paulcarneyjr

I don't believe that it is for the simple reason that many of us have learned: your social network can only expand so far before it gets "rough" at the edges. The quality of information degrades rapidly the further it gets out, so I am not sure that having more from anyone will help in all cases.

I agree. The Press Release is somewhat effective, but is becoming very overused. You are better off building a good followers on Twitter and providing your information through that channel. They will generally be more interested in what you have to say.

There are a lot of better-known tools to do this - you will face tough competition unless you can do something that they don't.

I recommend that you find a specific niche and become really good at that industry/niche. That will help you build out things that others don't have.

Lead, follow or get out of the way. - Thomas Paine

Yes - refurb is a great idea. One of mine is refurb (over 1 year old now) and the other one was new (6 months) and both work great.

I own 2 MacBook Pros (switched from Dells running WinXP and Win 7) and love them both. As you know, setting up printers and other connections are so easy. The machines are powerful to handle my development needs, including running Parallels with a Win 7 client to run SQL Server for dev. I recommend those machines.