AdWords system maintenance on August 25

On Saturday, August 25th, the AdWords system will be unavailable from approximately 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. PDT due to maintenance. While you won't be able to sign in to your accounts during this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Posted by Judy, Inside AdWords crew

8 Ways to Battle Unwanted Work Calories

Overeating at work can be pretty easy. Your colleagues bring in treats every day because it's always someone's birthday or leaving party. People eat muffins and doughnuts every Friday or even every day. The staff restaurant is full of fried food or mayonnaise laden salads and the nearest place outside work serves nothing but fast food.

Here are 8 tips to help you battle against unwanted workplace calories.

1. Bring your own healthy lunch and snack
You know it makes sense. If you have something healthy and delicious to eat you'll be less tempted by all the other unhealthy stuff around. It takes a bit of planning when you do your weekly shop but you'll reap the rewards. Choose food which is easy to prepare and get as much as you can ready the night before to avoid last-minute panics in the morning.

2. Say "No" nicely
You can get a lot of pressure from others to sample the snacks they bring in so this one may take some practice but it does get easier after a while. Just say "No thanks not just now" or "No thanks, I'm just about to have an apple" or simply "No thanks" - no need to explain or apologize.

3. Keep your desk clear of food
It's asking for trouble to keep food on your desk. Put the lunch and snacks you brought out of sight so that you have to go and get something from the kitchen or locker room when you're hungry.

4. Stop to eat
Don't nibble food unconsciously at your desk - it's the easiest way to overeat. Pause in whatever you are doing whenever you decide to eat and take time to really taste the food. If there's somewhere you can go away from your desk to eat then do that, otherwise just stop working on your report or reading your emails for 5 minutes and be fully aware of the food you are eating.

5. Stay away from vending machines
Vending machines tend to be full of unhealthy calorie-laden food. Having your own snacks should help you resist the temptation to treat yourself. But, in any case, keep away from the room with the machines and if you really can't resist, stop bringing any change to work - it's the only way!

6. When you need a break
Don't eat just because you need a break. Instead, take a quick walk or have a glass of water or herbal tea - even coffee is better than eating food you don't need. If you find that there are times you just have to nibble on something make sure you always have plenty of healthy snacks with you. You can nibble quite a bit on carrots sticks, cucumber and celery without doing any damage to your waistline.

7. Team up
If you have a colleague who is also trying to lose weight, join forces and help each other stay on track. It's great to have someone to go for a walk with at lunchtime or to hang with when everyone else is wolfing down cakes someone has brought in.

8. Choose wisely
You don't have to turn down social invitations from colleagues to be able to succeed at losing weight so go ahead and join in. But you do have to select what you have to eat and drink carefully when you eat out on a regular basis. Choose the smallest portions you can and get to know the menus at the local restaurants so that you can plan what to eat ahead of time. Even fast food places now have healthier options but remember it's often the extras which are the most fattening - condiments, dressings and sugary or milky drinks can more than double the calories in a meal.


Try these tips and you will definitely start to see the waistline trim down. Getting into shape means maintaining a healthy diet - drink plenty of water and eat complex carbohydrates along with lean protein and healthy fats - and exercising regularly.

Funk Roberts

Don't Rush the Beat

The Anatomy of Human Powered (web) Services

Human Powered Services (HPS) are the piece of the puzzle that meshes BPM with SOA... With HPS in the mix choreographing Human and Autonomous services is seamless, without HPS in the mix choreographing Human and Autonomous services is a pain.

I've blogged about HPS before...

Human Powered Services are chimeras that combine the features of "Normal" applications with Web Services.

From the perspective of the service consumer, a Human Powered Service (HPS) is just like any other asynchronous web service. The service is invoked, and then at some later time a response is received.

From the perspective of the Human who will provide the service, an HPS is just like any other web-enabled application except for one important detail; HPS applications are always oriented towards satisfying a specific request.

