few seconds the first time through. The objective here for the hiring manager is to take the stack of 20 down to a more manageable 5-10 resumes mentioned above.

At 5-10 resumes, the hiring manager will be spending some quality time reading what you have written. They may be highlighting and making notes about the things that interest them the most or that closely align with what they are looking for.

A few more resumes will be eliminated during this round, but not necessarily put back into the Don’t Call pile. These candidates go into the Might Call pile but will only be called if the hiring manager can’t get in touch with or come to terms with enough qualified candidates from 4-8 resumes they have left. This is the To Call pile that you want to end up in.

The hiring manager begins to make some calls and do some initial phone interviews. From here a few more people may be eliminated for a variety of reasons. Some of the people may have already taken other positions or the hiring manager does not like the candidate enough to invite him or her in for a face-to-face interview.

The hiring manager will keep doing phone interviews until they have invited 3-5 people in for a personal interview. As the realistic numbers I’ve indicate above reveal, in order to be invited in for an interview, you’ll need to have a resume and cover letter better than 495 other candidates. Notice I did not say you needed more education, better experience or more years on the job than the other people applying for the same job. You just need to have better paperwork…”you just need a better story.”