As our site grows every day we want to share some information with you on the way we are operating the project. We call this section «Business Blog» as it is similar to doing a log book where data is recorded in a chronological order. «Blogging» is gaining popularity with more and more people picking up the habit of publishing their experiences and thoughts on the Internet. Our Blog covers various topics — from TOEFL, TOEIC, MBA, GMAT, ESL/EFL test preperation to cultural traditions and current political events.
There will also be some Internet marketing terminology and if you have any questions regarding the information simply let us know.

The Business Blog is written by Torsten Daerr and edited by Alan Townend.

2003 — August 30
For the next three days Alan will be on a weekend trip and Adrian, an English/German teacher from the UK will be editing our NetLog as it is vital that the text is in pure English without any «Germanism».

This week we have managed to achieve quite some success with our promotion campaign and the best thing for me is that I’m learning something new every day. Our site has now been given a PageRank of 4 out of 10. For those of you unfamiliar with «PageRank», it’s probably one of the dominant systems when it comes to evaluating the importance of a website. There are two interesting facts about PageRank that attracted my attention right from the start: firstly, the inventor uses his surname as part of his creation’s name — PageRank, invented by Larry Page, co-founder of Google. Secondly, with Stanford University as the assignee and Larry Page as the inventor, a patent was filed on January 9, 1998. By the time it was finally granted on September 4, 2001 (Patent No. 6,285,999), the algorithm was known as «PageRank», and Google was handling 150 million search queries per day. This means Larry Page and Sergey Brin had planned to take leadership in the search engine field long ago…

2003 — August 29
Alan’s latest story contains a lot of expressions to do with «order» and «disorder» — a topic that provides a good basis for a cross cultural and mental attitude discussion, don’t you think? Recently one of my Russian friends pointed out that in the German language the word for «order» is female whereas in Russian it is «male». I’m not quite sure what exactly he implied by this remark but I guess it shows different ways of seeing things. In English «order» is just neutral as most English words are in a grammatical sort of way.

I found another interesting term in Alan’s story — planning officer. Do you know what a planning officer does? Well, Alan lately has had a slightly disturbing encounter with one of those guys, which resulted in his latest creation.

Do you remember our discussion about new internet related terms? Well, have you ever heard of «SEO»? I’m sure you know what a CEO — Chief Executive Officer is — the top manager of a large corporation. Now, I’m convinced most CEO's have no clue as to what SEO might stand for. Instead of teaching you now I’ll leave it to you. If you are interested you can check the term with any major search engine and yes, I will tell you more about it later…

2003 — August 28
We are facing some trouble with our server. So far it has been very reliable and fast and there was no reason to complain. However, since yesterday some of the features have not been available and it looks like we had some uninvited guests visiting so I am two days behind schedule with the NetLog. Not that it matters that much — you sure can survive a day without my ramblings but then again there is this principle called consistency which is absolutely essential for success in any calling. Putting in one or two hours every day will produce better results than working on the project just one full day per week.

Interestingly enough we had a 4 hour electricity outage this morning (similar to the one in the US last week and in London today, only that it was limited to our street). As has become a routine I started the day by checking my emails when suddenly the «lights went out». It was only then that I remembered having read the note that announced maintenance works for today.

When I got back online again I received Alan's latest story and intend to put it online for you to read as soon as possible...

2003 — August 27
Slava has restructured the NetLog file — now navigation is easier with 4 entries per page. He has also shown me how to convert cyrillic letters into HTML within the NetLog text which makes it possible to write entire phrases in Russian (if need occurs).
Interestingly enough, I reconsidered the word «browser» which might be different in Russian, at least that's what my Babylon Pro program says. Now, I could ask Slava what the Russian equivalent for «browser» is but then again he might not really know because he took all his computer training courses in German.

I once had an interesting discussion with another Russian who had been living 5 years in Germany and obviously was used to German computer terminology which in most cases is the same as in English. In this instance, however, the word was «CD-brenner» — the German equivalent for «CD burner» and he wanted to persuade me that in Russian IT is just the same — «brenner». I had no clue what the Russian word for CD burner was but I was doubtful they would use the German word instead of the English one. As it turned out this Russian had lived too long in Germany to learn the Russian word for «burner» although he spoke Russian most of the time.
This is yet another example how quickly language changes due to new technologies…