New York State politicians in March 2012 drafted and introduced a bill to both chambers of the New York State Legislature that is designed to “provide the right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting”.   The bill, if passed, would require website administrators to police their websites and set up special methods from which 3rd parties can request to force public, or otherwise remove, a specific post on a website.

The legislation is viewable here:

  THE  PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, REPRESENTED IN SENATE AND ASSEM-
BLY, DO ENACT AS FOLLOWS:

Section 1. The civil rights law, is amended by adding  a  new  section
79-o to read as follows:
S  79-O.  ANONYMOUS INTERNET POSTER; RIGHT TO KNOW.

A WEB SITE ADMINISTRATOR UPON REQUEST  SHALL  REMOVE  ANY  COMMENTS
POSTED  ON HIS OR HER WEB SITE BY AN ANONYMOUS POSTER UNLESS SUCH ANONY-
MOUS POSTER AGREES TO ATTACH HIS OR HER NAME TO THE  POST  AND  CONFIRMS
THAT  HIS  OR HER IP ADDRESS, LEGAL NAME, AND HOME ADDRESS ARE ACCURATE.
ALL WEB SITE ADMINISTRATORS  SHALL  HAVE  A  CONTACT  NUMBER  OR  E-MAIL
ADDRESS  POSTED  FOR  SUCH  REMOVAL  REQUESTS,  CLEARLY  VISIBLE  IN ANY
SECTIONS WHERE COMMENTS ARE POSTED.

The theory, according to New York State Senator Thomas O’Mara who introduced the bill in the New York State Senate, is to deal with the issue of cyberbullying.  Comments the Senator made to Mashable in this article stated “This legislation is an attempt to do something about that [cyberbullying]”.

 The senator’s idea is, if someone is being cyberbullied, they can force the website operator to publicize who is doing the cyberbullying, which will somehow prevent it from happening.  The reality of the situation is, the most damaging cyberbullying is done publicly through Facebook and other social media avenues where peoples’ names are attached to who is making what comments — the most famous of which was the Myspace mom case that was acquited in 2009.

The chances of this bill becoming law seem questionable given constitutional arguments made by the Electronic Frontier foundation, who already commented on this to Mashable that The right to speak anonymously is part of the First Amendment. So is this another attempt by government to watch what you are up to online, or are they just going about it wrong to try to stop Cyberbullying?

Webmasters, web hosting companies, and datacenter providers nationwide are watching this one very closely!

Let us know your comments — what do you think New York law makers are really up to with this bill?

TurnKey Internet, Inc. has received the prestigious Small Business Excellence Award for 2012 from the U.S. Small Business Administration.   Each year the U.S. Small Business Administration sponsors its National Small Business Week with activities taking place May 20 – 26 in Washington, D.C.

Winners of the Excellence Award are selected based on their company’s longevity, innovation, sales growth, increased employment, ability to overcome adversity or community contributions.

TurnKey Internet, Inc. recently completed a massive multi-million dollar investment in New York’s Tech Valley region which repurposed a previously abandoned U.S. Post Office building and converted it to a state-of-the-art datacenter utilizing advanced green-specific technologies to make it 33% more energy efficient than similar datacenters across the Globe.   TurnKey also installed a massive solar array system on the property to produce its own clean renewable energy.  Over the last 18 months, TurnKey has doubled its work force in New York.

We here at TurnKey applaud small businesses everywhere: 60% to 80% of all new jobs created in the U.S. are attributed to small businesses, and over 14 x as many patents and innovative designs per employee come from small businesses compared to larger firms.  Small businesses drive the economy, and we are proud to help support so many small businesses with our cloud-based business solutions every day.

Turnkey Internet is proud to announce our partnerships with CloudFlare and Attracta to bring our clients a new array of tools to both promote and protect their websites.

Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools by Attracta™

To help our customers succeed online, we’ve included a powerful set of tools in your cPanel control panel called “Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools.”  Clicking any of these icons will take you to your Free SEO Tools by Attracta, The World’s Largest SEO Service.

SEO is all about getting your website to show up higher in online search results, and these SEO Tools deliver real results for experts and novices alike.

One of the Tools Attracta provides, “Get In Google,” automatically generates a properly formatted, 1,000-page XML Sitemap of your website, submits it directly to Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Ask and verifies receipt. All with a single click!

