If you’ve mapped a domain to your WordPress.com blog, you can use Custom DNS records to make your domain compatible with other services not hosted at WordPress.com, such as an email provider.

Before you begin changing the records, please make sure you have the required information from your service provider.

To access Custom DNS, go to Settings > Domains in your Dashboard.

Next to each domain you have mapped to your WordPress.com blog, you’ll see a link labeled Edit DNS. Click it and you’ll see a couple of options.

The growth of online computer and social media usage is well-documented across all age groups . With this increased usage, technology is shaping the information we share and how we share it with friends and family members. Changing the way we interact via technology has the potential to change our relationships. In this study, we explore how these forms of communication connect family members, their concerns about Internet safety, and what they wish they knew more about related to online safety. We also explore the rules families have about online communication, and how family members feel about such practices. Ultimately we look at where family members would like these practices to move in the future.

Your building will need maintenance as it ages. Good maintenance helps retain the value of the building and makes the property more enjoyable to live in. Poor maintenance or neglect can lead to serious damage and safety hazards.

An owners corporation (formerly body corporate) maintenance plan must cover:

major capital items for repair and replacement over the next 10 years
the present condition of those items
when the items or components will need to be repaired or replaced
the estimated cost of the repair and replacement of those items or components
the expected life of those items or components once repaired or replaced.

If an owners corporation has a maintenance plan then it must have a maintenance fund to cover the cost of works in the plan.

Your owners corporation (formerly body corporate) can only make significant alterations to the use or appearance of its common property if the alterations are either:

listed in the maintenance plan
approved by special resolution at a general meeting.

A special resolution is also required if the common property is to be upgraded, renovated or improved and the:

estimated total cost is double annual total fees, or
works require a planning building permit.

I'd love to know how many are active each month. RT: @SMN_Australia: Google Plus hits 2.2 Million Australian Users http://t.co/AWWNPpTK

We estimate there are now 2,208,909 Google Plus Users in Australia.

The real question is active users. Twitter has said they have 140 million active monthly users, there are estimates for LinkedIn around the 100 million range. How many monthly active users actually log into Google+? That is the real question.

Miniature outdoor ads are just so damn cute! Once upon a time we had the tiny billboards for the PlayStation game LittleBigPlanet. More recently we saw the 12-inch-high signs, made of Legos, advertising the Legoland Windsor resort in England. Now, here's a similar effort from Canada (and ad agency Rethink) promoting the mobile edition of the Metro newspaper. Inside the tiny newsboxes are QR codes (which are making a comeback, remember?) that connect readers to Metro's mobile edition. Now, these ads are pretty small, but they're hardly record setting in that regard. Last year, you'll recall, Gillette etched the world's smallest ads on man's shaven whiskers. More images after the jump. Via Breaking Copy.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has just dropped some numbers at a speaker dinner here at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Costolo revealed that the company has gone from 90 million tweets per day in September of 2010 to 100 million at the beginning of this year to 1/4 billion tweets per day as of today, a 177% percent change. Twitter is now serving up a billion tweets every 4-5 days, Costolo said.

The company has gone from having 30% of its 100 million users active every day in January 2011 to over 50% active daily users today. The recent iOS 5 Twitter integration has notably increased signups 3x.

Twitter's "year in review" - for the previous 12 months. Links to previous years appear at the bottom of the page.

IBM Infographic on Social CIOsThe list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years.

Why? because CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore.

The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile.

Twitter scored a lot of points in Washington recently when it publicly came out in support of the government's Do Not Track policy recommendation for Web companies. But that doesn't mean the social networking and micro-blogging company can rest easy.

While praising Twitter for its Do Not Track commitment, Reps. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) and Joe Barton (D-Texas), members of the Congressional Bipartisan Privacy Caucus and Energy and Commerce Committee, fired off a dozen of questions Thursday to Twitter's Dick Costolo about the company's data collection and tracking practices, especially as those operations relate to Twitter's new "tailored suggestions" feature it is testing.

The Gillard government has a communications conundrum that transcends the media focus on Craig Thomson, or the travails of minority government, or even the Prime Minister's disapproval rating.

It is how to connect with part-time working mothers, who were the big winners in last month's budget, but don't know it - and are far more interested in Facebook than consuming traditional media.

