Life is good at Paragon Software. We just finished one of our most successful years to date. The momentum rolling into 2010 is looking really good for us. I am still managing the direction of the companies channel sales group and helping out with product management. Being in these two key sections of Paragon Software Group lets me get a very high level view of where the company is and will be moving to in the future. I am excited for what this year is to bring with new products and some additional technology that is needed and different enough to get peoples attention. One of the obstacles many companies face is the ability to get exposure to more people. Traditional marketing only goes so far and emailing news is not the best way to communicate with people and even worse if you want to have your message shared with others. Social Media seemed like a great venue for Paragon to shift into. The company has a corporate marketing team that manages a Twitter profile and a Facebook page but our region (America) wanted to do more. So we started creating accounts on social media sites so we can ...

Ma.gnolia is a very popular social bookmarking site. Like StumbleUpon, Reddit and others, thousands of people trust Ma.gnolia to store their bookmarks online instead of saving them locally to a machine. The obvious benefit to this is that your favorite sites are available anywhere and everywhere there is an internet connection. Dear Ma.gnolia Community Members or Visitor, Early on the West-coast morning of Friday, January 31st, Ma.gnolia experienced every web service's worst nightmare: data corruption and loss. For Ma.gnolia, this means that the service is offline and members' bookmarks are unavailable, both through the website itself and the API. As I evaluate recovery options, I can't provide a certain timeline or prognosis as to to when or to what degree Ma.gnolia or your bookmarks will return; only that this process will take days, not hours. I will of course keep you appraised here and in our Twitter account. Most importantly, I apologize to all of you who have made Ma.gnolia a home for your bookmarks and community. I know that many of you rely on Ma.gnolia in your day to day work and play flow to safely host you bookmarks, keeping them available around the clock, and that this is a difficult disruption. Sincerely, Larry I don't ...

I was chatting it up with a fellow Tweet the other day talking about interesting Twitter apps that we both like to see if anything new has come around. In the conversation we started talking about Twitter Karma and how a good Twitter Follow/Follower ratio matters. I never had given much thought to it but on a base level it makes sense. If you have 10,000 people following you and you only follow 10 of them, you must have some in demand Tweets. On the flip side if you are following 10,000 and only have 10 paying attention to you, you must really be an attention whore. After a quick Google search we found a site using the Twitter API that can calculate your Twitter Ratio in just a few seconds. Twitter Friend-Follower Ratio Scale Here’s how the TFF scale works: A ratio of less than 1.0 indicates that you are seeking knowledge (and Twitter Friends), but not getting much Twitter Love in return. A ratio of around 1.0 means you are respected among your peers. Either that or you follow your Mom and she follows you. A ratio of 2.0 or above shows that you are a popular person and people want to hear what ...

One of the projects I work on is called the Mayor of Concord. I started this back in Aug. 2008 and wasn't quite sure how it was going to take shape. I am very interested in the news of my area and sometimes the mainstream outlets don't cover my city as much as I would like. I thought that starting a local blog was important. Becoming the Mayor of Concord (online) was a bit of a challenge. Many of the typical rules of internet marketing do not apply to a hyper-local blog. It's not a primary focus to get people from all over the US or the world reading the site. I had to find other outlets that could be used to spread the word about my local blog and still keep the focus on a local audience. I have pulled together 10 ways to promote your local blog to a hyper-local audience. TOPIX Topix is the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city. A Top 10 online newspaper destination (comScore, March 2008), the site links news from 50,000 sources to 360,000 lively user-generated forums. Topix also works ...

Many of you already know but for the new readers, I'm having a baby soon. Well, my wife is technically having the baby but it's almost the same thing right? In my typical compartmentalized ways, I started a new site that will focus on being a dad and raising my son. One of the things I've been working on is getting rid of a lot of my websites. Pre baby days were filled with work and developing my blogs and websites. Post baby will require me to spend less time on my internet addiction and web development and more on baby Sexton development. Yes...it's a requirement. Since most of my readers here are only interested in my posts on social media and other internet treats, I didn't want to write too much about the looming baby details and threw together a blog to talk about nothing but babies. Welcome to Playing Daddy Playing daddy is going to be the site I am using to write about all the excitement and struggles of being a first time father. Many of my friends have kids already so I have gotten a taste of what I'm in for. Truth is you never know until you have one ...

I caught myself thinking about what services I use online. Between online storage, email, web servers and my pictures, I use different companies for different things. I have lost my interest in Yahoo though I do follow their company information like the new CEO Carol Bartz. I have a Yahoo email address but I hardly use it. The only reason I keep my Yahoo ID is because they have the best photo storage and sharing site online. Flickr Rocks! I posted my top 100 pictures of 2008 and continue to add new favorites to my account. I use Flickr as my online photo storage bucket. My wife is more of a photographer than I am but I have many pictures from Iraq and other trips that I have stored there. A lot of pictures I have collected over the years and many iPhone wallpapers I have collected. I was storing all of these pictures on my hard drive but ever with 1.5TB of space on my computers, pictures take up a lot of space. There are so many great features to Flickr. It's really a social media platform for people that appreciate photos. You can add friends, leave comments on great pictures ...

As if Post Secret wasn't enough, the world of sharing your deepest and darkest secrets online has just gotten easier. Secret Tweet allows anyone with a Twitter account to post their secrets online anonymously and some of the secrets are so juicy I may need an extra glass to hold all of them in this post. SecretTweet was created to allow Twitter users to share secrets anonymously. There are currently 4,800+ loyal followers of @secrettweet and many more readers via SecretTweet.com. At first I was discusted by the obvious personal nature of some people that are willing to share their anonymous secrets to the world but I found myself reading page after page filled with Twitter Secrets. From cheating spouses to insecure people, nothing is off limits to send to Secret Tweet. As a society should we be afraid of such blatant emotional issues?

I'm a Troll. Not the kind that lives under a bridge but I troll websites like a pro. I have about 200 sites I grab feeds from and others that I like to actually visit on a regular basis. Between blogs, Twitter and YouTube Channels I have watched people move from obscurity to celebrity like status online. WhoAreYouWatching.com was going to be a site designed to keep track of anyone online. First I was thinking of setting it up as a blog then I thought of making it more like the Revolution Two style where it would be video driven. I played around with them for a bit then got pulled away on other projects. Who Are You Watching? Would you like these domains? Once you have them, you are free to do whatever you want. All you need to do is leave a comment on this post. Tell me why you want the domains and that's it. Any backlinks you create by mentioning this post on your own blog or whatever will be counted as an EXTRA entry. These are the domain names I am giving away and their expiration dates. WHOAREYOUWATCHING.COM 7/27/2009 WHOAREYOUWATCHING.TV 7/27/2009 The contest will end Friday Jan. 16th. I will choose the winner ...

I'm a junkie, a domain name junkie. I collect domain names like some people collect baseball cards. Over the past couple years I have purchased about 80 or more domain names all with good intentions. I have built many of them into good sites that have a steady stream of readers and make a few bucks. Many of them sit in a GoDaddy graveyard and need to be given a better home than mine. I am going to be giving them away to my readers and the rules are simple. I will be giving away 5 domain names a month until all of them are gone. Some will be given away individually and others I'll create a group that will be given out. Why do I have so many domain names. Other than the fact that I have an addiction, I really got these domain names with the best intentions. The plan always was to use these domain names to either write in like a blog or put a basic site together to generate some small amount of revenue. I thought of domain names like a stock or a piece of virtual real estate. I would buy it and build it up ...