I ask my friends if they go into chat rooms and they all deny it. Isn't that strange. We're probably chatting with each other and we don't even know it because we hide behind silly names.

So what are we replacing when we spend our time typing out our thoughts with strangers? Maybe time with family. I'm too often shoo-ing my family away while I'm in mid-sentence on a message board. Or I don't answer the phone when I'm catching up on a string that has been going on for several days and is really heating up in controversy. I might even be late going to a friend's house because I lose track of time. Don't we all look a little crazy when we're chuckling to ourselves, and then frantically typing?

And then the TV news often takes questions on the air from emails. This is certainly becoming a very interactive electronic news world. But is it too much? Sometimes it's hard to tell fact from opinion, as we mix it all up and spit it out. People are putting their family movies on sites. It's crazy how we find ourselves watching that stuff. Are we lowering our standards?

I read an article on this recently. Some webmasters tried to measure hits with two different methods and came up with the two different results. So say if one retailer is trying to sell ads on their site, they use the hits as a way to set the rates. But another retailer may be using a different tracking mechanism and logging more hits, so they can charge more for their display ads on the site. As I said, it's confusing.

Of course, no one really monitors the web, per se. People put everything on it. Maybe I'm just having one of those days. Information overload!

Those of us over 35 reminisce about the days when we actually had to look for a pay phone. Or carry around one of those HUGE mobile phones. I remember how heavy that battery bag was to lug around. Imagine all of the new ways to communicate since those days!

So now you can log onto a radio station's web site and watch videos and see pictures from an event. You can log onto a tv station's web site and watch the latest news on a video. A newspaper's site has video, audio, slide shows AND a nicely written story.

Is all of this too much? Sometimes...

I have a good friend who was certain that he had Lou Gehrig's disease because his finger and his arm were twitching. He looked up the reams of information, the symptoms, the diagrams, the videos. He was scared, angry, sad. He was practically making arrangements for his wife and children. He finally got an appointment with a specialist. All the tests were negative. It was probably just overworked muscles. (He skips rope for exercise). We can laugh at this now, but if you are the one going through it, the worry alone is debilitating.

When a relative was ill a few years back, the doctors were doing what they do: test and rule out. But after each suggestion of a diagnosis, I was looking up the symptoms, the prognosis, the treatment. Then I would get a call: It's not that, now they are testing for something else. I was becoming an expert in paranoia. I was making myself crazy. (And yes, I matched the "crazy" symptoms too).

I was a the doctor's office last month for a regular check up and he made some comment about whether I checked the Internet for symptoms. I said I had not. He told me that so many patients come in with too much information and have themselves all worried for nothing.

I suppose some middle ground would be good. If you can look up something but limit your research to maybe 2 or 3 hits. Then you will be somewhat informed but perhaps not convinced that you have something. Leave that up to the doctors.

One friend of mine is really into geneology and she she joined a few online groups that share her interest. She was thrilled to learn that many of them specialize in the same geographic areas that she is interested in. Now, when they take trips to their ancestors' homelands, they post photos of old churches, towns and any landmarks they can find. You can't even put a price on that; it's just all information sharing. This has taken my friend's research forward by leaps and bounds.

A lot of people with hobbies that involve collecting like to find groups that will trade items. This is cost effective and you learn who you can trust fairly quickly.

It's amazing when you find that there are a lot of people out there with the same interests as you. And you don't have to host them at your house.

You can find so much personal information on someone if you do a Web search. I have found old friends, former classmates, friends of exes and exes of friends. You really have to be careful what you put out there. Even employers do searches now and can easily find that embarrassing picture of you from your college days of fun and frolicking. I read an article recently in which bosses said they have changed their minds about hiring someone after they found a little too much personal information on the Web.

Even thank you notes now seem to come through emails. What happened to the good, old-fashioned personal touch of a letter or card? Granted, sometimes I like the convenience of ordering a gift online, paying extra for it to be wrapped, and shipping it directly to the recipient. How easy is that?? But then I get a thank you note in an email and I feel a little dissed. I guess it's a two-way street.

I did receive a hand-written thank you card the other day and it was so rare that I just had to read it twice because it just seemed so personal. But after it sat on my counter for a few days, I tossed it. So maybe we are saving trees when we use email?

So the irony is, we're putting a lot more about ourselves out there in the Internet world for anyone and everyone to see, but this technology means we're losing the personal touch with the people and family we're closest to. Now there's something to think about.

A good friend of my has some college credits he picked up over the years but lately he has been getting nowhere. So recently he has decided to get an online degree while still maintaining his full-time job. He neither has the time nor money to do traditional college rout anymore. Still, his company tells him he needs his bachelor’s degree to advance from his current position.

This weekend, I was at his apartment watching the Tiger/Mets game and we got online and started looking for online degree options. We happened to find a great site that has a searchable database of online degree programs available from several different accredited colleges. I was surprised by the choices there now are for getting a bachelors degree online. About 10 years ago, I looked into online degrees and the choices were extremely limited. Now with widespread Internet access, college is becoming more accessible to a wider range of people.

