Museums are no longer for college students doing research papers or for older, retired couples. Now, there are museums build specifically for children to explore the world through their hands, eyes, and ears. Equipped with things to climb on, paint with, look through, and draw on, children museums are catered especially to those who stand under four feet tall, make little difference between their inside voice and outside voice, and like to forcefully investigate anything within arms reach. The benefits to children museums are far-ranging:

• Children museums offer art projects that many parents would cringe at undertaking in their own homes. Finger painting, clay molding, Lego construction area, drawing center, and many more creative opportunities encourage children to explore other methods of expressing themselves than the typical means of crayon-to-paper.
• Stations such as Lego building centers allow children to experiment with geometric construction and spacial reasoning. Finger painting allows them to experiment with various color combinations and an atypical implement.
• Clay molding allows children to use their hands and fingers to manipulate something shapeless into something with form and meaning to them.
• Fun Art for Kids is more important now than every before considering the decline in arts funding for schools.

Children don’t have to sit still in order to learn at children museums. Rock climbing walls, building blocks, puppet theaters, and music areas also give children different outlets for their hands-on curiosity. These centers allow for children to learn visually, aurally, and kinetically. By implementing these different methods of education, children can learn in a well-rounded manner with their different needs being met. These different stations also lay the foundation for children entering school. The museum setting offers them the opportunity to multitask between different fields of discipline such as music and physical education while reinforcing good habits such as turn-taking, forming lines, respecting personal space, and playing kindly with others.

Children museums provide educational entertainment in multiple ways, whether visually, aurally, or kinetically, and in ways that they wouldn’t be able to in home or even at school. They’re versatile stations teach children not only the surface-value lessons like construction or creative expression, but also deeper lessons such as turn-taking, fair play, line forming, and social boundaries.

In order for any type of business to survive, whether it is small or large, customer surveys must be handed out and utilized in a proper manner. Through the use of customer surveys businesses are enabled to retain existing customers, gain new customers, and increase their profit levels by increasing the interest of customers in new products and/or services.

Customer surveys also enable a business to build and enhance customer relationships. Actually, building relationships is the main purpose behind customer surveys. Anytime a survey is handed out it should be more than a questionnaire, it should focus on key elements that matter when it comes to building customer-business relationships. And, in some cases, such as business continuity planning software, understanding your customer is critical.

Customer surveys can be conducted in several different ways, including over the phone, in person, online, or through the mail. The type of survey used by a business is generally based on the industry the business operates within. However, online surveys have become very popular over the past several years and they have proven to be very effective.

Before a survey is ever taken by a customer the survey should be read through numerous times by company employees to make sure the survey makes sense and so that the business can rest assured they are asking their consumers the right questions. Asking questions in the right way allows a business to receive the best feedback possible from those customers that answer them.

Once a customer survey has been taken by consumers it is imperative that the answers are analyzed in the correct manner. In order to properly analyze the results a business should always wait until a large number of the surveys have been answered and turned back in; this allows for the results to be analyzed in a way that provides the most accurate results.

Using customer surveys is a wonderful way to publicize to customers new business aspects that are taking place and that they were not previously aware of. This feature of business surveys enables a business to increase their brand awareness while at the same time receiving valuable information in return that will allow them to enhance their business activities.

Customer feedback surveys are a tool that any type of business can utilize to increase their business profitability potential. All departments of a business should conduct customer surveys so that each individual department can use the results to improve the functions they perform.

It is very important that both negative and positive feedback from customers is recognized. The negative feedback should be viewed as positive criticism and necessary changes should be implemented to address the problems. As businesses address their problem areas that are receiving negative feedback they will see they their overall business activities improve. Positive feedback should always be used to show employees how well they are doing, and also used in ways that encourages workers to increase their worker productivity.

It is also important to send out thank you notes or emails to those consumers that completed the surveys. This allows customers to see that their opinions really do matter.

So, at The Nagwitch’s request, I plan to find expired domains that already have links pointing to them. How? Well, luckily there is a tool out there called Register Compass that has a searchable database of expiring, expired, and “at auction” domains for sale. In my mind, these domains can be revived and put into use for online promotion purposes or flipped as “refurbished” real estate. If I’m lucky, maybe I can pick a handful of hot expired domains, build out some quick sites, and rank for some funny stuff.

