The vast majority of business websites out there tend to stay laser-focused on their goals. Whether they’re intended to sell a product or generate leads, it seems that all of the content placed on their websites works towards this end. While there’s something that can be said about the strategy, changes at Google, Bing, and social media sites makes it beneficial to post content that does nothing more than educate, entertain, or act as a resource for people without attempting to sell or generate a lead.

If you want to truly get ahead of your competitors this year, you should be willing to devote a little bit of time (or money if you choose to buy it) every month on content.

This isn’t the type of content designed to get ranked in the search engines, but it can help your important pages get ranked. It’s not the kind of content that will generate leads through social media, though you have opportunities every time someone lands on your site. It’s the type of content that is truly giving – you’re motives should be business-oriented but the content should be able to stand alone.

A good--or bad--project manager can make the difference between a project coming in on time and on budget and it being a failure. How can you spot a good project manager? CIO.com talked to experts and IT executives to find out.

CIO — Just because someone has the title of "project manager" does not mean he knows how to effectively manage projects, as many CIOs and other IT executives have learned the hard way.

So how can you tell a good project manager from a bad one? CIO.com surveyed project management experts and executives to learn what skills are required to successfully manage projects--that is, to ensure that projects are kept on track and stay on budget.

Here are seven skills project managers need in order to be effective and successful:

How effective are the tweets you send that are important to your business? How are you monitoring the effectiveness of these tweets?

By monitoring what happens to your important tweets you can begin to understand what works and what doesn’t work and make improvements.

Here are 8 tools that are useful for monitoring the effectiveness of your tweets.

Twitter is big. With over 140 million active users, and 340 million Tweets per day, the social network is one that brands cannot ignore. Indeed, few brands are ignoring Twitter. Our recent report with global research firm Booz and Co. shows that 77% consider Twitter a priority social media platform.

It's great that brands are active on Twitter, but it's crucial they know best practices for publishing engaging content. Reach and engament can vary drastically with minor tweaks, so between December 11, 2011 and February 23, 2012, Buddy Media analyzed user engagement from more than 320 Twitter handles of the world's biggest brands.

After Google's installation of super-fast fibre optic internet service in Kansas City, do you think will it usher in a new era in industry and society - or just enable faster web browsing and media downloads? For technology consultant Bret Rhodus, Google's newest venture is an amazing business opportunity.

"This can be a game-changer," he says. "The opportunity for entrepreneurs is significant." For art supply clerk Danni Parelman, however, it's just a chance to download more music.

The California internet giant has begun installing fibre optic cable that will give Kansas City residents download speeds of up to 1Gbps - about 100 times faster than the broadband internet service currently available to most Americans.

It is easy to infringe Copyright on the web. The tools we have at our disposal, in the form of web browsers, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, and site copying programs like Web Whacker and Anawave WebSnake allow us to save pages or whole sites onto our computers with ease. Even email can be unwittingly used to breach copyright laws. Consider the following situations:

• I find a website which discusses copyright, perfect as a further reading for participants at a conference where I presented a paper. I copy the text from one page in the site and email it to all conference participants, with the suggestion that they visit this site to learn more about current copyright issues. It is probable that I have breached copyright.
• I see an image which would be perfect for the background of a number of pages on a site I am working on. I know that if I copy the image to my site I am infringing copyright so I decide to simply point to the URL of the image and include it in my pages this way. I know that this is less secure, as the image might be moved or deleted at any time, but I decide that this is better than breaking copyright. Unfortunately, including images in this manner still breaches copyright.
• I am creating a new site and need a cartoon for a page on coming events. I see the perfect image on another site so I write to the owner of the site to ask permission to use the image on the new site. I receive permission and happily insert the image in the web page. What I don't know is that the creator of the original website doesn't actually hold copyright in the image, making me in breach of copyright yet again.
• Having been made aware of the problem with the cartoon I used in the organisation's site, I search through some old publications of the organisation and find a cartoon that will work just as well. Fortunately, the cartoon was commissioned by the organisation for the journal it appeared in, so I reason that I can also use it on our website. However, a close reading of the agreement with our cartoonist shows that he has granted us the right to use the images he creates in paper publications only. If I wish to use it on our website I will have to negotiate a new fee with him.
• A school I am scheduled to visit next week informs me that their Internet connection is very slow. As I am going there to show staff how to use a particular website I make a complete, unaltered copy, without permission and save it on a floppy disk. I then use the disk version of the site in my presentation because it is much faster and more reliable than the school's Internet connection. By doing this I have almost certainly infringed copyright.

Takeaway: Myths, misconceptions, and confusion still plague the world of open source. Here’s the real scoop for anyone considering a move to an open source solution.

I remember a day when the mention of open source in a business setting — no matter the size of the business — was unthinkable.

The times they have changed, and open source is no longer considered a pariah. In fact, open source is often now considered first when a solution is needed. But when open source is being considered, certain things must be known. If you just dive in head first, there may well be some surprises waiting for you.

To keep new open source users from losing their sanity, I thought it might be helpful to list a few things everyone needs to know about open source before it’s put into place.

If you believe what you read, "Internet addiction" is about to make us a nation of derelicts. Men drooling over online pornography, women abandoning their husbands for chat-room lovers and people losing their life savings on gambling Web sites are just a few of the stories peddled in today's press.

But despite the topic's prominence, published studies on Internet addiction are scarce. Most are surveys, marred by self-selecting samples and no control groups. The rest are theoretical papers that speculate on the philosophical aspects of Internet addiction but provide no data. Meanwhile, many psychologists even doubt that addiction is the right term to describe what happens to people when they spend too much time online.

"It seems misleading to characterize behaviors as 'addictions' on the basis that people say they do too much of them," says Sara Kiesler, PhD, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author of one of the only controlled studies on Internet usage, published in the September 1998 American Psychologist. "No research has yet established that there is a disorder of Internet addiction that is separable from problems such as loneliness or problem gambling, or that a pa ssion for using the Internet is long-lasting."