Do you remember life without cell phones? It wasn’t that long ago that seeing someone with a cell phone was an oddity. Additionally, if they had one it was bigger than their hand and very cumbersom to lug around. Most of my life has been spent without a cell phone and yet now, when I misplace mine, I feel like I am almost naked.

Cell phones are called mobile phones in most parts of the world and every culture treats them a little differently. In America, as with many other things, almost anything goes. We talk on our cell phones in the supermarket, in our cars, in restaurants, and almost anywhere except church and the movie theater. It has gotten so bad that many states are now passing laws that make it illegal to talk and hold a cell phone while driving. Although it is obviously rude and annoying to hear people in public talking on their cell phones, no one seems to care and the mob rules.

In Japan, it is considered rude to use your mobile phone in many places and so they don’t. You will never see or hear a Japanes person talking on their mobile phone in a train, subway, supermarket, or most other public places. It is most rare to even hear a mobile phone ring in public as they always seem to have them on “silent” mode. Quite a contrast indeed, from America.

Cell phones keep changing and evolving a lightning speed. What was cool 6 months ago is now almost always old and obsolete. Many people have started in the last couple of years to wear their cell phones on their ears with the advent of an attachment which transmits to the main unit. People think nothing of walking around in public all day with these strange and odd looking contraptions hanging from their ears. It seems that just years ago they would be laughed off the street. No one is laughing now though as more an more people keep buying and using them.

The cell phone is now quickly becoming a handheld computer as well as a phone, camera, and MP3 player. The newest cell phones will connect you to the Internet and it is just a matter of time before that becomes commonplace. Someday quite soon everyone will have a small computer in their pocket in the form of a cell phone. I am starting to wonder whether there will ever be a need for face to face communication in the future.

One of the ways to make money on the Internet is to take surveys. Unfortunately, survey sites have gotten a very bad rap in the last 5 years or so and many people think they are all scams. Let me try to explain to you the difference between the ones that really are scams and the ones that are not.

If you surf the Internet much, you will undoubtedly come across ads for survey sites that say they will make you tons of money. All you have to do is join their site for a one time fee of $49.95 or some similar amount and they will open the doors for you to surveys that will pay from $5 all the way up to $100. These ads claim that you will be able to make a high hourly income and do it all easily from the comfort of your home.

The saying “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is” applies in this situation. First off, if it were this easy then everybody would be doing it. Any site that charges you to join to be able to fill out surveys is a scam of sorts. These sites are not illegal but they are quite underhanded in that all they will do is give you a list of all the survey sites on the Internet. You don’t need to buy a list of survey sites because every survey site can be found by anyone for free on the Internet. All it takes is a little surfing on Google and you can easily find many legitimate sites where you can go to fill out surveys. You do not need to pay anyone to direct you to them.

All legitimate survey sites will let you join for free. They want your business and you will in effect be making them money so free is the correct price. Any survey site that lets you join for free is probably legitimate despite what you might hear about it or read about it. Many people automatically say that the whole industry is a scam but they do not understand anything about it.

Advertising is big business and all one needs to do is to watch TV or listen to radio to understand that. Companies offer money in return for you to fill out a survey or try a product and that is just an extension of their advertising budget. The Internet is a huge new medium and most companies now have a budget which includes advertising on the Internet. One of the ways they spend that advertising money is to pay you (the general public) to fill out questionnaires and try offers.

There are dozens of reputable survey sites that anyone can go to and make real money. You will not get rich but you can pick up some nice spending cash or gas money quite easily. They are not scams as long as they don’t charge you to join and they will send you a real check that you can cash at any bank. Trust me on this. I make $200 to $500 per month every month with survey sites.

Do you have a new blog or website that you have spent weeks making just right? Have you have shown it to all your friends and family, and yet, something is missing? Something very important - ah yes, traffic.

It turns out that almost anyone can make a blog or website these days and make it look pretty darn good. But traffic is another story. What’s the use of having that site if no one is around see it and interact with it? And how are your going to differentiate your site from all the other millions of them out there? If you ever hope to sell things on your blog and make a little money you surely can’t do it without traffic!

Before you ever start thinking about traffic you should have thought about a theme for your blog. What will make it different and stand out in a crowd? What will make people go to your site and want to keep coming back? What exactly is the purpose and what is your goal with the site? It is best to figure that out right from the beginning, before you are several months in and it is too late.

When you have your site up, you are then faced with that new challenge of getting traffic. I have found that one of the first things you need to do is register your blog with the social blogging sites MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. It might take a day to get your blog approved and you should use that time to fill out all the info you can. Fill out your profile, put in a picture avatar, fill in all the tags (subjects your blog is about), and fill out your “about me” page.