To understand the anatomy of an HPS, it's helpful to compare them to the way we currently use email to implement processes... When someone (like our boss) wants us to do something, they assign us a task by sending us an email request. Our email client notifies us that a new message has arrived, or we check our inboxes for new mail. We open the email, process the request, and then reply to the sender with a result.

The human service provider's interaction with an HPS is essentially the same, except the formats for the request and the response are formally defined... It's similar to receiving a predefined form (such as a PDF form) as an email attachment... or of receiving an email with an embedded link to a web application.

Esther Dyson came very close to defining HPS when she expounded her views on Meta-Mail, but she stayed in the realm of human-only workflow. HPS belongs to the realm where service delivery is immaterial... Human or Autonomous should not matter to the process designer. A more subtle distinction between HPS an meta-mail involves the designer of the service. In the case of emailed tasks, the sender generally designs a one-time service that the receiver should perform... I might create a survey and send it by email to a list of people to get their responses. In HPS, the service provider generally defines the service to be performed, and offers this service to a wide audience. As I said, this is a very subtle distinction, and their is no reason why both models cannot coexist.

To implement an HPS, you need to assemble something like the following conglomeration of parts:

• An asynchronous web service to receive requests.
• A queuing mechanism to keep track of each requests until it is processed.
• An application that a human can use to see the list of pending requests... inclusion of a mechanism for notifying a human (such as email) is a nice touch, but not strictly necessary.
• An application that a human can use to process a specific type of request.
• A mechanism for transferring the results of the processing application back to the asynchronous web service, for delivery to the original requester.

The experienced programmer will note that there is nothing "new" on this list of parts... in fact there are a number of options for implementing each part. It's simply a matter of "some assembly required" and you can roll your own HPS system.

For those of us who are not inclined to reinvent what someone else has probably already invented, the good news is that many workflow and BPM suites have assembled these parts for us... We can easily create processes that include both Human and Autonomous services.

The bad news is that the Human Powered services developed within BPM suites are often imprisoned by those suites. It's often rediculously simple to publish Autonomous services for use outside a specific BPM or Workflow suite... but next to impossible to publish any Human Powered service for external consumption. I dare you to try to create a composite application that choreographs multiple Human Powered Services hosted by competing BPM suites... in fact it's often hard to choreograph multiple HP Services within a single vendor's suite unless they all hosted on a single server cluster.

I suspect that the reason for this lack of support for "free-range" hp Services has more to do with initial focus rather than any technical limitations; Most BPM and Workflow Vendor's focus on implementing processes within a single organization... and you don't really need to develop a "free-range" HPS to solve those problems.

Now imagine a world of where business processes cross organizational boundries. In that world services are performed by many companies, and each company hosts its own services. As a service provider in that world my customers shouldn't care about the user interfaces that my employees use (if any), and I shouldn't care about the user interfaces that my customer's employees use (if any). That's the world where "free-range" HPS makes sense... and I predict that the BPM vendors are going to shift focus to that world very soon... and the pain of implementing an HPS will greatly diminish.

7 Killer Tactics to Get Free Leads Through MySpace

One of the easiest ways to generate free network leads for your MLM business is through social networking sites. Social networking sites have taken the internet by storm over the past few years. Whether it be business networking sites such as Ryze, Fast Pitch, and Direct Matches, or more generic sites such as MySpace and Facebook, there are endless possibilities to build relationships with others, get free leads for your MLM business, as well as to market your product and services.

One of the most popular social networking sites is MySpace. Initially thought of as a place for teens to hang out and chat and the playground for music lovers and their fans, many business owners have discovered they can market their product and services very successfully, including network marketers. The following are the top ten creative ways you can use MySpace to generate free leads for your network marketing home business.

1. Build a fun profile. Your fun profile isn’t meant to be serious in any way. The purpose of it is to be goofy and fun! It can be about anything you find fun and humorous. At the end of your profile, you include a link to a splash or squeeze page about your MLM opportunity. Once your fun profile is created, you can start sending friends’ requests. MySpace lets you request 500 new friends’ requests every day, so you can build a friends list pretty quickly.