The Labor Party is about to launch a campaign aimed at reaching women who spend an average of two hours a day on Facebook, but seldom read newspapers and have no interest in watching Parliament.
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The campaign is based on research showing that young mothers are the biggest users of Facebook after students, with 78 per cent logging in each day and just 19 per cent reading a newspaper. One in five of these women logs into Facebook first thing in the morning, while almost one in five checks her page before going to bed.

The hype around social media over the last few years has pushed people, and organsations into the adoption of tools they don’t fully understand in order to keep up with competitors or industry leaders. This has led to many failed social media initiatives. No one argues that social media tools aren’t a great way to get the word out about all aspects of your work and social life. Depending on whether you are a private or public company, a government organsaition or just an individual with thoughts you want to share, social media can help you reach your audience.Why is it then that so many organisations are failing with social media?

The number one reason in my opinion, is lack of preparation. Organisations don’t research the medium correctly before jumping in. Researching social media is a matter of “listening”. Organisations simply don't take the time to listen. Listening is the first step in any social media policy and if you skip the first step your initiatives are doomed.

This website is meant to facilitate an international effort to build open interoperable systems that allow citizens to more directly interact with their cities. Many 311 systems provide a broad range of information and services, but currently the primary focus here is coordinating a standardized, open-access, read/write model for citizens to report non-emergency issues. For a broad overview, see the Learn More page, for an in-depth look see the post that describes Open311 as a specification for an open platform, and for general information about 311, see the Wikipedia page on 311.

Open311.org is facilitated and supported by OpenPlans, a New York City based non-profit dedicated to making cities work better.

I have long been an advocate of Skype for both audio and video chat, as I am a natural extrovert with many long-distance friends. That is, until I joined Google Plus and discovered how user-friendly and fun Hangouts were. The social network was only a week old but the features that Hangouts already offered blew my mind. Back when my social platform of choice was Google Buzz, a group of us would sit around on rainy days and wonder how we could get a YouTube movie to stream on the site and we could all sit around and mock it. Maybe some Google staff were paying attention, as that’s the option they came up with to make Hangouts exclusive and unique among video chat messengers.

How can we make our city a greener, greater place to live?

MindMixer is the only virtual town hall service dedicated to municipal and government projects. The simple platform generates a broader audience and creates more effective community participation, leading to measurable results and invaluable insights for community leaders and elected officials.

Ideas are rated on merit, and MindMixer measures and tracks individual participation - helping to identify the most interested and engaged people, to keep momentum going from one project to the next.

Currently used in San Fancisco, Aurora & Littleton CO, Plano TX.

Welcome to ImproveSF! Our aim is to generate opportunities for government and citizens to work together by connecting civic challenges to community problem-solvers.
Have questions? Tweet them to us at @improvesf.

ImproveSF was built out of the belief that the best way to tackle challenges that affect the community is with the community. By using a platform that allows members of the community to contribute from their own homes and on their own schedules, we believe that we will be able to engage a broader audience. And with this broader audience comes a broader range of ideas, solutions and participation.

ImproveSF is an online platform to provide opportunities for government and citizens to work together by connecting civic challenges to community problem-solvers. We host a series of curated challenges that are open for anyone to submit ideas and win unique prizes from our Rewards Store.

Your country, Your Call set out to find two proposals that, when implemented, would provide Ireland with opportunities for employment and prosperity.

The competition opened on Feb 17, 2010 and closed on April 30, 2010, with more than 9,000 entries.

The winning entries were:
Neil Leyton: creating an international digital services centre
Cianan Clancy & Colm MacFhlannachadha: The data island strategy

We're a team of people with a vision to create the place where small and medium size businesses/organisations find all they need to feel comfortable and confident in their social media marketing activities.

We believe that small and medium businesses across the globe who have fewer resources and significantly lower budgets need both user friendly and affordable technology that allows them to actually get something great in market, as well as access to real people who provide the offline products and services they need.

Although we'll continually add products and services - Tiger Pistol built, as well as via our Marketplace - today's offering is the foundation of the next generation in social media marketing.

Launching this week, Tiger Pistol provides SMEs with the ability to create Facebook apps and tabs, and understand the value of their fans.
Target market

Whilst anyone can use the Tiger Pistol platform, its creators see SMEs as the key audience. “Where we see the opportunity for us is to capture a disproportionate share of the smaller guys. There's a lot more of them and they need a lot more help. They need things to be a lot easier, they're a lot more isolated and they've got less experience. We think there's a big opportunity for those guys because those guys aren't currently being served,” says Tiger Pistol Co-founder and CEO, Stephen Hibberd. “We have a lot of larger businesses that have already signed up to use our app, and a lot of agencies we're already working with and they will also use our platform,” he adds.

