GoDaddy, one of the largest domain registrars and hosting companies, suffered a crippling Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack earlier today, temporarily leaving many of their customers without websites or email.

A Distributed Denial of Service (DDos) attack occurs when an attacker uses multiple computers to make a large number of requests one or more servers, with the goal of overwhelming them with so much traffic that they become inaccessible.

Almost 200 guests poured into the Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Audi dealership on Saturday night for First Crush, a Health First Foundation fundraiser which raised over $18,000 for heart-related technological advances.

The dealership, decked out as a hip Palm Beach night club, attracted a trendy crowd, who enjoyed gourmet food and fine wines from some of Brevard’s premier resturants, including Green Turtle Market, Djon’s, Oceanside Grille, Au Bon Pain, Chart House, and Silvestro’s, among others.

The event served as a prelude for the Foundation’s annual Grape Escape, a spectacular wine and food event, which will take place in Palm Beach Gardens this coming October.

The internet is a big place and it is important to know what others are saying about you across its billions of pages. That is why Google Alerts is so powerful. You can create an alert for any search term, such as the name of your company, the names of your products, or even the names of the key people in your organization. Google will then email you whenever it finds a new page that contains these keywords.

By knowing what others are saying about your brand, you will be able to use customer feedback to improve your products and services and provide better customer service.

Further, you don’t have to have your inbox constantly flooded. For each keyword you setup an alert for, you can tell Google to email you as it find it, once a day, or even once a week. We recommend at least once a day, so you can promptly respond to customer comments.

Google Alerts is also a great way to monitor what’s happening with your clients and competitors, so you always know what is going on in the sales environment.

If you haven’t already, setup Google Alerts today and see what others are saying about you, your brand, and the people and things you care most about. For more great tips, please subscribe to our RSS feed or check back regularly. You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

If you’re like most, you probably feel bombarded by an endless wave of spam on your Facebook news feed from people you barely know. Maybe it’s the daily horoscopes of some girl you met once in a bar, game updates from the guy down the hall at work, or the endless wave of status updates from your favorite band. Either way, you may feel compelled to abandon Facebook all together. But, before you click that “Close Account” button, let’s look at some ways you can slice through all the clutter and find the posts that really matter to you.

Create Lists

Lists allow you to group your friends and tell Facebook who you want to hear most from. Clicking on any list will display a separate news feed with only updates from the people on that list.

You can even select what type of posts (status updates, games, videos, etc) you wish to see in your news feed by clicking “Manage Lists” and then “Choose Update Types” in the upper right of your list’s news feed.

Built-in Lists

Close Friends – anyone you add to this list will show up more often in your news feed.

Acquaintances – friends in this list will show up less often in your news feed.

Restricted – these friends only see posts you make public. You’re still friends, but they only see stuff non-friends have access to.

Smart Lists

These lists automatically update based on the information in your friends profiles, such as their location. These can be based on employer, school, or geographic area.

Custom Lists

Create separate lists for each group of friends. For example, work, church, and school. You can check each of these daily to stay on top of what’s happening with each group of friends.

Unsubscribe from Friends, Interests, and Applications

You can remain friends with someone but never see any of their posts by unsubscribing from them. Simply hover over any post and an arrow will appear in the upper right corner of that post. Click the arrow and click “Unsubscribe from [their name here].” This will work for interests and applications as well, so you can finally rid yourself of those pesky games.

We hope you found these tips helpful. For more great tips and tricks, please subscribe to our RSS feed or check back regularly. You can also like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Over 460 guests attended the 30th annual Health First Foundation Benefit Ball. Thanks to generous community support, proceeds including in-kind donations reached $255,000 for Telemedicine and Emergency Services at all four Health First hospitals.  This year’s event, Ancient Egypt, Treasures of the Nile, took place at the FIT Clemente Center and featured decorations by Link Johnsten of Eau Gallie Florist.

Health First Foundation Benefit Ball Sponsor Party Ball festivities kicked off with a sponsor thank you party at the beautiful home of Harry and Wendy Brandon.

Thank you to all those who supported Health First Foundation’s 10th Annual Grape Escape. This year’s event took place at the Moorings Club, in Vero Beach, and raised over $350,000 for the Health First Heart Center. Thanks to the generosity of the bidders, over $101,000 was raised through Saturday night’s auctions.

Today we remember Steve Jobs, a visionary whose commitment to simplicity changed the world.

Thank you to all those who joined us this past Thursday for our Social Media for Small Business workshop.  Here are a few clips, in case you missed it.

Speakers:

Eunice Coughlin from Simple Internet Strategies

Joseph Grutta from Nautic Studios

Dominic Orsini from SEEgrowth

Stephanie Travis from One Source Accounting

Unfortunately, the rest of my section got cut off. For your convenience, I have included my slides below:

During my presentation on YouTube, someone asked about free video editing programs. Here are a few decent ones I’ve used in the past:

Avidemux
VirtualDub

Atlantis made it’s final journey into space earlier today at 11:26 AM. Here are some pictures, in case you missed it.