Yahoo has unveiled their new web-based mail system, an overhaul 2 years in the making. 

Among the new changes:

• built in instant messaging
• real-time chat, right from within Yahoo Mail, without having to run your IM application
• send text messages directly to a cell phone, and receive texts in return
• unlimited storage space (Gmail offers 2.9GB, Hotmail 5GB)
• improved search function to search your own mail by keyword
• send attachments up to 10MB in size per message
• Drag messages to new folders
• select a group of messages at once
• right-click a message for expanded options
• new tabbed interface
• a message preview pane (just like Microsoft Outlook)

Overall it is a vast improvement, and almost immediately vaults Yahoo to the top of the web-based email marketplace.  You can sign up for a free Yahoo Mail account here. 

Grandmother of “umpteen grandkids” Olive Riley is being called the World’s Oldest Blogger.  At 107, I’m inclined to accept this claim as truth. 

Born in Australia in 1899 (while it was still a British colony), Olive apparently has endless quantities of quaint and interesting stories, having lived through two world wars as well as the Great Depression.

Olive doesn’t know much about computers–a couple of younger friends transcribe her stories for the digital world, and she calls her blog a “blob”–but her fans number in the thousands.  She says she gets quite a kick out of the comments and responses people leave for her, and that she has made several new friends through the blogging experience.

Says Olive:

“It’s a bit of fun, although I do get a bit tired sometimes.”

You can watch a YouTube video of Olive right here.

Or you can go directly to her blog, The Life of Riley, and read her stories by clicking here.

The Trucker’s Report is a one-stop source for any and all information related to truckers.  Built with the average non-trucker in mind, the site offers all sorts of interesting stuff:

• Trucker Lingo:  Learn the secret language of the CB Radio
• Trucker FAQ:  Answers to such questions as “Why do truckers ride beside each other all the time?”
• Trucker Poetry

Everything you ever wanted to know about trucking, and more. 

Catch you on the flip flop.

We here at Keystone believe very strongly in the power of fun.  It has a lot of power, to distract you from what you should really be working on.  Here are some great distractions from your friends at the Keystone Blog:

• 25 Strangest Animals in the World
• “World’s Largest Spiderweb” is 200 yards long.  Yikes!
• International Talk Like A Pirate Day 2007 is approaching fast.  What arrrrr ye planning to do to celebrate?
• The Quick Glance 2 is a “mouse replacement device” that allows you to “click” things on your computer screen by merely looking at them.

And we’ll finish off with something special for all you golfers out there.  This is one of the most amazing/lucky golf shots I’ve ever seen, and I hope you enjoy it:

Yesterday there was a brief period (about 20 minutes) of downtime for our web servers in Atlanta.  Seems there was a power outage downtown that, according to the server facility spokesman, is being attributed to the recent heat wave.  The outage not only knocked out power to the facility, but also fried the activator that should have turned on their backup generators.  As a result, you may have experienced a few minutes where your website was down.

First of all, we apologize.  We know that your website is important to you, and it’s equally important to us.  We hate it when this kind of thing happens, and work very hard to keep instances like this from occurring. 

We are very pleased, therefore, to announce to you that we are moving our servers to a local facility in Nashville.  Dolphini Networks, located on 10th Avenue South in downtown Nashville, is housed in a $27 million Lucent facility.  From the Dolphini website:

“Dolphini has a 20,000 square foot data center and over 10,000 square foot of office space which is completely surrounded by its own firewall, fire prevention and security systems, making it completely autonomous from the rest of the building.”

We have met with these folks on a couple occasions, and have personally toured the facility.  We feel that this is a much better overall solution for our web hosting needs, and that outages will be significantly more rare.  More imporantly, perhaps, is that this new facility is close enough that our networking personnel, led by Mike Miller, can be in the building with their hands on the actual server within minutes of any problem that might arise. 

Our top priority has been to find the right solution, not just the first solution we stumbled across, and we are confident that Dolphini is the answer we’ve been searching for.  We will be installing the new servers in the next couple weeks, and there won’t be any downtime related to the switch.  We look forward to continuing to offer you the best service possible.

