Here are my results of the Superhero Personality Quiz
You are Superman

Superman 80% Spider-Man 60% Iron Man 55% Catwoman 50% The Flash 45% Robin 40% Hulk 35% Green Lantern 30% Supergirl 30% Wonder Woman 20% Batman 20%

You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.


Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

Study shows Google filtering more than 98% of invalid clicks
Andy Beal has published an interesting interview with Google's business product manager that sheds some light on the process that Google goes through to filter out invalid and fraudulent clicks. Their studies show that less then 2% of clicks in AdWords and AdSense are invalid and only a fraction of those are actually fraudulent. Google's goal is to filter out 100% of invalid clicks.

Read more here

Getting Listed in News Search Engines

Lee Odden has a great article on how to get your press releases listed in News Search Engines
Research web sites that are already trusted news sources and work on getting your articles or press releases published with them. Either pitch the journalists of those sites with contributed articles or story ideas or engage them via comments if it’s a blog.

Submit press releases though wire services such as Business Wire, PR Newswire, PRWeb or MarketWire that supply news. Not every release makes it through into Yahoo News so be sure to write a quality release offering news of real value. Include full urls in the release as most wire services and news search engines will convert this to an active link. This method is where press release optimization skills come into play. It’s a challenging task to write press releases that are both engaging to journalists and consumers as well as to search engines through proper use of keywords.

Apply to become a trusted news source. If your site produces frequent, original content, and/or has multiple contributors and a clear editorial process, then you may qualify as a trusted news source.

Here are the links to apply for Google News, Yahoo News and Topix.net.
Apply to Google News - Suggest a news source
Apply to Yahoo News - Suggest a local source or a source for news and blog search
For Topix.net find the relevant news category and click on the “Feedback” link at the bottom of the page

IE 7 Officially Launched!

Video Blogging, New Camera, Windows Movie Maker, YouTube

Wow, I'm trying out all kinds of new things today! We went apple picking at Hickory Hill.
I brought my new camera and tried out the video recording features. I then edited the video with my oldest son using Windows Movie Maker and then uploaded it to YouTube!

Here it is:

Riddles

My Sister-in-law Katie sent these to me. I had lots of fun solving them. Give it a try...

A woman shoots her husband.
Then she holds him under water for five minutes.
Finally, she hangs him.
But 30 minutes later they share a lovely dinner together at a restaurant.
How is this possible?


I have keys that open no locks,
I have space, but you cannot fill it,
You can enter, but you cannot leave.
What am I?


You throw away my outside and cook my inside.
Then you eat my outside and throw away my inside.
What am I?


No legs have I to dance,
No lungs have I to breathe,
No life have I to live or die
And yet I do all three.
What am I?


I am slim and tall,
Many find me desirable and appealing.
They touch me and I give a false good feeling.
Once I shine in splendor,
But only once and then no more.
For many I am "to die for".
What am I?


The beginning of eternity
The end of time and space
The beginning of every end,
And the end of every place

Mason Awarded Gold Partner Status With Major CMS software company

Great news! I'm really excited to announce that Mason Inc has been awarded Ektron Gold Level Reseller status. We are now one of only 2 interactive agencies in New England that have made it to this level! Mason was given this designation because of the scope of the ongoing project we engineered for Gardner Denver Inc. To see what they have to say about us, visit:
http://www.ektron.com/partners.aspx?id=4140

Ten Things You Should Know Before You Redo Your Web Site

Esther Schindler wrote a great article called "Becoming Clueful". In it she highlights tips on what businesses should expect from their web developers.

1. Understand what you want
2. It Costs More and Takes Longer than You Think
3. A Web Site Has Several Pieces. Don't Cut Corners.
4. Balance Glitz and Guts
5. If You Build It, They Won't Necessarily Come
6 Avoid Bit Decay: The Site Needs Maintenance
7. Treat the Web Team as Professionals

I actually have a few more to round it out to 10

8. Content is still King. - Visitors to your site are looking for quality information. The search engines rank the relevance of your website based on it! Your site needs regularly updated, relevant content. That means you will have to dedicate time to it.

