It is not easy to be a blogger and be able to write dozens of interesting articles each month. Some believe that there are three personalities that can help you be a good writer. You have to have each personality at least in part to achieve success as a blogger. Here they are:

Do you think that you have the above qualities? You do not have to be an expert in all of them, but it is important to remember that these personalities will help you be a good writer.

We might not very often hear about people who is using Linux. Probably most of our friends use Windows, and it is quite apparent that most people are familiar with Windows. I know that there are those who are very much into Linux, and recently I have even read an article regarding Linux on a forum. It is a fact that Linux is a free platform, so some could expect it to be more popular than Windows which is a commercial software. However, Linux is not as easy to use as Windows, and lacks many important features which could be useful to an average computer user. Generally speaking, Linux users cannot use many programs like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop. If you choose Linux you will simply have to live without these programs. I think that would be quite inconvenient for most people.

Of course, there are some programs which can be substitutes for the above mentioned software, as Open Office is quite powerful, and there is also a lot of graphic editing programs out there. However, the problem is that most software is only designed to work with Windows, so if you are not going to use the most popular operating system, you are not going to be able to use a lot of programs. It is hard to say whether Linux has a chance to become very popular, only the time will tell. However, it is true that it will be hard to compete with Microsoft Windows. Anyway, according to many computer geeks Linux still remains a great choice for advanced computer users.

There are many social networking sites like MySpace that are a wonderful place to meet friends that share the same interests as you. However, social sites pose a threat to you if you are not careful enough to use with caution. Here are some of the possible dangers:

1. Very often, people will not be who they claim to be. People in general tend to overemphasize their achievements, and make their lives appear to be more successful than they might be in reality. After all, nobody on the Internet knows who they really are. There is nothing which prohibits them from pretending to be somebody else.

2. Belonging to a social network might be addictive. Be careful not to start neglecting your family, friends, or work. On the other hand, if you simply like to participate in a social network a lot it doesn’t have to mean that there is a problem. It is good to have a hobby.

3. I know that people like sharing their personal information on the Net. However, if you are not careful, you risk being spammed, scammed, or even stalked. Do not give out your address to anyone, unless there is really a need for it. I also recommend not giving out your email details until you know that you can trust a particular person.

4. Stay alert if somebody asks you for your personal details such as passwords, bank account etc. If that happens, stop the conversation as soon as possible, as many predators and scammers are involved in social networks in order to find potential victims.

Overall, participating in social networking can be a great way to spend your time, but it is important to recognize potential dangers and be prepared for them.

There are many firewalls currently on the market, and while many of them advertise that they offer the best protection available, this is obviously true of only one firewall, as you cannot have many different firewalls that are the best. It is hard to decide which one offers the best protection just by reading the descriptions of various firewalls. The best way to decide which firewall can protect you the most is to conduct a test. Such tests were done, and I am going present you with the top five results:

Comodo Firewall Pro (95%)
ProSecurity (93%)
Outpost Firewall Pro (91%)
Online Armor Personal Firewall (89%)
Kaspersky Internet Security (85%)

It is interesting that the top two firewalls are actually free, and to have the best protection you do not need to spend any money. From the commercial firewalls it seems that Outpost, Online Armor, and Kaspersky are the best choices. From this list I would recommend Kaspersky. These days there is a lot of malicious websites that contain malware, so using a reliable firewall program is a must. However, the results prove that even those who do not have a lot of money to invest in protecting their computer can still have great protection. This is especially true if they do a little bit of research before deciding which firewall to use.

During the last two decades it was becoming more and more obvious that creating a game that has a chance to achieve a massive success requires to invest as much money as possible. While the cost of production of games was not that high 20 years ago, nowadays many games have a multi-million dollar budget. While this results in high quality graphics and cinematics for the consumer, independent game developers were feeling more and more endangered. Currently, there is just a handful of big players, but there still is a chance for indie game developers. Major consoles such as Xbox and Wii are allowing independent developers to create and distribute games through their marketplace. This may be a great opportunity for those who have great ideas for games, but lack a distributor and money.
It is hard to compete for independent developers with a company like Electronic Arts, which is a top video game publisher. The recent strategy of EA was to focus on quality of games rather than minimizing the cost of developing games. While generally that was considered to be a good strategy, some say that the drop in stock prices suggests otherwise. The shares recently fell a few percent and analysts suggest that this is due to their emphasis on quality. Unfortunately, developing a very high quality product requires a lot of money and time as we can see, for example, in the case with Warhammer Online, which was delayed a few times. More and more money is required for producing games, and that is a reality that we have to accept.