When Google’s Chief Doodler Ryan Germick and Google Engineer Joey Hurst decided they wanted to build the Google Moog Synthesizer Doodle, it was to “Pay tribute to someone who was like a patron saint of the nerdy arts."

Moog, who died in 2005 and would have been 78 today, developed what is widely recognized as the first commercial synthesizer.

The concept was to recreate the Mini Moog Analog Synthesizer in a Web browser. Germick thought there was no way it could be done. Hurst, who knew someone who owned an original Moog, was instantly excited by the project.

Hurst obviously succeeded, but it wasn’t easy. The project took almost four months from first mention to roll-out. That unveiling actually began yesterday in parts of the world where it was already the 23rd. Hurst explained it was probably one of the most involved engineering efforts they’ve ever had for a Google Doodle and required thousands of lines of code.

Project Noah is a tool to explore and document wildlife and a platform to harness the power of citizen scientists everywhere.

The demographics of internet users: http://t.co/MFR0YRnA

Burson-Martseller Social Media Report http://t.co/UziEz1pT

The Local Government & Municipal (LGAM) Knowledge Base is a Wiki-based Encyclopedia of Local Government. It was created for the use of and to promote collaboration between Local Councils, Water Authorities and associated organisations, and to help them to save money by sharing ideas & information. It is primarily aimed at an Australian & New Zealand audience, but users from other countries are more than welcome to join. Everyone, including local government employees, elected members, ratepayers, students and other interested parties are encouraged to use, reuse & add to any useful information they find on the site.

There are currently 4431 pages of information on the site.

Yarra City Council is located in the inner eastern and northern suburbs of Melbourne in Victoria. It covers an area of 19.5 square kilometres, and at the 2006 census it had a population of 69,330.

Are many #socialmelb folks going to the SMC Facebook event tomorrow night? I'm curious how much the two groups overlap. http://t.co/C2Ogin2p

Three minutes to @SpaceX launch! Watching the live stream now: http://t.co/R9LHdWeX

Restaurateurs should try to recognise and resolve problems with diners immediately or risk their patron's bad experiences spreading through social media even before they've left the restaurant.

That's the message from Restaurant and Catering Australia following new research that reveals almost a quarter of bad dining experiences are communicated on social media by the diner within a minute or two of leaving the restaurant, if not while they are still seated at the table.

A national survey of Australian diners conducted by Galaxy Research on behalf of American Express, has found one-third of Australians use social media to rate their dining experience, with a quarter of Generation Y diners favoring Facebook to share their views.

The Paleocene era would have been a terrible time to own a pet turtle, unless you had a garage to park it in.

Paleontologists have discovered a car-sized turtle in a Colombian coalmine that may have eaten alligators and ruled a large swath of land and fresh water.

After the Great Extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, reptiles continued to thrive, with some of them, like the 40-foot Titanoboa, growing to enormous sizes and dominating the post-apocalyptic epoch. This titanic turtle, dubbed Carbonemys cofrinii, was a Titanoba contemporary, at the size of a Fiat with a skull as big as a football. And in an era where ancient crocs preyed on small turtles, this 6-foot shell-dweller flipped the predator and prey relationship.

You’ve probably read about Android market fragmentation and wondered just how big a deal it is. This visualisation spells out the problem quite clearly: there are almost 4000 unique Android devices out there running a single app available on Play. That, right there, is fragmentation.

The image was put together by Open Signal Maps to visualise the distribution of devices using their app. It includes data from 681,900 users, and breaks them down into almost 4,000 devices. Admittedly, that number is artificially high, because custom ROMs report identities differently.

But, the point here is that developing for Android is no longer as straightforward as it once was. Oh, and if you were wondering, yes, that big green block occupying a 10 per cent share is the Samsung Galaxy S II. [Open Signal Maps via The Verge]

FReeZA is an innovative youth development program providing young people between the ages of 12 and 25 with the opportunity to attend affordable and accessible music and cultural events. FReeZA attracts over 140,000 young people each year to events that take place in safe, fully supervised, drug, alcohol and smoke-free venues across the Victoria.

MHBEC is the leader in the provision of business advisory and related services necessary to sustain and improve potential and current small business in our region

We have been servicing the needs of small business intenders or established small/medium business owners for over twenty years. MHBEC is focused on providing high quality business advisory services to businesses in the South West of NSW and North Eastern Victoria.