Submitting a Sitemap is a great way to ensure that all of your site’s pages are being properly indexed by the search engines and is, according to Google themselves, something every website owner should do.

Attracta also provides tools for Link Building, checking your site for malware and getting started with Social Media. In addition, you will have access to a wealth of SEO Tips and Google-produced Videos designed to help you raise your site in Search.

Getting started is easy: Just log in to your website control panel and click any of the “Free Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools” icons.

Free Content Distribution Network by CloudFlare™

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through their intelligent global network. They automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance possible.  In addition, they also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources which results in a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

CloudFlare’s system gets faster and smarter as their community of users grows larger. They have designed the system to scale with one goal in mind: helping power and protect the entire Internet.

With the installed CloudFlare cPanel plugin, from start to finish, setup takes most website owners less than 5 minutes. Adding your website requires only a few simple clicks and a minor change to your domain’s DNS settings. There is no hardware or software to install or maintain and you do not need to change any of your site’s existing code. If you are ever unhappy you can turn CloudFlare off as easily as you turned it on. The core service is free and they offer enhanced services for websites who need extra features like real time reporting or SSL.

Both services are included at no charge to our clients and are already available on all our Ultimate Shared Hosting™, Ultimate Reseller Hosting™, and SEO Hosting™ services.  And for our resellers, both products are completely “whitelabel”.

As for our Dedicated Server, Cloud and VPS customers, if you have cPanel installed on your VPS, Cloud or Dedicated server, we can quickly install both products for you at no charge.  Simply contact our support desk and request us to install either or both products.

Great News, Due to popular demand – our GREEN celebration revolving around Earth Day 2012, and the grand unveiling of our new green datacenter has been extended through June 1st, 2012!.

There has been so much great feedback about our new GREEN datacenter cloud-hosted products and services – and we wanted to thank everyone for helping us make people aware of how cloud-sourcing, and especially cloud-sourcing at TurnKey Internet’s datacenter can help your business be green too!

Our new green datacenter has its own on-site solar power generation plant, coupled with Hydro Electric and our Cold Containment Pod technology to make for the most energy efficient datacenter of its size anywhere! In just the last few weeks,  thousands of people have signed up and taken advantage of making their computer usage, and company carbon foot prints more green with TurnKey!

If you missed out previously, you can still get your 75% off for life and $100 visa gift card bonus deal through June 1st, 2012!  Be one of the thousands taking advantage of this offer, don’t sit back and miss out on these great deals – and best yet, you can learn more about how to decrease your energy usage for your company’s computer usage by cloud-sourcing!

You can learn more about how to make your businesses IT green, at http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/green

For more info, and to see all the promotions related to this offer please visit http://www.turnkeyinternet.net/cashback to see how you can Get Green for going Green and receive a $100 Visa Gift card bonus!

Cloud computing has improved to the point that virtualizing the office computing needs should be an option. Depending on the size of an organization, as well as how they use computing applications in the business process, there are a multitude of options that should be considered.

Before you consider the options available and how they could benefit your organization, we feel the need first to define exactly what cloud computing actually is. Cloud computing is nothing more than placing your organization’s applications and information in a datacenter and accessing those applications and data over the Internet.

By understanding the concept of cloud computing, you should now be able to grasp the idea of what a virtual office infrastructure is. Instead of the office server that stores and runs your applications being located on premises, it would be hosted in a datacenter. The same basic setup you have in your office would simply be set-up more efficiently and securely in a datacenter and instead of accessing the applications through your local area network(LAN), you would access your applications over the internet. The major change would be, instead of getting to work and logging onto the PC at your desk, you would be logging into the virtual desktops of your organization which would all be connected to the cloud-based server, thus forming a virtual office.

Seems like a fairly simple concept so why all the buzz about cloud computing? As with most new concepts, there are also two opposing opinions on the subject of cloud computing benefits.

One decision maker sees the ability to enable an organization to access to the company computing infrastructure from anywhere at anytime from any device that is connected to the internet. This would give their outside sales team the ability to better communicate with the office staff as well as provide their customers real-time information on their products and services. Cloud computing would also allow that same company the ability of letting some of their staff to work from home as an option or by choice. Additionally, with cloud computing, you have built-in disaster recovery. If some sort of catastrophic event such as a fire or flood were to occur at the main office, the company could still operate with its office staff accessing their work from home or a temporary remote office enabling them to communicate with their customers and still carry on the business operations.

