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I worked in retail when I was in high school, and then again while I was in college. I enjoyed it and I was really rather good at it.

In high school I worked in the house wares and gifts departments at the JC Penney near Washington, DC. While most of my friends were working fast food or in clothing stores in the mall, I learned all about good steel cooking knives, fine china, Kitchen Aid attachments, and expensive collectable figurines. I had a blast.

In college I went looking for the JC Penney again, because I was already familiar with the way they did business. This time I was hired to work in men’s suits! That rocked. I got paid to flirt, sell suits, and pin up alterations. The manager for the department knew that by hiring tall, pretty girls for her sales floor that she would increase sales. It worked. We were one booming department.

In both cases, I had managers who spent a lot of time training their teams. We were always in meetings, watching videos about product or customer service, and being given new goals. Let’s just say that while I learned equally as much from both managers, I sure enjoyed the meetings and trainings more when I was working in the men’s department. That was primarily because the manager made the subjects interesting and used entertaining training materials. It made all of the difference in the world.

There is a company called MaraStar that has a line of fun animated training videos, called ToonUps®, that get the same messages across that boring training programs do – but with humor and easy to remember clips. They have tons of professional office topics like office etiquette, planning, problem solving, and customer service tips. The difference is that the tone is light and engaging. It’s not any different than trying to teach a lesson to a class of second graders. The more engaging the presentation, the more people will remember.

Gas prices are prohibitively high in some areas. I know that I do a lot less shopping and recreation now that gas has been way over $3 a gallon for as long as it has now. I just cannot justify driving all over town when gasoline is eating up my disposable income.

Now analysts say that gas prices in the Tampa Bay area could go up as much as 75 cents a gallon. This time last year, we were paying an average of $2.34 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline. Prices are above $3.15 now, even though gas prices typically go down over the holidays.

February is when we typically see a spike in prices and by May, gas prices in the area are projected to be $3.50 and $3.75 a gallon. When gas prices go up, so do prices for most other goods and services. In response, consumers begin to spend less on non-essential goods.

When you choose an advertising network, you need to look at a lot more than how much ads cost or how much you will get paid to host ads. You need to make sure that the reach of the ads is appropriate for your target audience.

Advertisers
If you are getting ready to run ads online, make sure that your ads are being seen by the very people you know to be your ideal audience. What good is it going to do to run an ad for new recipe card software if the ads are going to be running on sites for used car parts or dog grooming supplies? You want your ad to be seen by cooks, moms, crafters, or anyone else who might actually click through and make a purchase.

Publishers
If you are going to give up valuable retail space on your website, you want to ensure that your site’s visitors are going to find interest and worth in the ads they see. Otherwise, the only things you are going to get in the end are a bevy of annoyed site visitors and ads that do not generate any income for your site.

Niche Ad Networks
The good news is that there are niche ad networks popping up. I’ll give you an example. One of the more specifically targeted companies is Intergi (www.intergi.com), an advertising company that caters to gamers. They partner with the foremost gaming web publishers to give advertisers the exposure to gamers worldwide. Gamers are a very specific subset when it comes to purchasing trends. They are also super important right now to advertisers targeting the wired generation. Studies have shown that gamers aren’t just kids anymore. Most gamers are older, working adults with a good supply of disposable income. They are an advertiser’s dream.

We might not be Hollywood or New York, but we get our fair share of juicy celebrity news here in Tampa. Of course, the caliber of celebrity is decidedly sub par. Hulk Hogan and Jessica Sierra merit big headlines around here.

The big news today is that American Idol loser Jessica Sierra will be headed to a substance abuse treatment program in California instead of remaining in jail here in Florida. I’m not sure about you, but it kind of sounds like she was handed a vacation in light of what she might have received.

VH1’s Dr. Drew Pinsky (former Loveline gab host) begged the judge to allow Sierra to go to a treatment center instead of prison. Circuit Judge Daniel Perry said he was reluctant, but in the end he granted the request. Sierra also ended up with her probation extended to 24 more months, to commence after she finishes her year of “treatment” at the Pasadena Recovery Center.

This should all boil down to excellent publicity for both Sierra and Pinsky, since Sierra will appear on this Thursday’s debut of Celebrity Rehab on VH1. The show is hosted by Pinsky. Imagine that.

Sierra’s dad, Joseph, confirmed the rumors that his daughter is pregnant.

Sierra is somehow holding onto that tiny bit of notoriety she gained by being on American Idol, even if it is of the humiliating variety. All I know is that my past stories on Sierra have generated an astonishing amount of traffic from people typing “vomit sex” into search engines. *shudder*

Dating again scares the socks off of me. It was hard enough in the past, but now that I have been out of the dating world for so long and I am a single mom, things seem like they have gotten a whole lot worse out there in the wilds of the world of single people.

