Pink markers: Suspected

Purple markers: Confirmed

Yellow markers:  Negative

Markers with No Dot: Death

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Here are also some handy facts you should know about the situation:

1. This latest pandemic is a new virus strain of Influenza A H1N1.
2. Flu symptoms include fever, coughing, fatigue, lack of appetite and muscle aches.
3. Influenza spreads between humans by coughing or sneezing and people touching something with the virus on it, and then touching their own nose or mouth.
4. Most influenza strains can survive up to 8 hours on most surfaces. Think tables, mouse, keyboards, phones etc. So wash your hands with soap often, especially after going out and before meals. Those alcohol-based hand sanitizers will work too.
5. Swine flu cannot be spread by pork products, since the virus is not transmitted through food. However, don’t eat undercooked Pork!
6. Help prevent spread of the virus by staying away from public areas and also coughing/sneezing into a tissue or your sleeves. And avoid those people  who tend to spray like a fountain when they talk.
7. For treatment, antiviral drugs work best if started within 2 days of symptoms. So if you suspect that you have it, go see the doctor immediately.
8. Great idea to boost up your immune system through proper nutrition, enough sleep and a balanced amount of fluids.
9. Overdosing on sugar, excess alcohol, food allergens and obesity can lead to a suppressed immune system. Try to avoid these when you know you might get sick or if there’s a global pandemic occurring.

Stay healthy everyone!

To be a successful online entrepreneur today, you have to be NetSmart. You have to understand how the masses communicate and be able to anticipate the ever changing needs that arises. These business people are generally very intelligent and perceptive, able to adapt to the high change frequency of the Interweb. And these are exactly the same people who can think of a way to improve the entire world, and pull a profit at the same time.

So to all the brilliant entrepreneurs out there trying to discover the next big thing, do spare a little bit of your brain processing time. Saving the world might not be something accomplished in one weekend, but with enough people going at it, it is something definitely achievable. And with the entire planet as a potential market, the profits might just be extremely lucrative. Why entrepreneurs and not scientists? Because realistically, nothing is going to happen without a profit being made. Now if there is an army of business-minded scientists, that would be quite exciting.

The term “Saving the world” is vague at best, but it can be defined as generally helping humanity. Here are some areas to start with: decreasing poverty, creating cheap and renewable energy, supporting human rights, ending conflicts, propagating education globally, increasing health care technologies etc etc.

Making it Measurable

Saving the world is not something easily marketable to the average person. It is something that seems impossible to reach, so why bother to even try? The first task would be to convince enough people that it is achievable, by setting a series of milestones to the end goal. A number perhaps, in how many people are helped.

Look at past examples such as distributed computing projects for SETI or Protein Folding. There are viewable progress measurements for your part in the calculations. Each milestone wasn’t quickly accomplished, but it makes it a lot easier to understand with a progress bar. Or even with website donation goals, having a milestone set visibly will allow donors to see the change that they have caused. It’s difficult to see the difference one person can make most of the time, but it is now possible with the level of tracking and communications made possible online.

Creating Momentum

If there is one thing that social networks have taught people, it is the art of propagating information to your friends. Once progress is measurable, momentum can be quickly built through social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. Dissemination of information on these networks are unparalleled in terms of speed, reach, targetability and cost.

Celebrity gossip and political warfare are spread, discussed and discarded in the span of hours. The level of empowerment is there but without a globally recognized goal in place. In the current time of the Obama, we can build upon the intentions for improvement. People are rallied from their place of complacency by economic turmoil, and are now open to suggestions. Now is the perfect opportunity to create new dynamics and goals in society through online networks.

What you can do

One person can now make a massive difference. That is the key idea here. Think of a way to fill the immediate needs of people, yet will ultimately empower people to make further changes. Not many people will drop everything just to do a good deed, but if it is convenient for them and creates an extra sense of moral gratification, it will succeed. Some might think this is an overly optimistic belief, but I believe in the basic goodness in people. We just have to get the ball rolling towards a brighter future.

