For those of us living north of the 49th parallel, Thanksgiving is this Monday and we’ll all be carving up our turkeys and indulging in some cranberry sauce. Before we head over to grandma’s for a nice dinner, let’s take a moment to read up on some great blog content from around the ‘sphere.

Damien Riley has decided to start up a new online adventure with the launch of A Teachers Brain. This adds to his collection of podcasts and he’ll be using it to discuss many of the issues that concern educators at all levels. How can we best prepare the next generation of online and offline citizens?

John Bardinelli recognizes that the Apple iPhone and iPod touch are both very popular platforms, but he feels that the iTunes App Store is not a threat to the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. It may be true that the App Store has many more games than either the Sony or Nintendo offering, but how many of these are quality games that you’ll play more than once or twice?

Darren Barefoot makes an effort to look the part when he makes public appearances, so I suppose he knows a thing or two about what to look for in a dress shirt. It’s all in the details, you see, so you’ll want to find French cuffs, a horizontal button hole, and just the right length.

Vancouver Condo has an interesting graph for us to consider. We all assume that Vancouver is a metropolitan area busting at the seams with more and more people moving here each and every day. As it turns out, the Vancouver population growth pales in comparison to Raleigh, Phoenix, Edmonton, and Dallas, among several other cities.

Buzz Bishop has been a part of the media for a number of years and he recognizes the paradox of free. People are willing to pay 99 cents a song on iTunes, but they don’t want to pay anything to get quality news reports and other online content. Information should be free, he asserts, because the quality at the price of free is still there.

When it comes to marketing the products and services offered by your company, it’s easy to turn to conventional advertising techniques like television commercials and ad space in the local newspaper. However, one of the most powerful ways that companies gain new customers is through referrals and positive word-of-mouth. If you see two competing products and can’t decide which one to purchase, you may be inclined to ask a friend for his or her opinion.

For this reason, it is important to invest some of your resources in developing a strong word-of-mouth community for your business. Easily the biggest pool for a potential word-of-mouth army can come from your employees. These people are already familiar with what your company has to offer and how it differentiates itself from the competition. The key, then, is to have your employees be passionate enough to want to refer their friends and family.

Sure, you could turn to monetary rewards and challenges, but it is also effective to work on employee morale as well. Little things like congratulating someone on a job well done or saying that you are proud of what they have been able to accomplish can go a long way. This develops company loyalty and, as a result, the employee will be more likely to speak highly of what your company has to offer.

The next time an employee is at a casual cocktail party and someone asks them what they do, they may say that they run the accounting department at BlueFur, one of the best hosting companies on the net… instead of saying that they crunch numbers at “some place.”

It is certainly important to provide quality content to your blog’s readers and that’s why you should a good deal of time considering what kind of articles you are going to post on your blog. At the same time, communication on a blog should be a two-way street. It’s about interaction and it’s about building a community. The strongest blogs on the Internet have massive followings of very vocal readers.

While you could certainly encourage your readers to leave more comments or to interact with you on Twitter, another possibility is to offer real-time chat on your website. This goes above and beyond what a blog-based forum can provide, but how can you go about implementing a real-time chat tool? That’s where Pierre’s Wordspew can come in very handy.

This WordPress plug-in is as easy to install and implement as any other plug-in, but it gives you the opportunity to provide a real-time chat experience to the visitors of your blog. If you’re worried about spam, this tool has several measures in place to address that concern. Other highlights include sound alerts for whenever someone posts in your shoutbox, the ability to delete comments in real time, and the possibility of using custom themes and gravatars in the shoutbox.

Pierre’s Wordspew isn’t for everyone and it may not be a good fit for every blog, but if you’re looking for some real-time chat, it might be worth a look. Find it in the official plugin directory on WordPress.org.

I had a discussion with a friend of mine the other day about some of the largest malls in North America. She spent a couple years living in Minnesota, so she became quite familiar with the Mall of America. It was the preferred shopping destination for many people in the area, because you could find just about every store under the rainbow there, including multiple locations of the most popular stores.

After moving to Calgary, she took the opportunity to visit Edmonton, which is a three hour drive away. While in Edmonton, she took a quick tour of West Edmonton Mall and found it to be quite the different experience than the Mall of America. The latter may have more stores, but my friend said that she likes West Edmonton Mall more because it has more additional features beyond the pure shopping experience. There’s a casino, a waterpark, a theme park, an indoor skating rink, a pirate ship, a sea lion show, a movie theatre and more.

Is West Edmonton Mall more desirable than the Mall of America? This is certainly a matter of personal preference and what each individual wants out of their mall experience, but it seems that the Edmonton mall has more of an opportunity to capture people who may not be interested in just shopping. This can help to expand the business possibilities there and it can expand the potential demographics for visitors. For the Mall of America, it is mostly for shopping and not much for anything else.

Whatever niche your company chooses to approach, it may be worthwhile to think about how you can add extra value and entertainment to your main product draw. This way, you may be able to attract potential customers who may not have otherwise been interested in what you have to offer.

Most of us are familiar with the traditional set of handheld label makers. You’d usually be able to hold these things in your hands, type out the text that you need with the on-board keyboard, hit the print button, and you’d be provided with a simple label. There is no formatting, no font choice, no images, or any of that other kind of stuff. Well, it’s time to take labels to the 21st century.

You could use your laser or inkjet printer for this purpose, buying the special paper for that kind of purpose, but having something like the Brother QL-570 Professional Label Printer can be much more convenient. The small label printer will fit right on your desk and it does much more than a traditional label maker.

Using the provided software, you can lay out your labels however you’d like, including the use of images. It won’t be able to do color, since it makes use of special thermal paper, but you can choose different font sizes and styles as needed. It’s also quite nice that the Brother QL-570 comes with a built-in label cutter too, so after it spits out a label, it will automatically cut off that length from the roll.

Find more information about this professional label printer on Amazon.ca. It retails for $64.49, including two starter rolls of label paper.

Last night Netenberg updated Joomla and WordPress. Updates:

- 4Images Gallery: 1.7.6 -> 1.7.7
- b2evolution: 2.4.5 -> 3.3.1-stable
- Drupal: 6.13 -> 6.14
- Nucleus: 3.32 -> 3.50
- phpBB: 3.0.4 -> 3.0.5
- phpCOIN: 1.4.4 -> 1.6.4
- phpESP: 1.8.2 -> 2.1.1
- phpWCMS: 1.4.2 r327 -> 1.4.2 r345
- phpWebSite: 0.10.2 -> 1.6.3
- TikiWiki: 3.1 -> 3.2
- Xoops: 2.3.1 -> 2.3.3b

If you are using these software’s I suggest you upgrade.