If you had to lose something very special to you, but knew it would become special to the finder, what would you choose?

A childhood blanket or toy? How about your house or car? What about a loved one or best friend? Would you want it to be a broken heart or an unrequited romance? A long lost friend of mine always had fun interview type questions to ask and that exercise is now something I like to do in my head during the work day. Since the chances of me ever becoming someone worth interviewing are so slim, answering these silly questions can be kinda fun. They’re good mental exercises.

Note: I’m thinking about creating a Twitter account that’s a call and response type setup for asking and answering pretentious interview questions. I’m not sure what the Twitter name will be. Something ironic I’m sure.

The reason I bring this interview question nonsense up is because I’m going to start interviewing people for a position I need to fill at work and I don’t want to ask typical questions. Since I’m young and hip, work at a startup, and am already an eccentric, I’m totally into semi-torturing candidates with ridiculous questions and solution-less puzzles. Now, just so we’re not confused about my intentions, the job will require people to be super creative and insightful. Not that I’m particularly either of those things; but, I do know that I’d be better at my job if I were gifted with a few more points in either attribute. Besides, I want someone under me that is going to push me to be smarter and more clever while also making me look like I know how to hire winners. We all want that, right?

Never one to let a good thing go to waste for too long, with synthetic motivation in hand, I decided to hop on The Nagwitch’s back and drive the shit out of her handsome ham hocks. Someone’s got to keep her in shape and I’ve got work to do.

The neat part about branding is that when people link to things in an organic way; i.e., naturally just slap an <a href> on a word, they are apt to do it on the brand name. For example, I like Jif peanut butter. The word I naturally selected to “reference” Jif’s site was its brand name. Pretty simple. However, sometimes people are clever, don’t want to drop a brand name, or are stylistically opposed to the way a brand’s name looks and therefore will use a different word or phrase for the link’s anchor text. For example, I like peanut butter. In this instance, I’ve opted to skip referencing Jif in name but want to make sure people know they can check out the peanut butter I like.

Now, you may be ask, “hey, The Nagwitch, who in their right mind would ever do option two?” And I would reply, “FYD.” That’s why links attached to brand names dominate most link profiles.

So, what am I proposing? Well, since the brands I’m working with aren’t well known…yet…I still have a chance to shape their link profiles. How will I do this? I’m not entirely sure. One thought I had was to make sure all link references to them that I create are equally proportioned between their brand and what they do. For example, Lorenguard is a power metal band that I want people to know about because they play power metal. Therefore, I’m always going to drop their name for sure. However, I may use “power metal” as the linking anchor text instead of their brand/band name.

I’m not sure a diverse link profile is the way to go. However, in an effort to be robust in my meager efforts, I’m moving ahead with this plan and will report the results. My hope is that organic linking to the Lorenguard brand will eventually outpace my efforts and that this phenomenon will occur because of the brand being discovered through “blurry searches.”

In other news, I’ve joined the Digital Point forums and have to say that I’m super eager to get involved with this community. From what I can tell, they have some elite people doing neat shit on the Internet and making a grip of cash doing so. Saint Philip wants to be down.

During our conversation, my friend mentioned his recent experience with a service called Chatroulette. For those not familiar, Chatroulette is a site that activates an available webcam on your computer and then connects you, via video chat, to a total stranger. I haven’t tried it yet but the idea behind Chatroulette is super fascinating. Why? Because why on Earth would you want to video chat with a complete stranger? Fetishism is a likely answer and  according to my friend, the majority of the people you’re randomly connected with are dudes attempting to engage in a personal act of gratification. The occasional female, which in his experience appears about twice every five minutes, is wearing a full burka about 50% of the time. Like most of the dudes, these burka wearing women will hit the “next” button on you almost immediately and skip to the next random human. Weird, right? Not really. Clearly, the people using Chatroulette are looking for something specific to their wants. My only questions then is what are these wants? I want to be down.