The 250-year-old Princeton library becomes the 12th partner to sign on with the Google Library Project.

Princeton University boasts a library stepped in American tradition, with an expansive catalog totaling more than six million printed works, five million manuscripts and two million nonprint items. Google and Princeton will work together in efforts to digitize approximately one million public domain books from these collections.

“Generations of Princeton librarians have devoted themselves to building a remarkable collection of books in thousands of subjects and dozens of languages,” University Librarian Karin Trainer said.

“Having the portion of that collection not covered by copyright available online will make it easier for Princeton students and faculty to do research, and joining the Google partnership allows us to share our collection with researchers worldwide, a step very much in keeping with the University’s unofficial motto of Princeton in the nation’s service and in the service of all nations.”

The number of partners in the Google Library Project continues to grow along with anticipation of Google’s digital bookstore; a service the company has admitted is one of its long-term goals in digitizing print content for online consumption.

With such a historic and well respected library joining the fray, it will be interesting to see if others follow suit by partnering with Google to make their content available as part of Google’s Book Search.

Even so, it’s difficult to replicate the feeling of holding a book in the palm of your hands. This, more so than forming new partnerships, is the true challenge facing the Google Library Project.

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Joe is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

The founder of the site is Farbood Nivi. He has been teaching exam preparation since 1998 and is former employee of Kaplan. On their blog post it reads,” The classes are live, teacher led and highly interactive and engaging. Every class is recorded, so students can review the exact lesson that they had.”

The price for the exam prep is $399 for16 sessions of 1.5 hours. The site boasts that it is a better online value than competitors like Kaplan and TPR. The competitor’s prices are Kaplan online is $1,249, The Princeton Review is $899, and Manhattan GMAT Prep is $990.

According to their site Grockit does offer financial aid. Under their FAQ it says,” We provide financial assistance on a per instance basis and may request documentation to establish financial need.”

The computer requirements for the site are Windows OS, Internet Explorer version 5 and above, audio headset and high speed Internet connection.

If you are considering an MBA program and want to prepare for the GMAT exam than exploring all options online and off would be a good choice.

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Mike is a staff writer for WebProNews. Visit WebProNews for the latest ebusiness news.

Aside from the various nouns describing what is literally cold and hard cash, my preferred use of the word is as a verb. The following definition caught my eye this morning. It applies itself quite well to a situation facing most, if not all, established SEO shops.

(v) change , alter , modify (cause to change; make different; cause a transformation) “The advent of the automobile may have altered the growth pattern of the city”

As the automobile became the primary mode of transportation in modern urban environments, it caused great change in the way cities were built and the way we live together as a society. An invention, the car, prompted innovation, wider roads and distant suburbs. The metaphor provides a historic marker for market-forces forcing evolution within the SEO sector.

Over the past twelve months, the word change has been a mantra in the research section of StepForth’s business. We have structured our staff in such a way as to provide our team with a diversity of viewpoints from my “bird’s eye view” to our Senior SEO, Scott’s, “reality of the trenches”, and all points between. When those varying viewpoints intersect, as they often do, we know we are thinking on the right track. Similarly, we learn a lot from sharing with others in the SEO and SEM industry.

Two key topics that tend to dominate the R&D portion of our formal staff meetings and many informal discussions amongst staff members are usability and consultation. Not surprisingly, they also tend to be discussed frequently on various SEO or SEM related forums.

The first factor is website, document, or file usability . Usability is a big word that covers many aspects of design and development. From an SEO perspective, the concept of usability covers three distinct areas, search engine friendly site architecture, human-friendly layout, and well-written, optimized site content.

Most of the websites, files or documents that pass across our monitors do not meet any of the three basic criteria mentioned above. As search engines become more sophisticated and the competition for Top10 placements gets harder every day, usability concerns are a growing problem for us. While many of the sites we see might look good, the reality is they are not properly structured for search engine spiders or for intuitive human navigation.

In order to meet the obvious need for search engine friendly site design and human-friendly layout, without losing focus on the SEO work we do best, StepForth has created a new division of the company, Pure Ignition , dedicated to search-ready design and user-intuitive layout.