- Provide quality advice for the full range of businesses
- Act as reference point for various Government and professional services available to business;
- Identify business training needs and where possible conduct short courses to satisfy those needs.

The services provided by MHBEC are partially funded by the Australian Government, the Centre is contracted by the NSW Department of State and Regional Development (DSRD) to provide business advisory services to NSW based established and intending business owners in the region.

"Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other networks provide the opportunity for Brands, Businesses, Restaurants, Bands and Celebrities to create an online presence with unrivalled potential for reaching new customers, building loyalty, growing sales and expanding your connections.

Akash Malik is an entrepreneur with a passion for helping businesses drive revenue through cost effective Internet and Social Media Marketing strategies. With an eMBA from UTS, Sydney, and B.Comp Eng Akash has extensive experience in digital marketing, web enablement and project management for e-businesses.

In this workshop, he will show you how to get started and harness the powerful marketing potential of Social Media for any business or brand – big or small. He will demonstrate how to use Social Media to engage with potential customers and build a loyal community around your brand. He will explore several mediums and discuss how to utilize them as a powerful GROWTH strategy for your BUSINESS."

The Hume Regional Growth Plan is one of eight regional growth plans being prepared across Victoria. It will provide a broad direction for regional land use and development as well as high level planning frameworks for key regional centres.

The Regional Development Company acts as a catalyst for change. Since 1997 we've been working with governments, communities, associations, businesses and industries on projects that produce results - enabling rural and regional communities throughout Australia to grow from strength-to-strength.

We are passionate about 'bringing to life' projects based on our expertise with people, processes and achieving real outcomes. Our very real knowledge of the environmental, economic and social characteristics of different regions provides a platform to plan, create and promote dynamic and sustainable living and working environments. Our understanding of these communities helps us engage, connect and unite the people in them.

At the end of the day, we believe that one vital element truly makes these ideas become a reality - a shared vision for a sustainable regional Australia.

WINNING new business can be tough. That means businesses of all sizes have to look outside their traditional patch in order to survive and thrive.

One of the biggest buyers in Australia is government. Many companies trying to crack the government market are confounded on two fronts: first, the complex tender documents; and second, knowing how to win over the tender evaluation panels.

- Focus on the essential.
- The assessment criteria are the hub of all tenders.
- Adopt each key term in the criterion as a subheading and deal with them individually.
- Describing how you reach that final outcome.
- Companies are often marked down because they don't provide sufficient evidence to back up their statements.
- Use a clear and unambiguous writing style.
- The ''so what?'' test can help make a company's tenders meaningful to the tender evaluation panel.
- Include relevant reference projects.

This is Klouchebag — the standard for measuring asshattery online!
"But... but my Klout score is important!"
No it's not. It's like search engine optimisation, only for yourself. Ignore it. Concentrate on making amazing things, caring about the people around you, and not being a douchebag. If you do that, then you'll soon realise that it doesn't matter one jot what an algorithm thinks of you.

Until now plastic has been a challenging material for regular people like us to work with. It usually requires special tools, high temperatures and safety equipment. Not any more!

Plastimake is a special type of non-toxic plastic polymer with some very exciting properties. It is a thermoplastic, which means that when it is heated it becomes soft and pliable, but at room temperature it is extremely strong. It can be heated and cooled as many times as you like.

Plastimake is special because it will soften at the relatively low temperature of 60°C (140°F). Because it is non-toxic you can shape warm Plastimake directly with your hands or other simple tools you may have around the house.

Plastimake comes ready to use in white pellet form. The only thing you'll need to get started with your jar of Plastimake is a kettle!

Anyone who enjoys board games has found themselves in a store standing in front of a wall of games with absolutely no idea what to buy.

With hundred of games to choose from the choice is anything but simple. This is why I’ve put together the How to Choose the Perfect Board Game flowchart. Start at the top and follow your way until you get to the title of a game.

If you already have that game back up to your previous choice and take a different fork. Eventually you’ll end up with something worth playing.

Forum discussion on freelance painting rates

If you hear sirens in your neighborhood, you should know why. Crimespotting makes this possible with interactive maps, e-mail updates, and RSS feeds of crimes in areas that you care about.

We’ve found ourselves frustrated by the proprietary systems and long disclaimers that ultimately limit information available to the public. As citizens we have a right to public information. A clear understanding of our environment is essential to an informed citizenry.