Once your blog is approved get ready for some serious clicking. What you are going to do is join every community you can and especially add as many “contacts” or “friends” as you can. MyBlogLog will only allow you to add 15 new contacts a day and that will only take you 5 minutes. But that is 5 minutes you want to make sure you do each and every day! BlogCatalog is different and it will allow you to add as many friends as you like. I have added over 300 on occasion and only stopped when I couldn’t take it anymore.

How does this get your site traffic? Many of the people you add as friends will be curious to see who is adding them as a friend. They will click on your profile page and then through to your website. Not everyone will do this but I guarantee a fair percentage will. If you add 300 friends on BlogCatalog I will almost guarantee you will get 50 to 100 hits on your website within the next 24 hours. And it is all FREE! Now it may not be the most targeted traffic you will ever get but if you have a nice blog with a good hook, you will get some interest. Just keep adding friends and writing good content and you will be on your way!

For the thousands of people who turn to the Internet to make money, there are really only two ways to make money and one big choice. The two ways to make money are: with your own website and without your own website. It is big choice whether or not you want to own your own website(s). There are many people that want to take on the challenge of having a website and there are those that want nothing to do with it.

It sounds simple and yet it is a difficult decision. Many people are intimidated by the thought of owning their own website and would never even consider it. It is difficult for the beginner and there is a lot to learn to be able to set up and maintain any kind of website. Owning your own website also entails a certain amount of commitment which many people just do not have the time or desire for.

Owning your own website, though, will undoubtedly give you the best chance to make money and work at home. It requires more learning, work, and dedication than not owning a website but the potential payoff is much greater. When you own something that you can build upon and keep growing, the potential is far greater than not owning that kind of asset.

For those people who do not want to get in that deep, there are many ways to make money online that they can take advantage of as well. The Internet is a place of great imagination and today you can get paid for almost anything you can think of. You can get paid for taking surveys, reading email, submitting pictures, referring other people to various things, and a whole host of other things.

Likewise, if you decide to own your own website you then have a seemingly unlimited amount of choices of what kind of website you would like to own and operate. Websites make money selling products, information, leads, pictures, and just about anything else you can think of. How you build your website and make money with it is up to you and can be done in thousands of ways.

The Internet is a constantly changing entity that is about as unpredictable as life itself. What works today to make money online may not work tomorrow or the day after. Every single day new websites with new ideas are popping up and changing the way things are done. The endless possibilities in future years make you wonder just how different the Interet will be down the road.

This could be a review of StumbleUpon but since I have nothing to compare it to it isn’t. There is simply no website or service that is similar to it. Website owners seem to love it but I think it is quite worthless in terms of meaningful traffic. Here’s why:

I have been “Stumbled” twice recently and both times I have come to the same conclusion that StumbleUpon traffic is pretty useless. StumbleUpon is actually a great site that allows you to surf the Internet. It’s a lot of fun for the surfer but for the websites they are surfing I am not sure there is much value.

Once you join up to SumbleUpon a toolbar will be installed on your computer (this is the part I don’t like) and you will be asked to check the boxes of categories that interest you. If you check the humor box you will be taken to websites that fall into the humor category and the politics box will get you political websites etc.

Once you have done that you are ready to go. Put on your seatbelt and press the “Stumble” button on your new toolbar! You will then immediately be taken randomly to a website that falls into the categories you just chose. Once there you can stick around and peruse the site or push the stumble button again. Another new site will pop up and after that one other and another and another. Now you are now truly surfing the net!

Stumbling the web can be very entertaining but I only do it when I am bored or have time to kill. One of my categories is humor so I go from supposedly funny website to funny website. Some are better than others, of course, but it is a great way to see what is out there in your categories.

The problem is that when I stumble I am in the mood for some fast action. I don’t want to be bothered with heavy reading and just want to be amused. I think it is this way with many others as well. When I am in that mood, I am not going to slow down too long to read anything and I am truly just surfing.

This brings me back to the premise of this article that StumbleUpon traffic is useless. I know that I definitely could be classified as “useless” when I stumble and my stats show that others are the same way. The last time I got Stumbled I had an additional 500 people view my site in under 2 hours. On that day I did not make any new sales, adsense income, or RSS subscriptions that were above and beyond the norm. The people were there, but only briefly. My site is a blog with posts and not that many videos or pictures. It takes visual stimulation to keep them there longer I believe and my blog does not have that.

Being Stumbled is great for the stats and very exciting when it happens but kind of a let down afterward. It’s kind of like going on a game show and coming home empty handed!