The addition of a search focused web design firm to our corporate family allows us to bring our services to another, much needed level without sacrificing or threatening our core SEO competencies.

Headed by Senior Web Developer, Mark Johnstone, Pure Ignition is our way of trying to bridge a “quality gap” in site design. Mark has worked with StepForth Placement for about three years, starting as an assistant SEO and eventually rising to be VP of Operations in the management of the firm. He had been a site designer for several years before taking a position with StepForth.

Having helped manage our business through the past eighteen months of growth and industry upheaval, Mark has seen and experienced all facets of the operation. Most importantly to the development of Pure Ignition, Mark served as the chair, or facilitator, at many of the staff meetings held at StepForth where he heard and/or dealt with issues presented by the other staff. He is well versed in what the SEO staff needs to see included in a file, document or website.

“I see the biggest challenge in balancing architecture, content and accessibility, “Mark said over a coffee break yesterday. “I like the idea of separating SEO from site construction or reconstruction because I think any designer or SEO that pretends to be everything for everyone is basing their services on their egos. The work-load is just too big now.”

In that spirit, we believe that by building a hand-tooled Design and SEO assembly line of sorts, we will be better able to meet the needs of a broader range of clients. By integrating services between the search marketing division and the new search-focused design division of our company, we expect to deliver a far greater volume of work at relatively lower costs to the involvement of third party developers.

Before Pure Ignition was formed, our SEO staff had limited options. Our clients would have to rework their websites or we would have to do it ourselves. Neither option is particularly attractive and both present added costs to clients, often resulting in third party fees. Needless to say, the curative prescription our SEO or sales staff would offer was often too expensive for many to pursue. Hopefully, we can ratchet those added costs down while providing more speed, inter-office communication and over-all efficiency.

Another reason the firm has generated a design division is because we simply don’t like to turn away good business. It runs contrary to the most sensible sides of our selves as successful persons of business. Since the autumn of 2004, we have had to turn away so many potential clients due to irreconcilable site design issues it is almost tragically funny.

Almost… We are a business after all. So are the sites we had to turn away. We’ve been around the block as a company and as individuals and, like all businesses, have seen and experienced our share of economic brutality. It’s ugly eh? Lot ‘s of good people get ripped off and by the time they come to us for search engine optimization, there’s little we can do to help them. Life is very real, even in the virtual world. We strive to offer our clients some form of security in the design, and promotion loop. That’s the greater purpose to Pure Ignition.

That brings us to the second key change we see in our business of running a boutique SEO/SEM firm. We are doing a lot more consultation than we ever have before.

The commercial Internet has been here for more than a decade. Most businesses have established and evolved IT departments or they have an outsourced vendor for IT services. Now that search engines have become so important to their business and to their competitors, they have positions dedicated to online marketing. They love to learn and strategize, and by happy coincidence, we love to strategize and make suggestions.

The market for SEO consultation has gotten so busy that our CEO, Ross Dunn now focuses over a third of his time providing direct consultation services.

One of the things that makes consultation different from hands-on SEO is that your suggestions are being applied and worked on by other people. Using an array of website analytics, a good SEO consultant should be able to provide a working map of suggested changes and offer solid reasons for making the suggestions.

In some ways, it is also like taking a leap of faith. Really experienced SEOs talk about a feeling they get when they know they have the right balance on a page. Jill Whalen once described it as the SEO Zen Factor . When you have the right mix on a page or document, you simply know you’ve got it.

The business of search engine optimization has changed a lot over last four years with the greatest changes seen in the last six months. We know the environment is only going to be changing faster in the near future so we too are making some significant changes in preparation as well as in reaction to market forces. Pure Ignition is now open for business, putting the entire firm in a far better placement moving into the future.

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Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel – 250-385-1190 Toll Free – 877-385-5526 Fax – 250-385-1198

Revolution, according to one definition offered by Princeton University’s WordNet is, ” a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving.”

Revolutions come in stages, generally brewing for long periods before overwhelming the traditional order with the weight of massive social adoption of new ideas, tools and methods. They almost always stem from increased social or technical knowledge and require the support of a prosperous middle-class majority to fully succeed.