Instead of simply knowing where a crime took place, we would like to investigate questions like: Is there more crime this week than last week? More this month than last? Do robberies tend to happen close to murders? We’re interested in everything from complex questions of patterns and trends, to the most local of concerns on a block-by-block basis.

We use data obtained from CrimeWatch, Oakland's community mapping website.

Interesting article - good use of mobile video. RT @The_Researchist: “Use mobile to go where ‘traditional’ qual can’t.” http://t.co/ccT1aEUG

Information and communications technology is an everyday tool for almost all our daily transactions and information needs. It allows for innovative approaches to government service delivery and community and industry engagement. The NSW Government ICT Strategy 2012 sets out the first steps to support the public sector to drive better service delivery, greater transparency and better value from investment in ICT.

Download the full NSW Government ICT Strategy 2012 pdf (23 MB) or the overview document pdf (2.7 MB).

The New South Wales Government has today detailed how it will use IT to drive better services in the state of New South Wales.

ICT Minister Greg Pearce released the official government ICT strategy, which has been developed in tandem with the state's various new ICT working groups and advisory panels. The government spends over $2 billion a year on ICT, and the key to the strategy's success, according to Michael Coutts-Trotter, director-general of NSW Department of Finance and Services, will be to make sure it works as a business plan rather than an ICT shopping list.

ICT Minister Greg Pearce said that the strategy targets 17 major initiatives, with 85 different points of action to bring the government "out of the dark ages and into the 21st century".

Many think the Dept. of Omnishambles is a recent phenomenon in Higher Education, arising from radical cuts to university budgets, rampant managerialism, and the effective redesignation of teaching academics as full-time administrators.
This is in fact not the case, as these excerpts from the works of great thinkers suffice to show.

One of the iPad's more intriguing business uses is making presentations before a live audience. The device is portable and fun to use, and the swipe and pinch gestures can make for some dramatic presentations. Sadly, iPad presentations haven't lived up to their potential - especially for users of Microsoft PowerPoint. But the lastest version of Brainshark's free SlideShark app could help change that.

Interesting article on Australian-Chinese ethnic identity & Chinese business relationships: http://t.co/C7NaXwH1 (cc. @tseenkhoo)

In a united effort to provide much needed support to flood victims in Queensland, Victoria’s restaurant industry will join forces to host a series of fundraising events on Australia Day.
Each participating restaurant will donate a percentage of its takings on Australia Day, January 26, to the flood-relief appeal.

This website has been set up as a central point for restaurants, suppliers and staff wishing to participate in the initiative. The website will also serve as a portal for consumers, with visitors to the site able to view the list of participating venues as it expands.

Participating restaurants will host an event or special offer on Australia Day, January 26 2011, at a fixed price for the consumer, preferably using produce donated by generous food and wine suppliers and the labour of volunteering staff.

Reporters can now use Twitter, text messages and email in courtrooms in England and Wales without needing to ask permission, the head of the judiciary said.

"Twitter as much as you like from today," Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge told journalists as he handed down new guidelines on using laptops and hand-held devices.

THE Federal Court will leave it up to individual judges to decide if court cases can be covered live on Twitter.

The issue arose after two technology journalists, Andrew Colley from The Australian and Liam Tung from ZDNet Australia, used the microblogging service to publish running reports of the landmark iiNet copyright case.

To help streamline your iPhone app design and development, we have put together a fairly comprehensive collection of iPhone & iPad GUI kits that will allow you to focus on developing rather than having to design everything from scratch.
Within this post you will find complete GUI kits and stencils, iPhone GUI elements and PSDs and finally a collection of the best icon-sets perfectly suited for the iPhone. (Some of the preview images are intentionally to large to show the as much of each GUI as possible).

Six years may not be very long in human terms, but it’s been quite an enormous span for the thing we know and love as Twitter. When @jack first sketched out his notion in March 2006, no one could have predicted the trajectory of this new communication tool. Now it seems that there are as many ways to express yourself in 140 characters as there are people doing it. And at last check, there are more than 140 million active users (there’s that number again) — and today we see 340 million Tweets a day. That’s more than 1 billion every 3 days. However concisely, it turns out there’s plenty to say.

Without you, of course, there wouldn’t be a Twitter. We mark our sixth birthday with you in mind, and celebrate your myriad ways of engaging, enjoying, and emoting on our platform. As Jack noted when he posted his sketch of the service he envisioned, “I'm happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives.” Thanks to you, it is.