9. You get what you pay for - If you use your neighbor's sisters nephew who is in high school, it will show

10. Don't use Flash because it's 'cool' - Flash has it's place use it when there is a NEED to use it not because you like to see spinning dancing babies on your homepage.

Fuel Cells Around The Corner?

BBC has an interesting article on the fuel cell prototype laptops. The good news is the fuel cell runs the laptop for 10 hours on a 100 ml of methanol. But wait before you start stocking up on your methanol cartridges... the bad news is that the prototypes are the size of a liter bottle of water and weigh about the same.

When I first heard about this on NPR a few weeks back and this one, I had this vision that the fuel cell laptops would just have this small methanol cartridge doc on the side. Ah, Imagine just stocking up on 4 cartdriges to run my laptop for a week without needing to plug in once! I bet we will see it some day....

Skype Out Free in the US and Canada

I tried the new skype out free service to call from my computer to a regular phone when it was announced on May 15th. The person I was calling complained that there was a lot of echo over the phone and that he found it distracting. Since I was using the built in microphone, I suspect that if I bought a headset that would solve that problem.

Add Email Notification to Your Blog

As I mentioned in my previous post, I have set up a blog for the town of Bethany (www.bethany-ct.com/blog).

There was an editorial on one of our local weekly papers here in town that talks about needing to update the methods of communication in town. Since RSS probably won't become a mainline tool until the next version if Internet Explorer comes out, I think it would be a good idea to add an email subscription link.

I use Feedblitz through my feed through feedburner for this blog, but I figured I would try to find other solutions as well.
I found blog alert (http://shootthebreeze.net/blogalert/) that looks kind of interesting. It has a pretty basic interface for the signup screen with a bunch of google ads. I have signed up. It will be interesting to see the format of the email.

I will do some additional snooping around, but if anyone else has a

The Town of Bethany is now blogging!
I met with the first selectperson today to review how to post to the Bethany Blog.
http://www.bethany-ct.com/blog.

You can check out her first post - Bethany Blog: May 11, 2006 Town Meeting

Autism Rocks!

On Sunday April 2nd, 2006 Catalyst Music Group will be sponsoring a benefit concert at the Acoustic Cafe in Bridgeport, CT to help raise money and awareness for the CT-ARSC (Autism Spectrum Resource Center). The event will run from 4-9pm with live music as well as some items up for auction / raffle.

Confirmed performers are:

Brian Dolzani
Darian Cunning
Nick and Gerard (of Scarecrow Collection)
The Alternate Routes

Check out the website for more information - Autismrocks.org

Google Has Billed More Than $11.2 Billion For Ads

Google has billed advertisers in 65 countries more than $11.2 billion in 48 currencies, and made payments to advertising partners of more than $3.9 billion.

MSN adCenter 3.0

MSN PPC sounds pretty cool from what I hear so far. I will post more if I can get my hands on a beta account. Here are five features that make MSN adCenter stand out:

1. Dynamic Keyword Insertion beyond Google AdWords: you can set up to three dynamic parameters that allow you additional control over you ad copy and even allow for dynamic destination URLs.
2. Extensive Demographic Data: This allows you to tailor your ads based on demographics and not just keyword phrases and geographic data.
3. Bid Based on Demographics: You can place a higher bid on a keyword phrase for a searcher who is 26-35 year old males, as an example.
4. Estimate Average Positions: Unlike Yahoo which shows max bids, and unlike Google that makes it very hard to know a rank, MSN enables you to see estimated position based on max bid and CTR of each ad creative.
5. Day Parting Bid Tools: You can "display your ads on specific days of the week, specific times of day or a combination of each."

New Yahoo Logo

I love logos. I swear, a perfect gift for me would be just a big book of cool logos. You know what logo I have liked since I was a little kid? - The Sun Microsystems logo is so cool! I used to always point that logo out to people and they would invariably say 'uh ya Jack that's nice... So anyway...'

Well I also like to see the evolution of a logo, like the new Budweiser, at&t/sbc and now Yahoo.
Check out the new Yahoo logo on techblog.

What the Heck Is bbbrrrrryyyy?

