As many of you may know, the majority of my friends and family live about four hours away from me. That means, that it is a long distance phone call for me to talk to them. When I found out about Tokbox, I was pretty excited to try it out.   Now, this is super easy to use.  I tried it out with a few people, and they were all impressed with the clarity of both the image and the audio.  I’ve tried other programs before (**cough**yahoo messenger **cough**) that the video was choppy.  When you’ve got little kids using these programs (which I have Madison talk to her cousins with it), they don’t understand the choppiness.  Mom doesn’t really care for it either.  However, there was no choppiness, no lagging, and really I have no complaints about Tokbox.  It took me less than 5 minutes to sign up for the service and get a chat started with one of my friends.  Now, the coolest part is that you both don’t even need to have a webcam (though the person initiating the call does I think).  Once you have your account set up, all you have to do is hit invite, and it will give you a link to pass onto the person you want to talk to.  You can even put this on your blog and/or social network profiles.  Then your visitors can click “Push To Talk” and connect to you in real time.  I’m not adding it here, because I really don’t think you want to listen to screaming kids which is usually how my day goes.  You can even record a video and email it someone too!

If you are looking to connect online, TokBox is the way to do it.  The clarity of the video and the audio can’t be beat, and it is so easy to use!

We allow my four year old daughter on the internet.  Yes, we are right there and monitor what she is doing.  She is only playing games on Noggin or Disney Playhouse.  However, I do worry about when she gets a bit older  Did you know that:

• 41% of unwanted sexual solicitations, 29% of unwanted exposure to sexual materials, and 31% of harassment occurred when children were online with their friends. (I can believe this due to the IMs I get.  I have it listed in my profile that I married, and I still get IMs from men wants who knows what).
• Law enforcement officials estimate that more than 50,000 sexual predators are online at any given moment.
• 1 in 5 youth ages 10 to 17 received a sexual solicitation or were approached online.

These are just a few of the scary statistics out there.  I like to think that I am always going to know what my kids are doing online.  However, I know that isn’t always going to possible.  That is where GuardChild comes in.  It does exactly what you think it does.  Its all about protection, education, and community.  You are able to protect your family by blocking pornography, stopping online predators, and monitoring instant messages, blogs, chat rooms (AOL, MSN, and Yahoo) email, and even what your child is doing on MySpace.   You also are able to join the members community which will give you hundreds of articles, parent resources, educational sites, and family-friendly entertainment sites.  Lastly, there is community. Guard Child has a blog that allows you to share concerns and successes, learn from online safety experts, and contribute articles, advice, and questions.

The saying that it takes a village to raise a child is still true. Things have changed so much since I was little. I can only imagine what it will be like in a few years when Madison will be trying to hide what she is doing online from me. However, I do believe in being proactive and software like this is exactly what you need.

Apogee is company who specializes in Search Engine Marketing. Their job is to make sure that their client sites are on Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live and other search engines. They are the experts in their field and they have a great blog to check out. By reading the Apogee Search Blog , you can learn a lot stuff for free. The posts are written so well that it does not matter if you are a beginner or an expert. You will walk away with more knowledge and understanding. They have some really great posts about SNSX conference too. If you are wanting to learn more about search engine marketing, you definitely need to check out their blog.

There are several boycotts going on out there against the big “G”. Personally, I did not use too many of their products except for Gmail and their browser. I am not willing to give up my email mailboxes yet, but I definitely found a new browser that I liked. Yahoo Search is everything I remember it to be but better. I ran a search over the weekend for free wordpress themes, and I got a list of sites that I had never seen before! These were truly relevant sites to what I was searching for. I didn’t have to through three pages to find what I needed like some other browsers I have used in the past. The thing I loved the most was that the sponsored listings are on the bottom on the page not the top. You can see that you are getting relevant results at the top instead of having to go through all of the sponsored stuff first. (I take this back. Some of the results have it on top, but it is only 2 spots).

If you are looking to use a new browser, Yahoo Search is one to definitely try out!