In the future, the American workplace is going to change a whole lot, according to this article on the ABC News website.  Most notably…it might not exist anymore. 

More and more, employers are allowing their workers to work from home, the park, a hotel room, the local coffeehouse…anywhere they want, really.  As internet connectivity continues to grow, along with the increase in teleconferencing and the continued growth of the online marketplace, offices are not as necessary as they once were. 

Around 42% of IBM’s employees are already working from home.  According to the article:

“We don’t care where and how you get your work done,” said Dan Pelino, general manager of IBM’s global health care and life sciences business. “We care that you get your work done.” 

There are, of course, many benefits in this scenario for the employer.  Less office space is needed, so companies save on rent and utilities.  Employees (who get to save gas money) also aren’t wasting precious time making the commute to and from work, and are therefore able to get more work done. 

Who knows…maybe you’re already working from home right now… as you read this.  Of course, if you’re reading this, you’re not really working, now are you?

I honestly don’t think the standard “Top 10 List” is ever going to go away–thank you David Letterman.  But part of the reason it’s here to stay is that people just seem to love lists, especially on the web.  Every day I see a dozen or so new lists.  Top 10 New Search Engine Strategies, Top 100 Movie Catchphrases, and so on and so forth. 

Well, we here at Keystone are not ashamed to jump on the bandwagon, since lists are clearly not going away.  Thus we present our List of the Top 7 Lists of the Week:

• The Top 100 Undiscovered Websites
• The 8 Most Successful Movie Franchises of All Time
• 18 Overlooked Things Every College Student Should Have
• 20 Fall Movies to Look Forward to
• The 25 Biggest Celebrity Scandals Since 1982
• The 15 Characters or Creatures Fans Most Want to Hang Out With (Entertainment Weekly Readers Poll)
• Top 10 Myths & Misconceptions About Search Engine Optimization

Enjoy!

A new study shows that college students have an inherent trust in the search results returned by search-giant Google.  Participants in the study clicked most often on the links that Google had ranked near or at the top of the results, regardless of how relevant those links actually were to what the students were looking for.  (Click here to read the actual study findings, but it’s definitely written with an academic tone).

The author of the study suggests that search engines need to do more to explain how search works, stating that more education on search algorithms is needed to help users get the maximum benefit from the services offered by the engines. 

Of course, Google doesn’t really hide how search works.  It’s not a big secret.  It’s just that the average web surfer doesn’t care to do the research themselves.  Sure, the actual algorithm that Google uses is kept from the public eye, because it is proprietary–it’s how they make their money.  But Google has long been quite open with those in the search marketing industry on what steps can be taken to help websites communicate better with the engines. 

Oh, I should also mention that if you have some interest in learning more about how search engines work, or how you can help get your site ranked better, just shoot us an e-mail.  Keystone has a variety of search-related services for your business, and we’re here to help.   

A new “mashup” called Vision 20/20 offers you the chance to see how many sex offenders live near you. 

A “mashup” is a combination of two softwares, systems, tools, or websites.  This particular one mashes up Windows Live Maps with publicly-available sex offender registry data.  So you enter your address and click the “Find the Sex Offenders Now” button, and you’ll get a map page that looks a lot like this:

Each of those little orange & green people on the map represents a sex offender, and their position on the map is tied to that offenders registered address. 

Go here if you’d like to run your own address through the system.   

There’s is a very interesting and growing debate in the technology world over the free use of someone else’s WiFi connection. 

On one side, the freeloaders, who say there’s nothing wrong with it.  After all, if the WiFi owner wanted to keep others off their connection, they could simply make it password-protected. 

On the other side, the WiFi-owners, who say that they’re the only ones paying the bill on their connection…that those wishing to get for free something that most of us pay for should go elsewhere.  Or be arrested.  There have now been three known arrests of people “stealing” someone else’s WiFi, pushing the issue into the general public’s view.  Is it illegal?  Is it immoral?  This excellent BBC Online article examines the issue from all sides, giving a great snapshot of the current state of the debate. 

If a WiFi connection is stolen in the forest, and no one’s there to see it…is it really wrong?