1. Be like a Wolf in  Sheepskin. If you’re going to spam out 800 copies of your resume, skip to tip #2. I would advise against that anyhow. Pick a place that you might actually like to be at, and with potential for job growth. You’ll be happy and live longer too. Once you have picked out a few potentially perfect places, learn about them. Pretend you’re going to go up on stage and talk about how awesome the company is for 5 minutes. Do you know enough? Dig through their history, their staff, and especially their company goals.

Look through the company’s website, their press releases, news updates and history section. It will most likely be sprinkled with a consistent message that their marketing team came up with. This is the message that they are proud of and want everyone to know about it. Now take this message and know it, believe it, live it. Now you can edit your cover letter accordingly and genuinely sound like one of their own people.

2. Making yourself Stand Out. Just put this into perspective and think from your employer’s point of view. As the boss, you decided your company is in need of extra help and asked your assistant to post a recruitment Ad on Monster, Workapolis. The next day, you get bombarded with 500 emails begging for the job, 30 love letters and 5 really funny yet scary offers. How are you going to find the perfect employee in all that mess?

You have to keep that in mind, and make the job easier for your future employer to find you. Open up your cover letter right now (yes you should have one) and see if it reads like everyone else’s. Does it sound like it came straight from a template? Does it sound robotic? Imagine you turned on the TV and a really boring TV Show intro comes on, you’ll want to change the channel in no time.

Bring up unique points that will make yourself stand out. Yes everyone else went to high school, loves to learn and can multitask. Think of a skill or experience that many others might not have. Maybe it’s a combination of them that makes it unique.

3. Stay Professional. Yes you have to get their attention, but even more importantly, you have to sound professional. You might have come up with an idea that’s so wacky it’ll get their attention for sure, but it might also make you seem gimmicky and without real substance to your skills and character. The key is to get their attention yet retaining good form. Sound enthusiastic yet thoughtful and intelligent. Use proper words and perfect grammar. Just ask yourself what James Bond would do in this situation.

4. Sound Confident. Nobody likes the unwanted, they would rather have what everyone else wants. If you sound desperate, it will raise serious doubts to your abilities. Sound like you’re confident. Talk like you’re full of experience and ideas, and just trying to find a new home to use your well-honed skills. Just remember to balance it out with some controlled humbleness, or you’ll sound annoying real fast.

5. Remove Fluff Words. Be concise and take out unnecessary words. Think of it this way: If you can sum up a paragraph into one short sentence, how would you write it? Make sure you get your main point across though. Now apply that same kind of summarization for your entire cover letter. Remember, after yours, there are another 10,000 resumes to read. Nothing annoys a prospective employer more than you wasting their valuable time.

6. Only mention Positive Points. You might think this is obvious but it’s often overlooked. I’ve read so many cover letters and resumes where they list out many of their strengths, but also potentially damaging weaknesses. Look at every single word and points in your writing. Is it irrelevant? Is it redundant? Does it make you look weak or stupid? Does it cast doubt on your abilities? Could it lead to other questions which you will not want to answer? Your employer will have plenty of time later to find out about your flaws, no need to help out in that area before you’re even hired.

In summary: The economy is terrible and many jobs are being cut. But cheer up. That just means companies are looking for individuals who are energetic and full of new ideas to help pull them out of the slump. Good luck!

I’m going to try an experiment here. Short-Blogging. Not quite microblogging, just short. There are too many topics I want to cover every single day, and it would be impossible to do a 500 word coverage for all of them. First though, I will analyze the current design of my site.

My frontpage consist of 11 post summaries with a thumbnail each. On the top right, I removed the ads and placed a box with Popular posts, Recent Comments and Tags. Popular posts allowed some of my old yet popular posts to remain actively read, instead of disappearing into the web abyss. Recent comments are for those social butterflies, wanting to see what other people are thinking. And of course there’s Tags. Out of all the blogs I’ve designed, I’ve never placed much of an enphasis on the tag cloud. But I believe that we will see it more and more, especially with the rise of microblogging.