While a four year degree at a top University may look better on a resume, today’s online programs offer an option to get a bachelors or masters degree to those who 10 years ago would have had no opportunity to advance their education. The more people that can further their education the better for our country so I see this trend as another way that the Internet benefits us all.

I also tried what everyone does - rebooted about 100 times - but each time I would get an error explaining that no hard drives were found. I was desperate to get access to my data and started looking at hard drive recovery companies from my laptop. I quickly discovered that hard drive repair companies were there for large companies with lots of money, not for someone who wanted to recover more personal stuff than files to save a business. Also, the prices were outrageous, most services were $2,000 and up just for them to give it a shot.

Another worry was if they somehow were able to access my hard drive, they would have access to all my personal financial data I keep in Quicken. I figured there had to be a cheaper ‘do it yourself’ solution out there so I kept looking – then I stumbled on BinaryBiz. Their VirtualLab data recovery software saved me from pretty much starting my computer life from scratch.

They have a free trial version for Windows that quickly found almost all of my files and displayed them in an organized list. I was never happier to pay for software I found on the Internet. For less than $200 dollars my binary life was saved.

If you ever need data recovery for a crashed disk, I would recommend giving BinaryBiz a try before either giving up or sending your hard drive to some stranger that will charge 10 times as much with no guarantee of success.

If you think of a unique website idea you really have something special. However, since most website ideas have already been done, you’ll need to find a way for people to find you. The great thing about the web is your website can be about the same topic as hundreds or thousands of other websites still be extremely successful.

The secret is to see what your competitors are doing and do it better. If you analyze your competition, you will see that most will be lacking great content. An excellent example of a site attacking its competition in a very competitive market with outstanding content is this loans website.

They definitely have the right formula as they build relevant content about personal loans, secured loans and many other topics. As this site adds more and more loan related content, they will begin to get a continual stream of targeted visitors looking for various type of personal loans. They also put easy links to all the social media websites on each article which is a great idea and a topic I will discuss in the future.

Whether you have a loan site or some other website idea in a highly competitive area, if you can make your site the destination on the web for information about your product it will be very successful. It amazes me how many webmasters build websites with all kinds of bells and whistles but forget the most important thing – Great Content.

Everyone says we live our lives through our children, so when the time is right, I'll suggest at least a year of overseas study in England to my kids. In today's world economy, an international education is more important then ever to prepare our youth for a successful future.

When considering international study, I always think of the U.K. first because of the country's fine reputation for higher education (not to mention the lack of language barriers), make it a good fit for any U.S based student looking to broaden their horizons.

This past week, I did a bit of research and found a website that offers an excellent U.S. Student Guide with information on everything from England's culture to financial aid. The website also contains information on other facets of life in the U.K. for students spending an extended period in England like car insurance and for those who plan a longer visit mortgages.

The Internet is making the world is becoming a much smaller place, so if the opportunity presents itself, I won't let my kids miss out like I did. Of course, money is always tight so I hope when/if the moment arises things are going well financially in my life to make it happen.

SEO Elite is great for getting a quick analysis of websites that are linking to my website and my competitor’s websites. Often, if you find a site linking to a site similar to your website, you can get them to link to you quite easily.

The software also helps you build a link directory (I have not used this part of the software) but it might come in handy if you want a quick easy way to maintain a link directory. The main thing I like about the program is seeing all the backlinks, what their PR is, the title tags of the pages, among other things in one easy to read table with many other summary tables. It can be a real time saver if you are the type of person that likes to analyze your backlinks.

You can also analyze links using Yahoo’s “linkdomain: mysite.com” command, but if a site has 10,000s of backlinks this can be very inefficient. I know Brad has a lot of happy customers, you can read some of their reviews on his SEO Elite Review page.

I have found the use of templates work best if you have a bit of web design knowledge so you can customize your template from the default set up to your personal vision. Most website templates give you the basic framework, it is up to you to take that template and make it work for your entire website.

One of the more comprehensive template companies out there, Best Web Templates and Design, offers 1,000s of website templates for just about any category of website, you can search their inventory and pick the template that fits your website idea best.

Of course, even the best looking website is not going to bring you traffic, but getting your site up and running fast is a good first step to creating a successful web business. Once you have your website up you can start to focus on bringing visitors to your website.

It is very important that every page of your site has a short, unique title describing exactly what that page is about. If you are selling hundreds of different items, each item page should have a unique item name. If your site has hundreds of different articles, each article page title should describe what the article is about. It’s as simple as that.

I have seen sites that use the same title across their entire website. If the name of your web site is Acme Widgets, you want more than Acme Widgets in the title for every page of your site. I have seen many sites do this that wonder why they are not getting any search engine traffic.

You really need to spoon feed information to search engines about what your website and each page is about. The proper use of the TITLE tag is one of the best ways for you to do this. It is such a simple, common sense thing; however, I am still surprised by websites that don’t take advantage of this opportunity.