In this case, that majority is the Internet users themselves. The search engines are providing the tools forged by in-house and third party software developers whose creativity formed the framework for the coming changes. Underpinning the revolution is the virtually universal access to broadband, high-speed connectivity in North America and most of Western Europe, Oceania and Asia .

The last thing a successful revolution requires is the need to have one in the first place. Unless a society or economy is horribly oppressed, revolution really is a lot of bother and hard work. Why go to the trouble of establishing a new way of doing things if the old one works?

The current Internet economy works just fine, at least for those who can exploit opportunities in or around it. A vast improvement on personal empowerment from the socio-economic order of the post WW2 corporate-economies, the Internet has provided tens of millions of people the essential tools to become entrepreneurs and add value to their lives and their communities.

Add the emergence of two billion new users and developers from India and China to the mix, along with the hundreds of millions in other parts of Africa, Asia and South America who are also finding easier access to the Internet and the need to alter our traditions becomes that much more apparent. Issues ranging from language and translation support to the legal differences between jurisdictional areas are suddenly on the table.

The Internet as we know it today is actually a massive hodgepodge of applications, common and conflicting protocols, and clunky client-side software strung together by an amazingly versatile and efficient routing system. The ability to collaborate between artificial and human driven intelligences is phenomenal but, as originators such as Vint Cerf and Bill Gates have said, what we see today is only the tip of the iceberg.

Yesterday’s quiet but deliberate unveiling of Microsoft’s Windows Live marked the true beginning of a new phase in Internet development as the software giant follows rival Google in presenting a host of online services and server side software for registered users. One giant following another through a virgin forest will certainly open a very wide path for others to follow.

In a nutshell, Windows Live has copied Google’s personalized search portal ( google.com/ig ) though its layout and functionality is very much different. Oddly enough, the release and functionality of Windows Live is not in itself an important milestone. Their contribution to Revolution 2.1 is the adoption of a user and/or group influenced personalization of information retrieval by the major search entities. Being the second to offer registered users the ability to create their own info-portal home page, Microsoft is pretty much ensuring that, assuming users go for it; others will follow the model in the future.

Microsoft also released OfficeLive , a major and important step forward in Revolution 2.1. OfficeLive marks a renewed mission for Microsoft in the development and distribution of server-side software. According to Microsoft chief technical officer Ozzie Smith, ‘Internet users have come to expect services that are fast, easy-to-use – and, in many cases, free. Access to personal information from any PC or mobile device is becoming expected, making more users willing to store their personal information on the servers of companies such as Google than their own PCs.”

Google has supported the development of much of the software that will power the coming changes. Over the years, the alliance between Google and the open source community has been widely known. Soon, Google is expected to be involved with the release of Open Office as server-side software on demand.

Google and Microsoft are not alone in their contributions to Revolution 2.1. The largest tech-driver of the coming changes is the ability to feed user-created information via RSS or Real Simple Syndication.

Yahoo recently took a radically different but equally revolutionary path with the citizen-publisher focused Yahoo Publisher Network.

The Yahoo Publisher Network is a massive initiative in grassroots publishing that Yahoo hopes will be adopted by citizen journalists and commercial publishers. YPN is an amalgam of what will eventually be dozens of Yahoo features and services with the ability to create and mass-distribute blogs. Yahoo leads the search field in the provision of in-house and user generated content for bloggers through the YPN. It also offers advertising distribution incentives similar to Google AdSense for YPN publishers.

Over the past ten years, two general types of information have emerged from the Internet. One type is academic or social in focus and the other is commercial or politically focused. The first wants to learn and share, the second to lead and sell. Up until this point, both have existed in tandem, pretty much treated equally by search engines and Internet protocols. Quite often, at least in the realm of general search, the commercial side has exploited this equality, (SEOs and SEMs can insert a polite but self-effacing cough here), sometimes pushing quality but non-commercial information lower in search results than it ought to be.

Concurrently, a new generation of software engineers grew up. Unlike previous generations, this new bunch has always had computers and the Internet as functioning parts of their lives. These teen and early 20-somethings relate to the Internet differently than their parents and even their older peers do. Like 30-something Gen-X’ers and their love-hate relationship with PR, mass marketing and advertising, today’s younger net-user doesn’t necessarily trust everything he or she sees online. Unlike previous generations however, this young set can immediately do something about it.

