More Changes on the Way.

On Thursday, February 3rd, the internet ran out of IP addresses. Everyone has known this day was coming and the web guys solved the problem in 1995. You may have noticed it just because some of your favorite web sites were unavailable for a few hours while servers and hosts updated their software.

The old IP (v4) address format was 4 sets of 3 numbers (e.g.123.345.456.789) or 232 number of IP addresses. This means that at some instant on that Thursday, 4 trillion 295 million devices were on-line at the same time.

Just to reassure everyone, the new number sets kicked in automatically and there are now 2128 number of IP (v6) addresses available. A lot more.

Every browser, every social media network, every online developer has started making changes to accommodate and take advantage of this paradigm. Google, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn all made significant changes in the last week.

This weekend Google, Facebook and Twitter were making new and exciting offerings. Even in the midst of downloading and mastering the newest stuff, Facebook and Twitter were adding more new features. In others words, even as you were working on learning the new features...”new” new features were being uploaded.

The primary beneficiary of all these changes is local small businesses. If a business knows how to take advantages of these changes, they will benefit greatly.

The Small Business Development Center at CSI is introducing a series of courses entitled “Capitalizing on the Web.” These courses are designed to provide hands-on training for small business. The courses are intensive, engaging, useful, flexible, timely and in a constant state of change. The courses will help small businesses, community agencies and non-profits catch up with the web’s fast paced changes and allow these same group to keep up.

These courses have the added important ingredient of on-going coaching and support.

For me, all this means changing my courses for the SBDC’s “Capitalizing on the Web.” It means the development of a new course covering “Preparing and Optimizing Content for the Web.” This class should be taken first and should be taken by anyone posting anything or making anything available on the web. Whether just posting a resume or adding photos to your album or profile in Facebook...anyone not preparing their content correctly will eventually have to go back and do it all again.