If you are a parent, you might be wondering whether Internet has good influence on your child. You have probably been growing up without access to the Internet, and children these days have had Internet access since they were very little. One of the things that you can do to understand your child better is to keep yourself informed about what is going on in the virtual world. Visit sites like MySpace to learn what it is about, read technology news, and visit some forums to see what the community is like. Try to monitor what your child is doing online, but do not violate its privacy. If possible, try to participate in some of the online activities with him. Teach your child to never believe everything it reads on the Internet. This will prevent many disappointments in the future, and might reduce the risk of anything bad happening. Overall, the World Wide Web is a wonderful place; however, it is also quite dangerous. This is mostly due to scams and dishonest people, as they are lurking behind every corner. The Internet also contains a lot of offensive materials, and that is why using a family Internet filter may be a good idea for some families. Such filters allow you to block specific category of websites including pornography websites, gambling, and sites that contain alcohol and tabacco references.

One of the ways that hackers might want to trick you is to send emails that look like they are sent from companies that you know, like your bank or PayPal. On the first glance, those emails might look like they are genuine. However, after some time you might discover that something is wrong. If you ever receive an email asking you to provide personal information, and asking you to click on a specified link to enter it, do not do it. Instead, open another window in your browser, and manually enter the address of a company that supposedly sent you this email. Check if everything is in order with your account. From my own experience I can say that real companies and institutions like your bank or PayPal will never ask you to provide any personal information without any explanation. So be careful. It is always better to be too careful than not being careful at all. There are people out there who wish to steal your identity, and make a profit out of it. It is up to you to protect what is rightfully yours. You do not have to give your password to anybody if you do not wish to do so. Be especially careful with those individuals who claim that they representing PayPal, because that is a popular scam.

An interesting way to make visitors click more on your ads is to limit their choices. While it may not sound very well if you hear about this idea for the first time, it isn’t actually that bad after all. The principle behind this it is that you should try to create the most logical exit points aside from the back button. A visitor has to exit the website at some point, so you should try to make him click on ads to exit the site. Some people recommend removing links to other sites from your webpage and this also includes widgets or any other banners that are not ads. You can also go to the extreme and remove your categories, RSS feed link, recent posts and date archive to even further reduce the users choices. This strategy has a lot of potential, but your blog might suffer from it, as you will be getting rid of some essential parts of your website. On the other hand, you should not be worried that your blog is going to look empty once you remove almost all the widgets and links from it. I wouldn’t be worried about that. Your blog will load faster that way and your readers will be able to concentrate more on the content and on the ads.

The World Wide Web is becoming quite crowded. In practical terms this means that domain addresses are being registered every single day, and there are less and less attractive addresses. While a few years ago you could just try to register short, single word domain names at any registrar without any effort put into it, nowadays to find nice domain names consisting of two words you need to use some tools. One of my favorite tools to find domain names is makewords.com. It is a website that offers you the possibility to search through thousands of combinations very quickly to help you find the domain name of your dreams. You can specify your website’s category, prefixes, affixes, and preferred website name. It is a really handy tool so I suggest you bookmark the website. I find this tool to be very useful and I am sure that many other people also take advantage of this helpful method to find websites that are not taken yet. It is better to do it now than later, as the longer you wait, the more likely you are going to miss the address which is attractive to you. It is generally true that those who founded their websites earlier are more advantaged. However, you can still find the address on the Web that will suit your liking.

Most bloggers would prefer to have more comments on their blog and there is generally an agreement that blogs benefit from comments. That is because not only many comments indicate that your blog is popular, but also make your visitors more involved with your blog. Various visitors often contribute interesting thoughts of their own, which in turn makes them more loyal readers and in general improves the overall quality of your blog. Improving the quality of your blog in turn attracts more visitors. So the question is not whether you should encourage comments, but rather how to do it. This post is going to give advice on this subject. Before we start, if you are a Wordpress Blogger, just make sure you have Akismet plug-in activated to fight with spam. Without further adieu, here is the list:

1. Have a top commentators widget on your sidebar. This greatly motivates people to leave comments, as they will feel appreciated for the fact of contributing to the discussion. I am using the “Show Top Commentators widget” which is compatible with the latest Wordpress release and can be found here: www.pfadvice.com/wordpress-plugins/show-top-commentators.
2. Reward your top commentators with a short review of their sites or even some money. Some bloggers have done this and it served them well as it encouraged leaving comments on their blogs.
3. Have a recent comments widget on your sidebar. This encourages visitors to leave comments, especially on older posts, because new comments are very easy to find. I am using the default “Recent Comments” widget from Wordpress. Blogs hosted on Blogger.com may use “Recent Comments for Blogger” found on storago.com/free_tools.