A couple of crucial points to remember about MySpace profile creations are:

a. It is a huge no-no to ever plaster commercial ads in your bulletin, comments, or email. Why? Because MySpace says you can’t in their terms and conditions and plus, the whole key to a profile is to make it non-commercial. You want to build relationships and not slam ads in people’s boxes.

b. Make your page a fun place to be with lots of cool things to do. Examples include sharing good restaurants and recipes, or posting fun and interesting things about your network marketing products and services.

c. Never put blatant sales copy in any of your profiles. This will spell the kiss of death if you do. Instead, share a few things about yourself as well as a link to your site. You can get as creative as you want with this, but in a classy way and not in a pushy, aggressive salesman way.

2. Create an interactive profile. With this type of profile, you want to get lots of interactive content. You can use trivia questions if you want. This works well because of the simple fact trivia questions are in and of themselves very interactive. You will still need a link on your profile page, but you also need to fill out as much as you can about yourself on your page as well. Make sure you include your picture. You can post a few trivia questions to your blog and then post a bulletin with one of the questions on it. You can then ask people to post answers on your blog and the first one who guesses right gets two kudos points.

Remember that every time you post a bulletin all your friends will receive it. This means, people will be coming back to look at your profile again. The more times folks review your profile, the more traffic you will receive as well clicks on your link!

3. Invite your celebrity friends. What you want to do here is to search for the most famous name in your particular industry. It should be name that your potential leads would know. For example, if you were in internet marketing, it could be Zig Ziglar or Yanik Silver. For those in network marketing, it could Tom “Big Al” Schreiter”.

What you then would do is to use the MySpace search feature to search your chosen celeb name to find their profiles. Then, make a friends’ request. Next, go to as many famous names you can think of that are related to your niche and invite them all to be your friend. This is important because in MySpace, big names attract a ton of attention, especially for those just starting out. You will want to make sure that your heavy hitter friends are displayed in your top 4 and 8 friends slots as this adds implied credibility. It’s like the heavy hitter is endorsing whatever your network marketing product or service you are offering.

4. Surf your way through MySpace. This is very powerful. What it does is create viral campaigns in which you market to the friends of your friends on MySpace. What you would do is not only send bulletins to your friends, but also post on the comment sections of their profiles. This way, not only will your friend get the message, but so will all the traffic that visits the profile. If you make a great viral comment on a big hitter’s page, you can expect to get lots of traffic to your profile as well as clicks to your link. This equals more free MLM leads!

5. Keywords anyone? You may not realize this, but content on Myspace is picked up by the search engines very, very quickly. If you share good content and good keyword concentrations, you will get indexed by the search engines. Just make sure it is good, quality content!

6. Post to Free Classifieds. Myspace offers you the opportunity to post classifieds. Make sure you carefully read the terms and conditions first. Numerous classified about your MLM products and services will get a lot more traffic to your profile link! More free leads for you.

7. Use the free Mozilla add on for MySpace. Mozilla is a browser like Internet Explorer. They offer a free tool bar that makes working on Myspace faster. You would go to http://www.mozilla.org to download it for free. Once you have done that, and it is installed, hit the “tools” button on top of the Mozilla screen. Then click “add-ons” and a small pop up window will come up. Next, click “get extensions” on the lower right hand corner of the window to be taken to a list of various add-ons. Select the Myspace utility and install it. You will then notice that the Myspace functions that appear on the top of the Mozilla browser. You will quickly discover how this speeds up everything you do on MySpace.

These are just a few ways that you can use the powerhouse social networking site MySpace to generate a ton of free leads for your network marketing home business. Create your MySpace account and profiles and kick your MLM MySpace marketing strategy into high gear today!

Tip of the Week

Make sure you only rest 1 minute between sets for upper-body work and only 2 minutes for lower-body work.

Funk Roberts

Don't Rush the Beat!