Web Guide One

Looking closely at the internet is like looking through a microscope at a petri dish sample: you see all the creepy-crawly things that are hanging around just out of sight. The problem is that these bugs have the potential to cause a lot of damage to your computer. Let’s take a look, shall we?

• Adware automatically displays advertisements on your computer. These can provide access to spyware and keyloggers that come bundled with adware programs.
• Spam is the junk e-mail (or other message types) that your inbox gets flooded with, which can be used to spread viruses or steal identities. (more…)

If you’re tired of being shushed by friends every time you try to review a new movie or lay down some political commentary, it might be time to start a blog. It’s quick, easy, and fun, and provides a free and uncensored arena for you to share your opinions. The upside is it’s much easier to find people interested in what you want to say online. The hard part is that you will have to differentiate your blog from everybody else’s.If you’re a neophyte to the blogosphere, a site like WordPress is a great choice. Starting an account is literally a matter of minutes. You can select a basic theme and customize it with your own images and logos, or find a user-created theme in their library. Once you get more familiar with the interface, you can add templates and “widgets,” or chunks of HTML code that can be installed anywhere without additional modification. (more…)

Computers are becoming larger and larger repositories of data. With ever-growing libraries of music, spreadsheets, and more, consumers are looking to computers with more RAM, and sometimes even relying on external hard drives. While these are useful in their own way, they all suffer from the same concern: what happens to all that data if the drive is damaged or malfunctions?There is an ever-increasing amount of sites on the internet where you can store and back-up your data in case of this eventuality. Another benefit these sites have over hardware is that access to the sites is often free. It’s important to understand the difference in terminology between storage and back-up, though. Backup programs keep the data offsite and are accessed by a desktop client. (more…)

Facebook has gotten a lot of flak in its time for the damaging effect it can have on a job application. While it’s true that that picture of you with no shirt on pushing your friend into a vat of pickle juice might not win you any awards with potential employers, networking can still be an important part of getting (and then keeping) a job. Luckily, you don’t have to change your Facebook entirely (although you should never have pictures showing illegal or less than proper behavior). LinkedIn provides a professional alternative which has caught on around the world.Around the end of June, LinkedIn had more than 70 million users across 200 countries. The site is translated into English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Founded by people with backgrounds in social networking and PayPal, the company’s current CEO is Jeff Weiner, who previously worked at Yahoo! Inc. (more…)