Necessity is the mother of invention and frustration is often the muse of innovation. The Internet gave these teen and 20-something innovators the platform to build better mousetraps on and the ability to do so almost instantly. That’s what the hype surrounding Web2.0 is all about.

What they have created is a set of extremely interesting social networking and communication devices that rely on the input and acceptance of Internet users. On the academic front, the Wikipedia provides one of the best examples. Built upon articles and entries written by registered users, the Wikipedia has rapidly become the unofficial encyclopaedia of the Internet. Quality control is an ongoing issue however the size and attention of the community contributing to the project makes the editorial project virtually organic. In the commercial realm, the newsletter or publication this article is written in could stand as basic but rapidly evolving example.

As technology and the wealth necessary to use it has advanced so rapidly over the past decade, tools that make information distribution and retrieval simpler have emerged. In other words, some clever inventors have found ways to make search simpler. At the same time, advances and innovations in grassroots technologies (such as RSS enabled blogs mixed with a/v production to host podcasts) push the search industry to broaden the horizons available to users. The major search engines didn’t start the revolution. Their function is to popularize it as they exploit emerging revenue streams.

The changes I’ve dubbed Revolution 2.1 will have an enormous impact on Internet and search marketing.

The first thing we SEOs and SEMs need to realize is that the search sector is expanding rapidly to include specialized, regionalized, and personalized search tools. Each of the major search engines and literally dozens of smaller search tools offer a widening array of search options. Learning the new methods of treating and feeding information to search engines is critical for continued success in the search marketing field. For instance, we recently had an opportunity to perform SEO services on a podcast a client in a highly competitive field wanted to produce. We took a pass on the project as we felt we didn’t have the skills or tools necessary to do the job. Having been alerted to a gap in what will be a growing field, we hope to be able to service such requests in the future. Our survival literally depends on it.

Next, we need to understand and help our clients understand social and business communication tools such as RSS feed readers, photo-sharing applications, and group-networking sites such as Friendster , Tribe.net , MySpace , XuQa and LinkedIn .

Lastly, we need to start adding features such as Yahoo’s MyWeb button or Google XML sitemaps to client sites to aid in their transition to the new web being weaved in Revolution 2.1.

The funny thing about revolutions, especially ones that get played out without a coherent plan that has the full consent of the people, is that unexpected developments happen. The Internet as we know it today is a prime example. Back in the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, nobody could have predicted the massive social and economic changes brought about by the rise of the public Internet.

Flash ahead thirty years to today. Anything can happen and the web that comes from today’s changes will be far more functional. It will incorporate traditional media such as TV and newspapers and allow users access to tools used to create traditional programming. The revolution has been brewing over the past two years. Ever since a functioning business model based on paid-advertising turned tiny contextually delivered three-line ads into pure profit, software designers have been churning out a series of “killer apps” hoping the suddenly super-wealthy search engines would buy them or futures-hungry venture capitalists would fund them. For those who were successful in the development and those of us about to benefit from their success, the next Internet revolution has begun.

Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel – 250-385-1190 Toll Free – 877-385-5526 Fax – 250-385-1198

Canadian-born Tilghman joins directors such as Stanford president John Hennessy, Intel’s Paul Otellini, as part of Google’s ongoing commitment to developing academic and technological advancements.

“Google is a company from which I can learn a lot because Google fundamentally is in the information business,” Tilghman said in a phone interview with the Daily Princetonian. “Universities of course have to be adept in the distribution of knowledge, and also in the dissemination of knowledge.”

Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Eric Schmidt, himself a Princeton graduate, described Tilghman as a person of “raw intellect.”

Dr. Tilghman is most recognized for her postdoctoral work with the National Institutes of Health, where she contributed to the first successful cloning of the mammalian gene.

From there, she made additional breakthroughs in the field of mammalian genetics as a member of the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia and an adjunct associate professor of human genetics and biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylvania.

She was also a member of the National Research Council’s committee that set the blueprint for the US effort in the Human Genome Project Initiative.

