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Thank God tomorrow is Friday because this has been one very crazy week. If work keeps on coming in at this pace I'm going to have to either clone Steve, me and most of the other people who work for us or find some way of inserting a few more days into my weekly timeline.

Of course having just undergone some surgery on a knee and being confined to bed for the last two days has kind of put a crimp in my output this week but even when I'm back to sitting at my desk down at the office the work is beginning to outstrip the amount of time available to all of us.

Outsourcing
In fact things have really reached the point where I'm starting to dip my toe in the outsourcing waters for some of our mainstream work. That's quite a turn-around for me because I've always been strongly anti-outsourcing but then the early days of outsourcing were full of people who delivered shoddy work and maybe things are different now.

These days in mainstream there are lot of good workers available through places like oDesk and you can see some genuine recommendations about their work before you actually hire them. Having said that I'm not sure that our first outsourcing experience is going to be a good one ... the person we hired to do some work seems to have disappeared before they even started the job so we'll just see what happens.

And before any of you suggest that finding someone that's reliable is almost impossible if I'm hiring a worker from India or Bangladesh let me tell you that the person we hired was from the United States. At least no money has changed hands and when you use oDesk nothing is paid to the work has been done.

I should also say that I'm still not convinced that anyone from a non-English speaking background can provide suitable text when it comes to written work ... but they can certainly handle coding and graphics. Before I tried any outsourcing I did speak to several people who have had some big projects successfully completed through outsourced coders.

Recommendations
One of the best ways to encourage people to buy what you're selling is to provide recommendations from satisfied customers. There's nothing more reassuring when you're about to spend some money than to hear of someone who has already bought the same product and is entirely happy with their purchase so recommendations definitely work.

They work so well that some mainstream companies have gone to great lengths to get positive comments and reviews about their products out there in the market place. Of course the easiest way to do that is to either write your own or pay people to say nice things about you and lots of companies do it.

You will even find plenty of comments from satisfied customers on adult sites too but before you rush out and add a heap to your marketing sites it might pay to sit back and wait a while. You see the New York Attorney General is now taking action against those companies that engage in spreading fake recommendations.

While it's unlikely that action will filter down to the level of a few recommendations on an adult site in the immediate future it certainly could one day and when it does you might find that the penalties are rather heavy. Just this week the first company to be prosecuted for fake recommendations has agreed to pay $300k by way of fines and penalties so it's definitely something worth considering when you feel the urge to add some positive recommendations to your marketing message.

An interesting tool
Here's an interesting little tool that seems to have been released just recently and it's ideal for any Webmaster site ... or maybe even a newbie board ... that wants to add some easy to follow tutorials.

It's called Screenjelly and you will find it at Screenjelly.com. This little program allows you to record your screen activity with your voice. It's unlikely that it would allow anything overtly adult but there's no reason why you couldn't develop some tutorials using non-adult content.

The program does limit you to clips that are just three minutes long but there's nothing stopping you from building a series of clips to cover a full tutorial.

And that's where I'm going to leave you for this week. I've got to tell you that being stuck in bed and taking large amounts of pain killers just suck ... but then I do get to have a wonderful man to wait on me and Steve has re-discovered his cooking skills so life isn't all bad.