Update: Shortly after 1 p.m. ET, Twitter hit 500 million users, according to Twopcharts.com. Naturally, the analyst company is on to the next benchmark — the countdown to 600 million registered users. The estimated time until the next Twitter celebration is only 108 days away. There were an estimated 922,000 users accounted for in the past 24 hours.

There are skeptics who challenge these figures. Twopcharts has noticed fluctuations with the Twitter accounts it has been checking while keeping track of the countdown to 500 million. In a blog post, the company states that out of 100,000 accounts it has looked at, many have been suspended or closed. Others are inactive, still showing the default egg profile picture. It’s disheartening to some that 53% of the sample the company is analyzing is inactive.

It was surprising a few months ago when Pinterest became one of the top ten social networks on the web.

A recent Experian study says Pinterest has jumped to the #3 social network position, ousting LinkedIn and falling only to Facebook and Twitter. Pinterest's traffic was up almost 50% from February to January 2012 and Pinterest's unique visitors increased from 11 million to 17.8 million. One week during January yielded 21.5 million Pinterest visits, which is 30 times what its traffic was six months prior.

People are still most engaged on Facebook, spending an average of 405 minutes per month on it. They're spending about 89 minutes per month on Pinterest. But all you really need to know about Pinterest is in the chart below. Here's what its total visits look like since last year -- the past three months are nearly a vertical line.

A prominent First Amendment scholar has co-authored a white paper arguing that search engines enjoy the same high level of First Amendment protections as traditional media outlets.

The paper, written by well-known UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh and attorney Donald Falk, argues that such regulations would be preempted by the First Amendment. Google's search engine "uses sophisticated computerized algorithms, but those algorithms themselves inherently incorporate the search engine company engineers' judgments about what material users are likely to find responsive to these queries."

The authors argue that this selection process is no different from a newspaper editor selecting wire stories to run, a guidebook deciding which attractions to feature, or a parade organizer choosing which floats to include. Courts have ruled that all of these editorial processes are fully protected by the First Amendment.

Everyone’s talking about Instagram after the recent $1 billion Facebook acquisition, in just 2 years the app has aquired more than 50 million users. Here’s a nice infographic that shows some pretty impressive stats as Instagram heads toward the 100 million users milestone.

Some highlights from these app stats are:

Each day on Facebook 300 million photos are uploaded
Instagram gains one new user every second
One billion photos have been taken with the app
There are roughly 58 photos uploaded each second

Apps like these are transforming the way that we share experiences.

I’ve been in Rockhampton this week for Australia’s national beef exposition – Beef 2012 (http://beefaustralia.com.au/) – and attended a great seminar highlighting the importance and influence of Australian farmers and beef producers to tell their positive story about agriculture.

Beef producers from South Dakota, USA Troy & Stacy Hadrick (www.advocatesforag.com) shared their own experience and how the use of social media can now help level the playing field and bridge the gap with the world’s increasingly urban population with little understanding of where their food comes from.

The Hadricks currently have approximately 17,000 fans on Facebook and 4000 followers on Twitter. They use social media to help educate consumers about life on the land and provide balance to the sometimes polarised public debate on animal welfare and food safety in the USA.

Kingaroy district stud cattle exhibitor Rosemary Balzer, Balrosa Bazadais, gets a helping hand from MLA social media manager Matthew Dwyer at the MLA Social Media Worlshop at Beef 2012.

WHEN Nuffield Scholar and Marlborough district cattle producer Ray Vella saw how his wife Leah was using this social media tool Facebook to stay connected, he gained a better appreciation of how he could share his story.

At Beef Australia 2012, Mr Vella joined with Meat and Livestock Australia social media manager Matthew Dwyer to provide a snapshot of just how "getting social" can actually get people into conversation whether it is for personal or business pursuits.

For those livestock producers attending the MLA social media workshop, most were there to gain an insight into how they could become more pro-active in promoting their business, sharing opinions while also talking to real people across the broader community at virtually no cost.

IF YOU think social media is just a great way to keep in contact with family and friends — think again. People in the agricultural industry are using social media to attract labour, market their business, communicate key messages, create awareness and engage with customers.

Just look at the Ask an Aussie Farmer Facebook page that has attracted more than 1070 LIKES in a few weeks.

If you want to get in on the action and don’t know where to start then keep reading.