While the current site design has a navigation that will work for a small to mid range of topics, it is not easy to navigate if I was to post on a broad range of them. As I create these posts, I will probably integrate a more advanced tag plugin, even if it has to be custom coded.

Microblogging in Twitter is pretty fun and extremely informational too. But unless I use social media full-time in my occupation, it is currently more than difficult to fit it into my schedule. Which is also one of the primary reasons I’ve been building TwiSpot.com, so that even someone like me can take advantage of all it has to offer, without spending a ridiculous amount of time to process all the information.

Speaking of custom coding, version 2 of TwiSpot.com is in the works, with a crazy amount of new features. Actually the changes are so drastic that it’s like a completely new site. I can’t say too much about it yet, but it will be fun and easy to use. That’s basically what I try and base most of my designs and projects on. If I don’t love using or seeing it, then it’s not worth building. Can’t wait to show you!

Twitter Addiction

I’ve also been using Twitter a lot lately and that probably takes up the most time. Is it an addiction? Only if learning can be considered an addiction. If you follow the right people, it’s like hardwiring your brain to an Encyclopedia. The relevancy and timeliness of the knowledge is extremely valuable as social media becomes more mainstream. Also since Twitter limits each tweet to 140 characters, the information will be summarized into a nice 1 second read.

I’ve been anticipating the social media global brain idea for a long time, and from my observations in Twitter, it seems to be much closer now. The value of creativity is brought back into the spotlight, where one person’s idea can be amplified a million fold through social media. I will continue to stay with Twitter, because it has become an essential tool to staying ahead of the game.

How I learned about the Interweb

I have a background in Advertising and Marketing. Worked in studios and Ad agencies but really hate having to deal with clients. They aren’t out to improve anything, and most just want a safe bet. I am someone who needs to learn constantly, who needs to create something new. I knew it would be pointless if I continued to be a salary slave, and so I began by learning about internet marketing.

I suppose my training would be similar to many people. Reading articles on SEO, online business, monetization, writing, forums, Videos, E-Books etc etc. Every new project that I start, I try to incorporate more and more into it as a test bed for a future big project.

I’ve been using the Internet for a long time but I haven’t really given much thought to how it actually worked behind the scenes. I don’t mean the software running the sites, but the interactions that naturally occur between groups of interests. Then I had an opportunity to change all that.

My first big web project

Earlier this year, I created a series of WordpressMU networks with a partner. For months I went through mountains of learning material and testing for User interface design, social media design, adwords, SEO, online communities, blogging, PHP, CSS, SQL etc etc. One moment I would be photoshopping a fantasy landscape, the next I would be sweating with a PHP help file.

There was a steep learning curve for working with a partner too. It taught me all the things that could go wrong in a business relationship and I’m thankful for it. Definitely better to learn all of that early on.

I’m a Pisces so I’m all about using the creative side of my brain. All of this was an uphill battle for me and made me lose a lot of sleep. I wanted to outsource everything but I’m glad I stayed the course and learned everything myself. Without all that knowledge, I would not have been able to create all the opportunities open to me today. I believe jack-of-all-trades  are going to thrive nicely on the internet.

Plans for this Blog

I’ve been experimenting with different types of design themes, blog post topics and plugins. While I’m getting closer to understanding the optimal goals of blog design, I fear that I’m going in the wrong direction with Creativeherb.com.

This blog was originally meant as a home base for me to write down my thoughts, and perhaps share a tidbit of wisdom or two. But like many things that I do, I tend to be a perfectionist. I started to become traffic greedy. Why share words with 50 people when you can potentially share it with tens of thousands?

I changed my blog topics twice in a month and site tagline 3 times in a week. I just couldn’t decide which subject I should focus on, I just have so much I wanted to say across many categories. Then I realized that the name “creativeherb” was just difficult to brand. Is it a creative site? Or is it a herbal site? I didn’t want to give up my personal site though.

