Another year has come and gone, but the blogosphere is stronger than ever, populated by thousands (if not millions) of fantastic blogs for us to discover. It would be impossible for me to mention all the different bloggers that you can read, so let’s just keep it to five posts as we usually do with our weekly In The Sphere speedlink. Enjoy!

Nick Mercer from The Outboard Brain Of A Geek has decided to don the cap of a fortune teller, gazing into his crystal ball to make a series of 2008 predictions in the technology realm. From the iPhone to Twitter, Facebook to video blogs, they all get a mention.

Enkay Blog was lucky enough to go out with a test drive, providing his impressions of the 2008 Honda Accord. He’s got all sorts of pictures and information about the family-oriented sedan, ultimately concluding that “Honda has hit a home run with the new Accord.”

Neil Patel of Quick Sprout is one of the Internet’s most successful entrepreneurs and he’s also one of the youngest. His inspiration and guidance comes from all sources, most recently providing Tony Soprano’s top 11 tips for success. While most of us don’t want to swim with the fishes, there is something to be learned from the mob.

In what could be the most ironic post ever, Four (or Five!) Reasons Why tells us why year-end lists are boring. To make things even more ironic, one of the reasons that Mr. List cites is “Lists are an excuse for journalistic laziness.” Ha!

The Thinking Blog puts a new spin on the whole new year’s resolution tradition, listing off a series of resolutions Mr. T Style. Do you pity the foo?

There are so many dimensions to a marketing campaign and things get even more complicated when you start to consider international customers on the Internet. You have to be careful about using any sort of cultural reference, because people on the other side of the Earth might not “get it” or they may even be offended by something that you wouldn’t expect.

The economy is very much an international affair these days. Take the Apple iPod, for example. It was designed in California, it is assembled in China, and then it is shipped to just about every corner of the globe. There are certainly language barriers involved as well, and this is why it is oftentimes a good idea to have as many people on your staff as possible who speak languages other than English. If they can read, write, and speak a foreign language, you may have the ability to land a contract that you may not otherwise get.

There are also certain cultural norms that go beyond language. Business dealings in Tokyo are significantly different than those in New York, Milan, or Shanghai. You need to be aware of these differences whenever you are dealing with someone from a different part of the world. What’s more, even if you are dealing with someone within your own home city, they may come from a different cultural background as well.

When putting together your next marketing campaign, just be aware that there is no “one size fits all” campaign that will work across all countries and cultures. A good experiment to watch would be the upcoming iPhone launch in Japan. Will it sell? Or will Japanese consumers shun the Cupertino-designed handset?

Joomla! DocCamp is an exciting community effort, where a number of Joomla Developers and writers will be getting together to write documentation for the new Joomla! 1.5 framework. It will be happening simultaneously in many cities around the globe. So far, Vancouver BC, Brussels, and Washington DC have indicated they will be involved in this great community event.

Joomla OSM has kindly covered the cost for the first soft drink, beer, and pizza per individual. We’ve chosen the nearby Steamworks Restaurant in Gastown for our lunch break where we will enjoy our ‘pizza & beer’ and additional socializing.

Who can participate?
Developers and writers who are familiar with the Joomla! CMS and want to help. We have considered room for up to 20 writers, but the more the merrier!

When is the event happening?
On Saturday, January 19th from 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

Where is it happening?
At the Network Hub – 3rd floor – 422 Richards Street, Vancouver, BC, Canada .

Registration

• Register here right away.
• Bring in your laptops and join us at The Network Hub. Your laptop should be able to access the Wi-Fi signal and go online. Make sure you have a recent version of Firefox , Safari , or IE 7 installed.
• Install an IRC client on your laptop as well, so you can join the virtual party on IRC with the rest of the participants in other locations.
• We will give you an introduction on how to get started and collaborate on documentation.
• Have fun, make friends, learn and be a part of a community of more than 150,000 members around the world.

Although we only scored a C+ on our last years goals I continue to believe every great business should set goals for there business. This year we have very specific goals we want to achieve and we have outlined it below in no specific order. If your business does not have a business plan then you can build one free online using the Interactive Business Planner.

Website Improvements
We are currently working on a new site design which we will hope to have done before March. Once we have the basic site design down we will call for your input in the design process.

Billing Improvements
As we can not find a billing system that works out of the box how we want it our goal for 2008 is to build our own. This is a big undertaking but is a necessity as we grow and should have been done years ago. We will be calling for our communities suggests as we begin that process later this year. I do not for see this being done the last quarter of 2008.

Service Improvements
Each year we add new services and drop old services that are not working with our business model.

We will be dropping Reseller Hosting, Exchange and Business Hosting services in 2008. These services make up less then 5% of our business. If you currently have one these services your service will continue we just will not be taking any new customers for these services once they are completely dropped.

We will be relaunching Business hosting on managed dedicated servers, one for each business. To round out our services we will be adding more Managed software hosting for both shared accounts and dedicated servers.

Software and Script Plans
Each year we build software and scripts to help our customers make life easier. This year we plan on having our FTP software B.E.E.F. completed by the end of the first quarter. In the second quarter we have a WordPress CSS script slated to be built. The third quarter we will be working on releasing a blogging network site. In the last quarter we will be working on a new facebook application.

We have decided to shelve BlueFurCode for the time being as there appears to be no interest in it. I think as web 2.0 continues to grow we should relaunch the idea in 2009 or 2010.

Server Software Upgrade Plans
This year we would like to have all our servers running Apache 2.3 and PHP 5 before the end of the year. It is predicted that PHP 6 will be available in 2008 so we will most likely be testing this as soon as the release is made so we can make it available to customers. We will continue to be testing MySQL 5 with our servers so we can provide it hopefully before the end of 2008.

Summary
We have some big goals for 2008 which will improve our services to you. If you have any ideas to help us achieve our goals feel free to comment.

For most bloggers, one of the greatest challenges is finding that delicate balance between optimized advertising and a good user experience. On the one hand, a site with a lot of advertising probably has a better chance of converting and making money, especially if many of these ads are on a flat rate or CPM model. On the other hand, most web surfers prefer blogs that have minimal advertising, because it makes it easier to read the content. You want to provide a good user experience, but you also want to make money online.

One of the more interesting WordPress plug-ins that I’ve found is the Shylock Adsense Plug-In, which is designed to better manage the Adsense integration on your blog. I’ve been using Adsense Deluxe for some time, but the Shylock plug-in seems to provide a lot more functionality, because it “allows you to insert Adsense ads on your blog without modifying the template.” Perhaps even more interesting is the ability to “show different Adsense ads for articles older then X days.”

In this way, you can set it so that newer posts are Adsense-free, providing the best user experience possible for your loyal readers. At the same time, older posts can have a more aggressive inline 300 box, optimizing traffic coming from search engines and other sources. Getting even more complex, you can choose to include a 468 banner on newer posts and it will automatically switch to a different ad format (336 box?) after a certain number of days. You can also choose to individually select articles that must be without ads (like PayPerPost/IZEA) permanently.

The Shylock Adsense Plug-In can be downloaded here.

As we close the books on another successful year we want to share some of our own numbers. I know most hosts keep these numbers a secret but as we grow we think that it does not hurt to know where we are at.

New Sign-ups 2007
2,031

Total Customers
6,427

Total Domains Hosted
148,036

Revenue Percent Increase 2007 Over 2006
98%

New Servers 2007
56

Website Visitors
152,654

Referral Rate
79%

We are looking forward to another successful year in 2008. If you have any suggestions or ideas to help us improve let us know.