On Wednesday, June 17th, Amazon.com sent an “Important Notice from the Amazon Associates Program” email to all affiliates in North Carolina. While Amazon.com is not terminating North Carolina-based affiliates, they intend to if legislation being considered by the North Carlolina General Assembly is passed in its present form. Amazon claims the bill includes an  "unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates." What is it really about?

Did your favorite third-party Twitter application begin acting strangely, or quit working altogether Friday evening? If so, don't panic, you are probably just experiencing a Year 2000 Bug for the new millennium, dubbed the Twitpocalypse. Who would have thought 2 billion tweets could cause so much trouble? Read on to learn how we got into this mess, and what will have to be done to dig us out.

We want to bring your attention to "changes announced on Tuesday" that will have a great impact upon individuals and organizations using the popular social network website, Facebook, for business. As of Saturday, June 13th, at 12:01AM, users, and administrators of pages, will be able to choose their own user names to direct people to the webpage through a self-chosen, recognizable URL. Up until this point, the URL for individuals and pages has been an assigned series of numbers. Prior to this update, we would just like to take a moment to alert you to potential pitfalls regarding the usernames. As there are more than 200 million active users and an increasing number of companies using Facebook, acquiring the most desirable company Facebook URL could become problematic if one is not chosen soon after the selection period becomes active at 12:01pm on Saturday.

DesignHammer has recently joined the Meetup trend and is sponsoring a group supporting further education of local web professionals in the Triangle.

Black hat SEO has a negative reputation, and rightly so: It's a shady set of deceptive practices that degrade the user experience and are adopted mostly to make a quick buck. To keep a business legitimate and afloat on the Web, avoid black hat SEO techniques and embrace white hat SEO techniques.

Online registration is open for the fourth annual BarCampRDU, to be held Saturday, August 8, 2009, at the Red Hat World Headquarters in Raleigh. The popular event for local technologists has attracted over two hundred participants each of the last three years, and will probably reach capacity well before August.