I have wamp server installed on my local machine and it acts as a web server so whenever I edit server side files I can see the result without needing to upload them. The way you access this is through a browser and by typing in localhost.

I also use an open source eCommerce package called Magento. If you install Magento on a your computer when you login to the admin panel is stores a cookie of information. The problem is localhost doesn’t allow for the system to store cookies, you need a domain suffix for this.

So what people have done in the past is add a line to the hosts.txt file that says 127.0.0.1 localhost.com – this means that localhost.com will route internally. In Windows 7 you can’t edit the hosts.txt file in the same way, you have to do the following:

Open the control panel and go to networking and sharing center, click “view network status and tasks”. Then choose change adapter settings and pick the local area connection – this is your default connection usually. In there you will see all the adapters that give you access to the internet. Choose the adapter that is called Internet Protocol V4 and choose properties. In the advanced setting there will be a tab called WINS, click that. You have to turn on Enable LMHOSTS lookup.

OK your way out of everything and go to the start menu – you need to open notepad as Adminstrator, otherwise you won’t be able to save the file you are going to edit. Then open C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc – you need to open LMHOSTS.sam.

Then you can add the 127.0.0.1 localhost.com line to the bottom of that file, save it and you are good to go. This will work with add domains that you want to redirect internally.

Which ever is the best social network is going to be the one that finds a way to monetize what they have. At the moment ‘lets just build an advertising model around it’ isn’t working. On Facebook users aren’t interested in advertising because they are engaging with their friends. On YouTube people aren’t interested in advertising because the medium of direct access video is being blocked by adverts slowing down the process. And with Twitter there is so much unorganized information that trying to do segmented and targeted advertising is impossible.

So, you ask, what are the social networks going to do? Well my answer comes from looking at a very successful company who at when they launched didn’t have a revenue model either – Google. They hit upon the idea of PPC advertising because they wanted to offer buy-ability from there USP which is to organize the world’s information.

Someone at Google thought that if we are organizing the world’s information then companies will pay for online prominence if we give it to them. It just so happened it was a great move – why wouldn’t a user click an advert if it related to the query they had actively typed into the search engines? I think the way to monetize social networks is to think very carefully about that word ACTIVE. On search engines a user is doing something to get an answer, on social networks people are much less active they are highly reactive – looking at photos, reading posts and watching videos. The one environment that I have spoken about were this is different is Twitter – people have to be active because there is so much rubbish that people couldn’t react to all short posts – they have to do something to get satisfaction.

Twitter can use this USP and make money – the way they make money is not from advertising but from affiliates. Give a revenue to people on Twitter because they have to be active anyway and they are already in communities of their peers. If user a posts a link to a new pair of Nike shoes and user B who is a friend follows the link and purchases everyone is happy. User A gets a cut of the money, User B gets the new product and the company gets revenue and free advertising and advocacy of the product from a community thought leader.

Twitter has the potential to make a lot of money from this concept and if they mobilise it quickly they can will be the best social network because they will be the ones making huge profit when everyone else is still scrounging around trying to break even.

My following thoughts have been inspired by this blog post.

First I think it is fair to say that people’s patience is shrinking by the day – what would happily have been researched over the course of a week in a library is now required in a matter of minutes through the connected internet. The next stage is is mobilizing data so that information is delivered straight to the user by thought leaders instead of mathematical estimations by a search engine.

There is only two things that are going to push the envelope of the real time web, one, can people make money from it, and two, can people advance quicker from it. At the moment real time web is made up of a series of social networks offering a service by which individuals can self publish in real time. There is very little in the way of filter the experience from the receivers point of view. What I mean by this is that people can talk to each other but they have to already be aware of the club you can’t EASILY look back and use the old information to your advantage. It is very much like instant messenger at the moment people can be in the conversation but the throw away nature of the content and the lack of content hierarchy stops outsiders from even benefiting from it.

The is one big difference between IM and real time web and that is storage. At the moment the content might not be easy to go back over but you could because the information is stored.

I think that the way that real time web will grow is by utilizing it to create a better system of search engine – a recommendation engine without the need to by human mans. A system where a voice carries more weight than an arbitrary link on a quality domain. If real time web can qualify content in real time and understand the difference between one message and another compared to the original author then we could have a system for the future.

I think real time web is the next generation of internet information resource and it is something I am passionate about. Over the next months I will be developing a service that will hopefully utilise real time web and create a new user experience, but I can’t do it alone. If you have any thoughts on real time web and how it can be used to better internet experience contact me, or comment.

The SEO expert will then explain that search engine optimisation is a slow-burn process and that you can’t expect results overtime, they might even show you some cools stats from the Google Webmaster console to put your mind at ease. But what a lot of SEO experts won’t do, and what Google say is the most important thing, is get inbound links for you.

Link Building and off-page work is one and the same thing, it basically means interacting with people who have websites and asking if they will link to your website. Why would anyone link you your website? Well the answer is simple – to add value to their visitors experience. A blogger who writes about golf clubs would be interested in linking to the best online golf shop but they wont link to ten of them. Unfortunately this is the reason why the so-called SEO experts don’t want to get involved in link building because on how much work is involved. They have to research the blogger, to decipher the client’s USP and engage with the blogger over a long period of time to actually get the link.

Link Building is not assured no one can guarantee to be able to get links from an independent source – because that is exactly what they are, independent. But this is the defining factor between good rankings and great rankings. Between 70 and 80% of everything Google cares about related to off-page work so it is a must.

If you are looking to outsource your search engine optimisation then make sure that your expert knows how to do link building as well fancy coding or you might as well flush your money.