Additionally, from a financial viewpoint, your overall computing expenses will be reduced as you no longer will need to finance a continually aging and outdated computing platform as well as eliminating the costs such as power, cooling and office space to run a computing environment.

The opposing side sees cloud computing as not yet proven as a concept or maybe they don’t like the idea of not controlling and managing the company hardware. They may not believe in the concept of allowing employees access to the computing infrastructure from outside the office which they may feel would not be as secure. It could be that the IT manager of the company is worried that his job could be in jeopardy if the company moves to cloud computing, and instead embracing the opportunity to improve their company’s computing system, he is doing everything in his power to convince the decision makers not to consider cloud computing as an option.

The truth of the matter is, office virtualization and cloud computing are here, rapidly growing, and being embraced by both large and small organizations all over the world. Similar to how it is now commonplace that everyone has their own cell phone, every business will eventually be participating in some sort of cloud computing offering. You can choose to maintain your status quo or start taking advantage of the accessibility, scalability, security, and cost savings of virtualizing your office with cloud computing — or you can sit back and wait a bit longer to see if this is just a fad that will pass — like, for instance, like the telephone booth.

Social Media is the landscape upon which an interactive dialogue takes place over the Internet (and now the air waves of your favorite smart phone). Friends and family use it to keep in touch, businesses use it to communicate, and consumers use it as a way to learn and influence the businesses who want their attention. The popularity and growth of Social Media over the last 5 years is tremendous, and only continues to grow. So how do you take your business to the next level – and utilize Social Media to benefit your clients, and yourself?

#1: Content, Content, Content : Have something to say, and don’t make it boring.

Resonate with what your audience or potential clients want to engage about. If you are in the business of producing custom pencils with monograms, then you may want to discuss and write about subjects that tie back in some way. For instance discussing gifts for the holidays or how customized pencils branded can be used as souvenirs or keep sakes at the front desk of your business to give away to clients.   The idea is to have something of interest to say – not just be promoting yourself.  When you send out a tweet, or post something on your facebook page – its ok to lead them back to you for a potential sale, but you want your content and message to be helpful, and insightful and not just self promotional.

#2: Build your Soap Box – and speak loudly!

You can pick your soap box, maybe it’s twitter, your own blog, or facebook – or focusing on review sites – but you need to speak up and loudly.  This means you can’t just setup an account, and post something once a year.  Your followers will not stick around, and others wont stumble onto your message.   By broadcasting your content out to the internet (via twitter, facebook, your blog, etc) – people will find the content that means something to them.  Again if you were selling pencils, and talked about how its a good gift to present business clients.  Someone searching for gifts might stumble upon your message, and learn about your business – and in the end could lead to a sale.   What is even more important, is when someone finds your content and follows you – their friends who follow them, now get lead to you.  Meaning by attracting just 1 person to follow you on facebook, or twitter – its possible 100’s more may take notice, and that multiples further and further long term as more people take a look and find what you have to say valuable or interesting.

#3: Expand your Soap Box – automatically!

If you want to maximize your reach I’d suggest you utilize a wordpress blog and leverage its ability to use ‘plugin modules’ to auto post your blog content right to your facebook and twitter audience.  This way you are broadcasting in all channels at once!   I recommend the “Auto Tweet Plugin” and  “Wordbooker” plugins for wordpress to achieve this.  If you aren’t sure, or don’t have a blog- contact your web hosting company for assistance.  Most offer automated and built-in word-press blog for your web site and can assist you with this.

#4: Go where your clients go!

If you are in the restaurant business, you want to frequent discussion groups, forums, round-tables and review sites in your industry.  Yelp is the most popular for reviews on restaurants, but there are more open discussions elsewhere too.  Respond and interact in these forums yourself, soon you will be consider a member, or even an expert on the subject.  People will actually look to you for advice, and likely follow you on Twitter and Facebook if they find what you have to say interesting (further expanding your reach in the Social Media world).

Tune in next time, for more tips to Chop the Competition!