Take, for example, the news story that is out right now about Christopher Lee McCuin, a guy in Texas who kidnapped, killed, and then cooked his girlfriend. Yikes. Is this the kind of man who is out there as a dating prospect?

I have also been reading about how sexual predators have more and more often been targeting single moms on dating sites. They are actually grooming women in hopes of getting their sick paws on the children. It’s enough to make me want to remain celibate for the rest of my life.

When I look out there and see the kinds of things my older single friends are enduring, it makes me sick. I have friends who have recently dealt with abusive men, cheating men, men who lie about their jobs and being married. Heck, there is even this guy I see in the library all of the time who comes in after he gets off work, wedding ring glinting in the light as he sits at a computer and has cyber sex with women on MySpace before setting up multiple dates with multiple women he plans on meeting in hotel rooms. I only know this because I have had the displeasure of being seated next to him three times now and I can’t help but look. It’s like a freaky car accident.

That’s why the site WomanSavers.com is such a Godsend. It’s a Date Screening Website and online database where women can rate actual men. If men have been abusive, have cheated, have been general jerks, you can warm your fellow womankind. The site also has a lot of free resources for abused women like medical advice from doctors, free psychotherapy advice, and the support of thousands of other women worldwide.

Thankfully, I do not have a dilemma when it comes to finding a babysitter. When I lived in Gainesville, some of our best friends lived across the street and three of their five children were old enough to sit for Gigi. Nearly all of the time, their parents were home across the street and their dad is a pediatrician, so backup help was super reliable, to say the least. I also had several close friends who were members of a mom’s group I was in. We would sit for one another.

Now that I am in the Tampa area, I have various family members who can watch Gigi when I need to be somewhere. Since I have finished my classes and teaching certification, I have not needed a sitter. I try and schedule things I need to do on the days Gigi is with her father.

All of this, though, comes to mind because of a news item I just read. Over near Ft. Lauderdale a 12-year-old boy has been arrested and charged with beating a toddler to death that he was babysitting. Apparently, the kid used a baseball bat on the 17-month-old girl because she was making noise while he was trying to watch TV.

The 12-year-old was home alone with a 10-year-old and the toddler. The relationship between the three has not been made public information yet.

The boy was arrested Saturday on first-degree murder charges and arraigned in juvenile court Sunday. He is still in custody. Florida has given juveniles life sentences in the past.

When a 12-year-old beats a baby with a baseball bat, there is a clearly a crime present. This is not something that happens by accident, like when a child drowns in a pool under your supervision or you lose a kid in public. This is willful bodily harm with a deadly weapon. A child that commits this sort of act is certainly in possession of so many additional issues that he would have eventually harmed someone else.

This is just another reminder of why it is so important to really know who you are leaving your child with when you need a babysitter. An adult is usually the best option. It makes me want to ensure that I never have to leave Gigi with anyone else again.

I have a mailing list for this website I created that is a clearing house for free hair bow instructions. The mailing list is getting close to 1200 members and a majority of them are very active on a daily basis. You can only imagine the amount of e-mail this generates. It is my opinion that using a mailing list to keep this group of people together is not the most streamlines way to go about things.

Since my members upload a lot of pictures, sets of step-by-step instructions, and tips about the crafting industry, I was thinking that a great way to better organize all of the information coming in and still give my members a way to participate heavily would be to add a wiki to my website. A wiki is user-generated set of web pages. You can set the permissions and anyone can make additions and edits. All of the changes are logged so that accountability is present. Your users can add entire pages of information, photos, videos, links,

WetPaint is a site that allows you to create a free wiki. They’ll even host it for you. You can’t knock a freebie that won’t even tax your own server account. Although I would eliminate the dynamic e-mail list I currently use, the free wiki has a discussion forum on it that members can use to interact and comment. It would make finding old information much simpler and organization would upgrade considerably. I have also been looking at other Wetpaint wikis that have chat rooms and blogs. This is a highly nteractive way to bring a group of people with the same interests together.

Now, nothing is really absolutely free you know. There are contextual ads on the pages and links to other Wetpaint Wikis. This is something you can have waived if you are using the wiki in an educational setting and can qualify for the removals. I think this is a GREAT tool for teachers. A classroom wiki is a super way to engage children in learning about collaborative efforts through technology. Technology and children are like catnip and cats, so the draw will be strong.

Wikis are gaining momentum. If you’ve done a search on any given topic lately, you have probably noticed that wiki pages tend to come out near the top of your search results. If you want to bypass all of the irrelevant search results that search engines like Google spit out at you, you can use Qwika. It simply searched through all of the wikis on the net. How cool is that?