Summary

My master plan for 2009, is to refocus Creativeherb around my business projects and design experience. I will talk about my projects and the business thinking processes I go through. It will not be a continuous stream of business tips or photoshop tutorials, but something more personable.

I will also showcase my professional design portfolio and talk about my design processes. I  hope this will increase exposure and authority for me as a Brand. I will also aim to increase reader participation because I would like to converse with like-minded people through my designs as well.

I will also start my new primary blog, involving case studies of brands and branding. I love branding, I can talk about it all day. And the domain name is much easier to remember than Creativeherb.

I have several other projects in the planning stages and one big project in the works. They are in completely different markets, so it will be interesting to see the success level of each.

That’s the bite sized summary of me, I hope you enjoyed learning a bit more about me and will come back to visit soon. Feel free to leave a comment to say hello!

Most of the blogging guides you read will tell you to find a niche that you love, a topic that you can be passionate about. You can obviously just blog about how awesome your typing skill is or what you ate for dinner, but traffic would be terrible. Statistics suggest there are certain topics rich in traffic and potential customers who will click your ads. That’s where the Reblogger shines.

The Reblogger wastes no time with low traffic topics, but goes straight to whatever is hot. Google Keyword Suggestions will tell you what people are searching for, and Microsoft Search Funnels will tell you about the keyword patterns. Actually knowing about the topic is not an issue, because writing for the general public means not having to write in too much detail anyways. You do not have to be an expert on the subject to blog about it, you just have to reword it well.

There are many sub-types of Rebloggers. If you’re a Quick Search Reblogger, your day will consist of finding out what people in your niche are searching for. You will then come up with a pre-filtered list of results that you create for your readers. If you are adept at finding those hard to reach sources of information, then you may find this style suitable for you. Alternate sources of information may come from Newsgroups, low profile professional sites, or even the 138th page of Google search results. Even opening up a real book will reveal “new” information that has a relatively low regurgitated level. Take all that info, repackage it into a list. Done.

Then there are the News Rebloggers. People read news, and a lot of it. So why not just rip a large quote off your favorite news site, add a dash of your own comment, then post it up? Preferably completely out of context of course, to generate better comment numbers.

Even better are the Gossip Rebloggers. The sleazier you can write, the more people will come back. What is more interesting than someone else’s love life after all? You may not buy one of those sleazy tabloids from the supermarket check out, but reading it on the internet is a completely different thing. After all, if CNN headlines Britney Spears before a war, there must be a good and legitimate reason for it. Conscience saved.

I understand that information has to be expressed in different ways, so that it can be absorbed better by the various personalities. Different people will learn best in different ways. Some people need a list, some a dissected explanation and some will need a fantastic promise.

If we are not counting all the variations and spinoffs on the original ideas, do we even have 1% of people attempting to generate new ideas then?

Nowhere else can you get thousands of responses instantly. Polls on websites were a step in the right direction, but even then the participation level was low and slow. When you first join Twitter, don’t expect everyone to answer your questions right away. Your question should be phrased to provoke conversation or re-tweeting(forwarded on). A question asked by an influential person on Twitter however, will be much more likely to get a response. Companies such as Gregg Fraley’s setup creates an easy entrance into the world of Twitter research without having to do it yourself.

If you want to experiment yourself, it is very easy to add or remove a person in Twitter, users will follow others with like-minded conversations.

Starter Twitter Tips:

A good idea to name your account based on the topic you will focus on. Just like a website, the name of it will be the first impression that people receive.

Write your Twitter profile according to what you want to do with the account. Your first few words are the most important because it will determine whether they continue reading or not.

Another way for the right people to follow you on Twitter is creating a descriptive background. Design an appropriately attractive background with information such as your Logo, URL and critical keywords. Based on web eye-movement tests, the upper left side of the screen is what people look at first, so design the background with all the information on the left. A good example of using the background for informational purposes would be my Twitter page. Clarity and simplicity is important here so the message you are trying to convey isn’t distracted by complicated textures or graphics.

