On Friday, a massive outage occured at Amazon Web Services that generated a wave

of negativity and criticism in blogopshere. Not long ago, Rackspace, one of the world's largest hosting companies, experienced a outage that resulted in a similar reaction. When the backbone collapses, so do our favorite services. This makes

This post is by Holly Buchanan.

How many times have you sat down to write a piece of copy and the ideas simply did not flow? It used to happen to me a lot, until I started working with personas. Personas are a copywriter's best friend for so many reasons, but two of the best ones are:

They are wonderful idea starters

Believe it or not, you don't have to be a blogger to respond to and

engage bloggers.  All it takes is a willingness to monitor the

blogosphere and respond when appropriate.  Doing so can help you

convert skeptics and naysayers into fans. 

Here's an example of what can happen if you take the time to become involved in existing discussions in the blogosphere about your business.  Recently I posted on Daily Fix about a new campaign that Kraft is launching for its new 1/3 less fat version of its popular Philadelphia Cream Cheese product.  The campaign is ongoing this month, and a few weeks ago Kraft launched a blog to help promote the campaign and the product.

We're going to the Olympics! Well, "we" at Mashable aren't, per say, but blogs are. The International Olympic Committee is allowing athletes and other accredited members of the games to blog for the first time this August. Here's the catch: blogs are only being allowed because the IOC determined blogs to be a personal form of expression, and not a form of journalism. And, the athletes blogs will still need to follow IOC guidelines. Blah.

The Details Edition of the magazine headline remix for blogging inspiration (following the Cosmo challenge) has come to a close. As with last time, we've had a lot of great participation and interesting posts.

Also as with last time, some people have experienced a great deal of success with this simple technique, so I thought I'd lead with one of the more enthusiastic success stories. These great results happened to Tiffany Monhollon of Personal PR:

Why bother about your competitors? Well, a stupid question, I know. You can't possibly think that you can enter a new niche and get on top without looking into what has been done before you. When done properly, competitor analysis will answer your most important strategic planning questions:

Is it worth trying to enter this niche? Will I be able to overdo my competitors? How fast? Will long and hard victory be worth the effort? What's my expected ROI?

Harper's Magazine has this to report: Google's motto may be "Don't be evil," but the profitmongers in fact are evil. Why? Google's plan to build a massive datacenter complex in Oregon "has triggered an arms race" that has lead Microsoft and Yahoo to build their own gargantuan server farms. These server farms, Harper's warns, will combine to draw more than "90 megawatts of electricity -- more than the World Trade Center humming at peak power on a hot summer day." For this reason, Harper's opines, Google's "motto is perhaps due for an addendum: 'Lead others not into temptation.'" Oh, that's what happened with the WTC. I always wondered.

Social media and social engagement is becoming more widely known to search marketers. Terms like "Power Users" and "Whales" are also part of the new age "lingo". But what makes these top users any different from you and me? How much time is invested to get this status? An angle I don't think many have explored for social activity is the amount benefits being at this level can bring you. Such as links to sites that are associated with you and interviews conducted by webmasters.

Imagine exploring millions and millions of news pages and other documents to find information about events that are scheduled to happen in the future, to help predict the future.

This kind of future search, or future retrieval, might be able to support the making of decisions in many different fields.

Does testosterone make men more likely to start businesses? According to Roderick White, Stewart Thornhill and Elizabeth Hampson of the University of Western Ontario, the answer is "yes".

They measured the testosterone levels of 31 male MBA students who had been involved in starting new businesses with 79 male MBA students who had never been involved in starting new businesses. They found that the students with entrepreneurial experience had higher testosterone levels. In addition, there was a relationship between testosterone levels and the odds of having entrepreneurial experience after they separated out the effects of the subjects' age, race, undergraduate degree, risk taking propensity, and the time of day that the testosterone levels were measured.