Web 2.0 Workshops Announced @ Berkshire Athenaeum

If you live in the Pittsfield, Massachusetts area, you may want to sign up for one of the Web 2.0 Workshops to be held October/November at the Berkshire Athenaeum, Pittsfield's Public Library. All workshops are 1 hour long, free, and being held at a variety of times, days, evenings and Saturdays.

There will be workshops on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs and Blogging (Create Your Own Blog), Google (search strategies), These will be hands-on workshops geared to getting you started on your web journey.

While each of these workshops has a business connection, Business Websites You Should Know About will provide you with strategic websites and support networks useful in starting and maintaining your business. Your marketing efforts can be enhanced by using LinkedIn (the business social networking site), development of your Blog, and by Twitter and Facebook. Social media increasingly is the means of getting the word out about your business and all these sites are Free. For nonprofit business the workshop, the Berkshire Funding Resource Center with it Foundation Center databases will be critical in finding seed money and critical contacts in Foundation networks.

Other workshops will focus on DoItYourself databases, where you can learn about all things automotive and home repair. Workshops on Microsoft applications Word 2007 and Excel will also be held. Finally, there will be an Email workshop, getting you started and answering your email questions.

As you can see October and November will be a busy time. Sign-ups for workshops have already begun, but it's not too late for you. The full schedule with dates and times can be found here. (Just click on the word here.) All workshops are hosted by the Berkshire Athenaeum Reference Department. Register for workshops NOW by calling 413-499-9480 ext. 202 or by visiting the Department.

Labor Day 2009 - Record UnLabor Day

Happy Labor Day! Or is it Happy at all?

It's time to reassess the economy. Labor Day is a special day set aside to celebrate those who do not own the means of production, namely the laboring classes or more specifically anyone who needs to work for money to meet their short and long term needs. Those who labor are not in a position to let money work for them. Those who work for money are subject directly to the upturns and downturns in the economy. Here small businesses are in a similar position simply because they do not own enough money or assets that they can be free of the great economic shifts that have been going on in the last year.

According to the United States Department of Labor in its most recent report, over 15 million people are members of the rank and file of the Unemployed or nearly 10% of the "civilian" work force of 150 million plus as of August 31, 2009. For these 15 million Labor Day is not cause for celebration but another day in an extended forced time without work, an extended forced vacation.

To put these numbers in perspective 15 million represents the number of individuals that are unemployed and seeking full time work. The US workforce is about 154 million. Subtract 15 million who are unemployed and you get the employed workforce of 139 million. Now multiply 15 million by a factor of 3 or 4(dependents, spouses, others) and you get the real effect of these numbers. Anywhere from 45 to 60 million people are directly impacted by the 15 million unemployed. 45 to 60 million people are facing real hardship, not being able to think beyond the next week having to face foreclosure, bankruptcy, unable to meet rental and mortgage payments, forced to choose between paying bills and food, delays in going to college or increasingly reliant on college loans or to put it another way the credit markets, which only recently have started to loosen up. Another part of this working for money is the enormous difficulty individuals and small businesses have in getting out of debt.

So Labor Day represents a cautionary Holiday this year. The Labor Movement in the form of Labor Unions brought us this special day, as well as the 40 hour week and the weekend, itself. Today, organized labor represents only 12.5% of the civilian workforce. Those working in the civilian workforce are 98% employed in the private economy. Only 2% of the workforce is in the public sphere - government employees, public school teachers, police and firefighters. Organized labor represents 36.5% of the public economy and only 7.8% of the private economy. The recent bankruptcies of General Motors and Chrysler led to further weakening of labor contracts for these companies and to the breaking of longstanding agreements. It also led to breaking of business agreements with creditors. To work in a trade union in these companies is to do with less and this is true of the newspaper business, too.

Above we mentioned those who are unemployed are defined as looking for full time work. A trend in the last 15 years has been toward reliance of employers on part time workers and outsourcing jobs to contractors of jobs, whereby people work for short periods of time. Long term full time employment is not readily available.

Looking for more information on the economic and social impact of these trends, see The Future of Work in Massachusetts, edited by Tom Juravich and Pulitzer Prize winning author, David Shipley's The Working Poor: Invisible in America, (not so invisible anymore) both found at the Berkshire Athenaeum and other Public Libraries in Western Massachusetts.

So Labor Day 2009 is really UnLaboring day. It is the end of Summer. It's Back to School. It's time to buckle down and get back to work!

That's true, except for the 15 million out of work and the 45 to 60 million impacted!! For them it's a time of worry and concern!

Top 20 Most Popular Websites

Alexa -- The Web Information Company tracks globally web surfer activity and comes up with daily statistics on most popular websites. As you can imagine this means dollars and cents in the global marketplace. And this puts into perspective the competition between Google, Yahoo. and Microsoft for dominance. Also it allows us to see where social media sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Craigslist are going.

Alexa is an Amazon.com owned company and, yes, it tracks companies like Amazon, Ebay and their reach across the globe. Besides what sites are being surfed, Alexa also breaks down average number minutes on each site, and who is using the site by age group, education, gender, income and location. These demographic breakdowns are essential in the competitive marketplace.

So what are the top 20 sites for United States websurfers? They are Google, followed by Yahoo, Facebook, YouTube(a Google company), MySpace, Windows Live, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Ebay, Microsoft Network, Blogger (a Google company), AOL, Amazon, Twitter, GO, Bing (Microsoft's new search engine), CNN, Flickr (a Yahoo company), WordPress (like Blogger, a free Blog service), and ESPN Sportzone. LinkedIn appears as number 24, Weather.com 25, and New York Times 28.

Google gets 34% of marketshre globally, Yahoo 26 %, Facebook 25%, and YouTube 24% and MySpace 4.5% and Twitter gets nearly 4%. Individuals spend more time on Facebook, an average of 27.5 minutes compared to Google's 7 minutes and YouTube's 22.5 minutes. Twitter users spend average of 8 minutes a day twittering. Bing, the new Microsoft search engine, is already in the top 20 at number 16 but amount of time spent is only 2.1 minutes. Nevertheless Bing can be seen as up and coming and Microsoft and Yahoo will be using Bing as their search engines, thus providing real competition for Google.

Now statistics such as these are not great for reading, but they do provide the nuts and bolts backdrop to news about Google, Yahoo and Microsoft and web trends. Notably, social media sites are heavily represented in these statistics. People are spending much of their time on these social sites, making friends, sharing photos and information, and exchanging and sharing files. News sites are not represented among the top twenty but they are represented in the top 50 and include the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal. Amazon and Ebay make strong showings in the top 20 at 13 and 9 respectively. Internationally Google China is number 4 in China and Google Japan is dominant there. So these companies have taken an international position and are heavily represented there. Baidu, a Chinese search engine is number 1 there and because of this carries 6% world share of surfers.

Are these fleeting trends? Hard to believe but the World Wide Web is only 15 years old. Skeptics then said that money could not be made on the Internet. Today the World Wide Web is a vast economic engine. Amazon is turning profits. Microsoft and Yahoo and have been around for more than 10 years; Google celebrated its 10 anniversary this year. Colleges, Universities, the United States Postal Service and all government agencies are on the web. Any business will need, if it does not already have one, a presence on the web. In a short 15 years the World Wide Web has become a part of our daily discourse and activity. Today there is still skepticism about profitabilty but no question that the world wide web is here to stay. Ignoring its possibilities would be ignoring vast opportunity.

Alexa is a useful marketing and analytical tool in gauging the reach and progress of these critical websites and their positions in the global marketplace.