You can also leverage existing questions and answers through Twitter search engines. There’s the default one from Twitter, and also multiple live searches such as Monitter. You can get insightful information from the search results, or even take it further by directly contacting the people who wrote the original messages. And once you are connected to the right person, people of similar interest will gravitate to your tweets and follow you as well.

Twitter is an extremely timely and broad-reaching research tool. The interactions and the insights are invaluable to any industry. And with the right strategies, you will always be a step ahead of the competition. What do You use Twitter for?

Look beyond the obvious and see the potential. The teacher, Tom Farber, only started doing this because of the major financial crisis that the school system faces. His semester budget doesn’t even fully cover the cost of printing out the tests and exams. Without additional funding, the amount of testing will have to be reduced, lowering the quality of the education.

Of course that’s no excuse. No excuse to bombard students with powerfully crafted persuasions that will shape their future goals and desires. Wait a minute, isn’t that what schools wanted to inspire in the first place? I don’t mean aspiring to party in a limo every night, but to have other goals that will contribute positively to society.

Advertising is a tool used by rich people to get even richer. It works because the rich people wouldn’t waste their time and money doing something that doesn’t work. So let’s take that powerful system and use it to positively influence the next generation. Create an optimal level of Advertisement saturation in the school, while fine-filtering the Ads that are allowed to be placed. Advertisers such as respectable publishers, University programme recruitment, music instrument vendors, nutritional foods producers etc.

Students spend most of their off-school time exposed to irresponsible advertising, so let’s even the playing field by exposing a counter-message. While they’re at it, update the school system and create social media based learning through Twitter. What do you think about this? Am I totally out of my mind?

While it is good to absorb as much creative output as you can, there comes a time when you must venture within yourself for the answer. Forget the technology, forget your habitual styles, forget the conditioning.

Sometimes you may feel stressful at trying to find the design solution. Please picture this: The designs we try to create are merely solutions to problems that we created in the first place. Without us first creating the problems, there would have been no need to find a solution now. So look back to before the problem occured and see what was working naturally already. There’s the solution.

Try to feel what would be most natural in the design, try to feel your own hints of discomfort. We have become so desensitized to media and sensory bombardment that we don’t even realize the stress on ourselves. Look around and see what makes you happy, and study it. Why does it give you pleasure or peace of mind? Then try to replicate that harmony, strength and comfort into your designs.

Look around you again, caress the textures with your eyes, feel the flow of the air circulating around the room. Go back to the basics, don’t add complication to an uncomplicated matter. Nurturing the pureness of your creativity will unlock many new insights and approaches to design.

Computers are a tool through which our creativity can express all the colors of our imagination. Avoid the pitfall of letting the computer tell us what we can make, but instead, look inside to see what you want to create. It is a fast-paced world we live in, don’t forget to slow down sometimes to enjoy it.

How do you get your design inspirations?

1. Keep it really, really Simple.

Find your business message, and distill the idea into a symbol over and over till there’s nothing left but the single message. Try to stick with one central meaning. You have 2 seconds of someone’s attention. By the end of that 2 seconds, they either understood the meaning of your logo, or they got confused and shut you out forever.

2. Use symbols, Not Pictures.

Firstly, a symbol is easy to identify at different sizes, from giant billboard signs to tiny business cards. Secondly, symbols are more universally understood, especially if you managed to distill the brand idea into a proper symbol.

3. Make your symbol look Rock Solid.

Use font and symbols that look strong. Even feminine logos can have gracefully strong lines. But if it looks too fragile or undecided, your logo will get lost in the sea of crappy logos.

4. Use Less Colors.

Colors are part of your brand image, associate your brand with a color that will appeal to your target market. And the less colors you use, the less it cost for printing. Designing first in black and white will help with this.

5. Test it Hardcore.

Move the symbol around to different sides of your business name. Place it over textured graphics, place it over different colors. Zoom way out. Zoom in big. Rotate it. Put it in the middle of other logos. Is your logo still looking awesome? Great. If not, work on it some more.

There you have it, the quick and dirty on determining if a logo is good or bad. Got any other essential tips for good logo design?