This is a beginner’s how-to guide, so jump online and head to www.facebook.com

Firstly, if you already have a personal Facebook page it is important to note that a business page works a little differently.

Australian beef producers have been told they need to start tweeting, blogging and Facebooking to regain the community's trust and repair their industry's tarnished image.

The advice was from Troy Hadrick, an American cattle rancher who is also one of America's highest profile social media 'agvocates'.

"It's important for individual producers to get out and make sure consumers know how this is affecting you, what you are trying to do to fix this, and why you care as much as they do in making sure this doesn't happen again. That is how you work your way through it. Don't sit back and wait for it to resolve itself. You have to be an active participant in this conversation."

Since the last Beef Expo in 2009, social media has become a critical tool for farmers and rural industry lobby groups. No sector knows that better than beef, which last year had its nose well and truly bloodied by savvy animal rights groups. This year social media was on the menu every day and the main message for farmers is they can't afford not to get online and engage.

Last year, Australia's beef industry learnt the hard way about the power of social media. After Four Corners showed the brutal treatment of Australian cattle in Indonesian abattoirs animal rights groups used social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to pressure the Federal Government. It was relentless and it worked.

How to Choose the Best Chart for Your Data http://t.co/ku2AjMfO | A useful article that will help to choose the correct chart and format it.

Like you, we’ve sat through over 1,000 boring presentations. We worked in big corporations. Information is supposed to be fun and exciting, not dull and boring. So, we did something about it. We started off with a web application to create infographics, but we realized that was not enough. Click here to find out more about the latest direction from Piktochart.

The Labor party says the NBN should be FTTH and the 100Mbit/1Gigabit top download speeds offered are future proof, whereas the Coalition has argued that it should be FTTN and 100mbit speeds are overkill.

Businesses in Australia who deal with large numbers of big files like photographers, designers, architects and animators can only use automated cloud storage backup if they’re willing to leave their computer on all the time so it can slowly backup data overnight and the next day.

This is frustrating for the business people involved, causes unnecessary wear and tear of computer components and wastes electricity as the computers are left on for far longer than they need to be used by a person.

The high NBN upload speeds of 5, 20 and 40Mbits will enable individuals and businesses to make use of automated offsite cloud backup services much more effectively than ADSL2+/Cable currently allows because data will be finished being fully backed up much sooner after it is created.

RSS feeds for each topic covered by the DBCDE

Working together for the best outcomes

South East Metro Councils (Kingston City Council, Frankston City Council, Greater Dandenong City Council, Casey City Council, Cardinia Shire Council and Bass Coast Shire Council)

Campaign:
The purpose of the secretariat is to identify common issues and priorities and then, using the strength of their united approach, to open dialogue with Commonwealth and State Government and industry in the region to ensure the best outcome for their communities.

Our Approach:
Socom provides South East Metro Councils with executive support and communication services, including strategic advice, lobbying programs and meeting co-ordination.

Facebook has a strict set of rules and guidelines that pages and brands must follow, yet we see pages breaking these rules almost daily, usually due to a lack of education. If caught breaking these rules, Facebook has the right to remove your page, without any warning, and you can lose your entire community in an instant.

Here, we will visit some of the main rules that govern pages.

Having recently started a series of interviews for the lovely lasses at Business Chicks on collaborative consumption, I have found most of the #collcon businesses out there face the same problems. Those problems are potential customers like the idea of sharing, but we worry about what might go wrong if we trust another person. And we want other people to lead the charge before we dip our toe in, and if that doesn’t happen, we walk away.

So for a model built on two or more “strangers” meeting to share an experience, idea or item to survive, how can we summon the bravery needed to take that initial leap? And how can we make the most out of collaborative consumption and make sure the experience is a positive one?

Here is how you can Make the Most Out of Collaborative Consumption:

AN UNEMPLOYED man, a retired pharmacist and an upholsterer took their stations, behind tables. Screwdrivers and sewing machines stood at the ready. Coffee, tea and biscuits circulated. Hilij Held, a neighbour, wheeled in a zebra-striped suitcase and extracted a well-used iron.

''It doesn't work any more,'' she said. ''No steam.''

She had come to the right place. At Amsterdam's Repair Cafe, an event originally held in a theatre's foyer, then in a rented room in a former hotel and now in a community centre a couple of times a month, people can bring in whatever they want to have repaired, at no cost, by volunteers who just like to fix things.