This isn’t the first time Google has tapped geneticists. CNet reported in 2002, that Google tested a supercomputer-esque toolbar to help Stanford University’s researchers decipher how genetic information is converted into proteins.

Schmidt described Tilghman as a natural leader and motivator.

“It’s an honor to welcome a woman of Dr. Tilghman’s reputation to our board,” said Schmidt. “Google is a company born out of university research, so we look forward to tapping into her extraordinary talents as an accomplished academic, and as a champion of discovery.”

Princeton Softech today announced its solution for the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450, designed to address the needs of PeopleSoft users for long-term management of their business-critical financial and enterprise data to help meet compliance and regulatory requirements. The Princeton Softech solution has been tested for interoperability with the IBM DR 450 and other IBM products through the IBM TotalStorage Proven Program and is designed to allow customers to archive PeopleSoft data to the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450, with the ability to retrieve subsets of archived data for PeopleSoft users to access via a variety of means. Princeton Softech is the first vendor to successfully complete testing with the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450 under the TotalStorage Proven program.

“Storage requirements for compliance data is expected to grow at a rate of 64 percent per year. This increase underscores the importance of comprehensive compliance solutions among leading vendors for managing large amounts of ERP data throughout its lifecycle,” said Alan Stuart, Chief Strategist and Business Line Executive, IBM Data Retention Solutions. “Maintaining access to information on-demand is the end objective, and the work done under programs, such as the TotalStorage Proven Program, is an important step in helping companies not only lower their total cost of ownership, but to also integrate their data and business processes.”

By integrating Princeton Softech’s Archive for Servers PeopleSoft Enterprise Edition database archiving software with the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450 and PeopleSoft application suites, Princeton Softech is enabling PeopleSoft customers to leverage a truly unique performance solution for storing ERP archived data for long term compliance and availability purposes at a competitive price. According to Gartner, by understanding the role of different technologies in business processes and where established or new technologies can aid compliance, enterprises can reduce the costs of regulatory compliance and derive long-term business value (Gartner — Sarbanes-Oxley: The Role of Technology, October 10, 2003).

“Data retention regulations require that different types of business-critical data remain accessible for many years, particularly financial information. As a result, PeopleSoft customers require a highly focused archival solution,” said Roy Satterthwaite, Vice President for tools and technology, PeopleSoft. “The integrated solutions will help our customers better manage their long-term data and business needs as well as make it easier to implement, personalize, use and upgrade their software.”

Given the needs of regulatory compliance, deleting valuable production information without providing for future access could put an organization at risk. Princeton Softech’s Active Archive Solutions address this issue and enable companies to manage database growth, improving the performance and availability of critical business applications and optimizing the customer ownership experience. Princeton Softech’s Archive for Servers platform directly integrates with the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software, used to manage and enforce data retention policies for the IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450.

“IBM and Princeton Softech provide PeopleSoft customers with powerful solutions that enable organizations to better address their increasing compliance requirements while optimizing their investment,” said Paul Winn, President and CEO of Princeton Softech. “True Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) requires alignment of people, processes and products, and we are helping customers move towards this model.”

The IBM TotalStorage Data Retention 450 stores, retrieves, and manages regulated and non-regulated data in a non-erasable and non-rewritable format and is designed to help customers protect the integrity of their data. These capabilities provide the foundation for managing growing compliance and data retention needs. In addition, this system can automatically enforce data retention policies while supporting on-demand availability of key data and applications in the event of hardware, software or network failures. As a result, companies have an essential component for ILM that can help reduce the cost of compliance associated with managing and storing relational data.

“Rapidly growing databases and the enforcement of regulatory standards represent a significant challenge for enterprises and are driving companies to purchase integrated data archiving solutions,” commented Peter Gerr of the Enterprise Strategy Group. “All three companies are addressing this need to help customers manage the entire information lifecycle and provide immediate improvements in managing database growth while still keeping archived data accessible.”

Princeton Softech’s Archive for Servers platform and IBM’s TotalStorage Data Retention 450 are available immediately to help customers address database compliance requirements.

ERP Update provides articles, insights and commentary on enterprise resource planning issues.