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Contrary to popular belief, social marketing doesn't have to be painted with visions of Big Brother. As a publisher, you cannot have a better segmentation methodology -- in real time and without any bias -- than the one that organically grows on your site.

Search marketers received more evidence this week that universal or blended search results are changing searcher behavior. If you're not yet optimizing your news, image, or video content, you need to start.

With all of the talk of being “green” in the IT industry, it sometimes seems hard to think that you can be have a green system. Here are some ways that you can be green.

Of course, the most costly (upfront) method is to get a new less power consuming PC. Unfortunately, this may not recoup anything for the individual consumer - even if you run your PCs continuously (at $0.14/kWh, going from a computer that consumes 400W to one that consumes 320W would save only $70 a year).

The only real savings would be in removing a power hungry CRT monitor for a less power consuming flat screen monitor. However, realize that the big savings only start at 19″ or better monitors (again using the formula for a 17″ CRT monitor of 95 watts va a 17″ LCD using 30 watts equals a grand savings of about $20 a year).

So how can you really go PC Green?

For a business with, say, 12 PCs the idea of saving almost $100 a year per PC for upgrading is well worth the look.

Just as moving from individual printers to a more centralized model (the savings in ink, toner, etc. alone is worth the consideration).

One of the handiest ways to also cut down is to consolidate systems and servers. Recently we wrote an article about removing your server altogether which can create significant savings…especially if you can consolidate all the data to a NAS.

Consider turning off your PC (did he really say leave it oiff)! That’s correct….you heard it here: leave it off at night.  There is a great article at Coding Horror that speaks well to the savings of leaving PCs off.

Many people speak to components failing by turning on and off the PC, but remember that the only items with real “moving” parts are the hard drive(s), CDs and cooling fans (and hard drives are designed with them being powered on and off regularly) so you other components are relatively safe from being turned on and off.

This link at the U.S. Department of Energy provides some good tips to utilize the power management features within Windows 2000, XP and Vista.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When using remote services (RDP, GoToMyPC, LogMeIn, etc.) you should only use the monitor features as most remote programs will not “wake” remote hard drives powered down by power management.

Being PC Green will take effort for both the user and business and while it seems the business is the biggest benefactor, the individual should consider that the average “home” pc lasts 5-7 years versus the 3-5 year lifespan for a business PC. At just $90 a year (minimum savings) you’ll save $450.00 or more than half the price of a new PC.

For a business, saving over $1000.00 annually (also assuming 12 PCs with $90.00 minimum annual savings) could become a justification to a phased upgrade to more energy effiecient PCs.

The bottom line is that with increasing costs for energy the relative small savings of a more energy efficient PC become a more attactive option.

Featured posts to the Search Engine Watch blog in the past week.

Have you ever been in a situation where you are unsure if your Anti-Spyware tool did anyting to actualy remove malicious code? Or worse yet, the very thin you wanted it to remove is NOT removed?

Well before you body slam your PC like a WWF wrestler, you may wat to utilize ComboFix, a handy little tool from our friends at bleepincomputer.com.

Their tool removes such die hards as: SurfSideKick, QooLogic, Look2Me or any combination of that group. It also does a nice job of removing those pesky Vundo infections.

One of its advanced capabilities is to identify and list recently created files which can give you clues to other infections. You can use it to unhook any dll in the system32 folder as well as delete up to 8 files using its command line functions.

Also it deletes a bunch of files related to the infections above automatically and stays updated fairly regularly (as a matter of fact, it even expires itself to ensure you have the latest version).

To use combofix, download the executable from bleepingcomputer.com to your system. There are detaled instruction located in the forums, but the simple way to run it is: to double click combofix.exe and follow the prompts.

When finished, it shall produce a log for you which you can review.

(Note: Do not mouseclick combofix’s window while its running as it can cause the tool to lock up.)

Lastly, this is a serious tool so if you do not have a serious need for a tool like this then DO NOT USE IT! Consider it a “last resort” tool in your arsenal, as it is not discriminatory in what it will remove.

Utilize your existing tools first as they are more “user friendly” and tend to fall on themore cautious side.

As the developer himself states - “It is best deployed by those who are trained in what its findings reveal and different computers will have different infections and require different ways to remove some infections.”

Found in the search marketing forums: SEO Standards; SEO at University; Good CMS for Easy SEO; and more.

Search has evolved from a way to address the fundamental challenges of finding a particular item, to become a method of finding the most relevant content out of a sea of possibilities. There are benefits for users, publishers, and advertisers to bring a social element to site search.