Category: News & Trends

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AdWords Hijack What You Can Do

Just how could someone hijack your Google AdWords account without you knowing? How can they get your Google account email address and then password in order to change the password to lock you out? It appears that visiting a website with a virus or responding to one of the AdWords phishing emails that has gone out recently may allow bandits to compromise your system and your account.

First and foremost, don’t ever click links you get in emails from Google AdWords or even PayPal. Take any action requested by logging into your account with your browser to assure that you are really going to the site you intend to be visiting.

Second, make sure that you are using Internet Explorer 7 and have the phishing filter enabled. This will let your browser help you to know when a website is pretending to be a site that it is not.

Third, periodically change your passwords and look to use a secure password of a combination of numbers and letters.

Fourth, be careful of the sites you visit and routinely check your computer for malware. It appears that there is a bug out there that is downloaded from a malware site masquerading as a legitimate website and the bug seeks out your AdWords information and mails it to a bot for fraudulent use. It will keep you locked out of Google properties so you cannot access www.Google.com or even AdWords to check on your account.

Don’t think it could happen to you? Well it just happened to one of our previous clients and they got hit in one day for $10,000 of clicks to their American Express. Google is investigating and shut down their account in one day, but the absolute aggravation of communication of the issue, concerns about charges, not being able to get into your account, shutting down their legitimate business account for the period to resolve the issue, and why it would happen to you, is just something you simply do not want to experience.

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A Parent’s Review of the Outspark Fiesta Game

My kids who are 11 have found this game and are loving it, but from a parent’s point of view is it a good game for kids? If you click my post title you will go to the Outspark game page. My kids like the game called Fiesta.

One thing that you should be aware of is that you will need to help them download it as they will be asked if they are above 13 years old. Hmm, well you’ll have to decide if you can handle that issue or not yourself. My kids equate it with Runescape but with hugely better graphics.

The game is actually quite entertaining and the graphics are really quite advanced. I find that this game will be best for 11 to 15 year olds and may bore older children or be too advanced and complex for younger children.

In Fiesta you can do quests, can fight mushrooms, get pets like dragons, the graphics are manga-like and so very cool. There is chat available and bad words are blocked out with stars – Thanks Outspark. Fiesta has new features added all the time. When you first log in, the control panel shows you what is new so you can know what to check out each time you log in. The kids have not seen any special events like on Runescape, but that doesn’t mean that come a holiday they won’t be there.

The very best thing is that you can go to different worlds and fight different creatures. From a parent’s viewpoint the kids cannot fight people just funny creature-like things such as slime, blue crabs and mushrooms. There is fighting, but no graphic people oriented violence.

The ability to travel worlds, earn experience points from doing quests and fighting creatures, and you can buy things. My kids have not learned to buy things yet, but they love the quests.

There are four levels of cash; bronze silver, gold and gem. You get money from selling things that you have made as an artisan or from killing a creature and taking their holdings. If you have a younger child or one who has not played before on Runescape, you may want to check it our for yourself first, but if your child is already playing Runescape this is another game clone and you should be fine allowing its use. As always, download a game or watch the play for the first 30 minutes before you decide to let it stay in your house.

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Looking for Posts

Now that Blogger has a new future publish date, we are able to post ahead and wanted to point out to you where you can find our content as we will no longer be providing teasers for our daily posts cross linking our blogs.

Monday and Thursday find our posts here at Blog-World Watch

Tuesday and Friday find our posts at Web-World Watch

Wednesday and Friday find our posts at Design-World Watch

We’ll be watching our stats and making changes as needed. Right now Blog-World Watch is our most popular blog with readers using RSS subscriptions. Web-World Watch is our most syndicated blog on the Web; featuring our headlines on a variety of website, and Design-World Watch is our newest blog and is still building traffic.

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Blog Writer Rights

My firm blogs for many clients professionally and we may be one of the only writing firms doing this, but we license our content to you for exclusive use on your blog, but do not write blog posts as “work for hire”.

We don’t specifically blog as “work for hire” to protect our writers and our content from unexpected use. We’ve had people write how-to books from a compilation of our blog posts, use blog posts verbatim as press releases, and we’ve even had some clients use our blog posts as new website content. None of them ever told us upfront what they were going to do, but used our services in a manner in which they were not contracted for nor expected for use. Blog posts are supplied at a much lower compensation rate than other writing and so use in this manner is simply cheating us out of a fee.

You only have to be burned once to know you need to cover an issue in your letter of agreement! Now we license our writing to clients for their exclusive use on their blog only. We can expand on a blog post and create web content or a press release at our special writer rates for these services, but a blog post has to stay as a blog post. That protects other aspects of our writing business, makes sure that our writing staff is fairly compensated for their work based on market pricing, and allows our business to grow.