As many of you know, I'm an honors graduate of OIART, the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology - one of the top audio production schools in the industry.

One of the many reasons I chose to attend OIART was the high job placement rate of their graduates which results in excellent connections within the industry. Graduates are invited back to OIART as guest lecturers, and this year I was happy to speak and share my experiences as an entrepreneur.

There has most definitely been a shift in the media landscape, from traditional media including newspaper, radio and television to online media. The most prevalent of the online media sources are blogs.

What Is a Blog?

Weblogs, web logs or simply blogs, as they are known, are easy-to-use websites (no HTML knowledge required), where you can quickly post thoughts, publish articles and interact with people. Blogs are typically accessible to any Internet user.

Blogs are Exploding

Technorati is now tracking over 50 million weblogs and about 120,000 new weblogs are being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs created every second.

Businesses can take advantage of this powerful communications medium, starting with a few simple steps to get involved today.

Why is that?

Here are four reasons why people who are poised for success may not reach their potential, and how you can apply some simple truths to experience your own break through.

The founder, John C. Maxwell is an internationally recognized leadership expert, speaker and author who has sold over 13 million books. His organizations have trained more than 2 milion leaders worldwide. Every year, he speaks with Fortune 500 Companies, international government leaders and organizations as diverse as the United States Military Academy at West Point and the National Football League.

In his session, "Leadership Gold", Dr. Maxwell explained a simple truth: The best leaders are listeners.

This morning, the Official Salesforce Blog announced that they have expanded their partnership with Google and together have delivered an industry-changing new product called Salesforce for Google Apps.

Techmeme and the New York Times has some great coverage on this developing story.

As heavy Salesforce and Google Apps users, we're pleased with this development and can see how we'll be using this dynamic duo for greater productivity and ultimately our ability to deliver a better service.

This afternoon, I had the opportunity to share with a group of about 80 regional technology companies on how to better position their websites in Google.

The business seminar was hosted by the TechAlliance, a membership-based organization that exists to represent, support, and accelerate the growth of technology companies to the benefit of the entire regional economy.

Seeing as Audible is their major sponsor, I knew the time would come when they discussed recording audiobooks, the time required and how much narrators get paid.

Well, I've got some answers for you.

Development tools such as Adobe AIR and Mozilla Prism are the two most notable players. To get a feel for what can been done, Adobe had published a nice gallery of applications.

Let's face it, the only reason desktop applications are still relevant is because of bandwidth and security.

Sitemaps have been around since the advent of the Web and used primarily as a way to list all the pages on a particular website.

Nowadays, sitemaps have other purposes such as organizing web content by topic, showing the search engines which pages you have created and developing a linking structure that emphasizes specific areas of your website over others.

But just how do you make a sitemap? And, how do you get that sitemap into Google, Yahoo! and MSN? That's today's topic and for the webmasters and entrepreneurs out there, I think this article will be quite refreshing.

For decades, we've been stuck with the mouse, icons and drop-down menus, originally invented at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s and made popular by Apple and Microsoft in the next decade.

How far have we come?

In this business, while some are slow to change and adopt new technologies and services, others have fully embraced new paradigms such as software as a service, a category that Voices.com would fall into.

The promise of software as a service (SaaS) companies is that they'll be available anytime, anywhere, something that I believe we've delivered on.

In the future, the voice over industry will continue to benefit from embracing this new paradigm with the integration of new services, technologies and web applications designed to improve business performance.

The word "usability" refers to methods for improving ease-of-use during the design process. That's precisely what we aim to do with each quarterly service update.

As we push forward to our most recent set of feature updates, aptly called Spring '08, we're once again reaching out to you for your feedback, recommendations and feature requests.

This time, we've put together a brief survey to help us improve Voices.com and there's no opinion more valuable than yours!

How does an online business make the most of customer feedback? One avenue to explore is the development of downloadable content, specifically audio, video and text resources that truly add value and give customers the experience they've asked for.

News: There was a relatively short outage on Amazon’s S3 storage service a short while ago. Voices.com uses Amazon to host audio demos, but not auditions or files uploaded for SurePay escrow transactions.