Is it a new adjective for ' boy it's cold'? Well, maybe, but really its more testing to see how the search engines are doing at indexing words and how long it take em to do it. Scoble has noticed a trend that the major search engines are lying about the results. For the word brrrreeeport (which was our last test), Google says there are 14,000 results when the number is probably more like 400! Sounds like a little search engine conspiracy to me... Very interesting

What the Heck Is bbbrrrrryyyy?

Is it a new adjective for ' boy it's cold'? Well, maybe, but really its more testing to see how the search engines are doing at indexing words and how long it take em to do it. Scoble has noticed a trend that the major search engines are lying about the results. For the word brrrreeeport (which was our last test), Google says there are 14,000 results when the number is probably more like 400! Sounds like a little search engine conspiracy to me... Very interesting

Skype Me

OK, there's a small addition to the Mason Technologist. You will see on the left hand side of the page a link to contact me with Skype. This has proven to be a wonderful way for me to keep in contact with my international clients. Feel free to drop me a line.

Intel Skype Deal - Anticompetitive

CNET reports that Skype has inked a deal with Intel to only allow advanced VoIP conference features on Intel machines essentially shutting AMD out of the game. Why? AMD's processors have been proven to run faster then Intel! I have to side with AMD on this one - this just doesn't seem fair!

What Should You Read Today?

Check out this new website called BlogCode. The site makes recommendations on which blogs to read.

Here is a list of Blogs that are most closely related to The Mason Technologist:

Notes, links and conversation (http://pascal.vanhecke.info)
Google Blog of a Google Consultant, The (http://www.johnston.co.uk/blog.html)
Online Marketing Blog (http://www.toprankblog.com)
Search Engine Watch Blog (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/)
Wikicompany (http://wikicompany.wordpress.com)
David Crow (http://davidcrow.ca/)
Rick`s Ramblings (http://rickmahn.blogspot.com/)
Rob Bazinet Unleashed (http://www.robertbazinet.com)
Custard Melt (http://weblog.greenpeace.org/melt)
Error500 (http://www.error500.net/)
Transblawg (http://www.margaret-marks.com/Transblawg/)

You can get a complete list here:
http://www.blogcode.com/lcompare.php?r=631.

How does it work?

According to their site:
Recommendations are based not only on subject matter, but also on the style and input of the bloggers themselves - and their readers. Plus the recommendations are formed by the collective view of those who have read and enjoyed these same weblogs.

The State Of The Blogosphere

David Sifry has posted an updated state of the blogosphere report with some wonderful graphs and figures.

Here is the summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs


• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months


• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago


• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day


• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created


• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives


• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated


• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour


• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day


• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Testing Out The Blog Search Engines - Brrreeeport

Scoble is tracking the made up word brrreeeport to see how long it takes the major blog search engines to index it. OK, so I'll play along ;-)

Tons Of Web 2.0 Logos

Boy I had so much fun looking at all these logos that Ludwig Gatzke has posted on his Flickr page. It's sort of a where's waldo to find your favorite website.

Here's a fun game:

1. Count how many companies drop the last 'e' a la Flickr
2. How many orange logos are there? (Boy thats the hot color these days eh?)

Email me for the answers ;-)

Internet Searches Up 55% Over Last Year

Nielson//Netratings reports that the total number of searches in the U.S. conducted across approximately 60 search engines grew 55 percent year-over-year to nearly 5.1 billion searches in December 2005. According to their study Google represented nearly 50% of the searches with Yahoo and MSN coming in a distant second and third.

Google is continuing to show increasing marketing dominance with a 5.7% increase of the total searches.

Super Bowl Commercials Posted On Google

OK, so I'm not a big football fan and I'm defiantly not a big commercial fan but....
I have to admit there are some funny ones this year. Google has them all posted back-to-back. Bud Light takes it for the fall on the floor funny category for Hidden Bud Light and the Awwwww Award goes to Budweiser Clydesdale American Dream.

Tons of Free Music

OK so I am still digging my Pandora account. I was happy to see them integrate the personal favorites page (here's mine) and the ability to purchase the song/CD from iTunes or Amazon.
Very cool, but you can't pick the exact song you want to listen to and you can't download them for later.

Here's a new site to uncover cool new music called Audiri. They let you stream or download the songs. I was having fun listening to the Audiri top 100! I'm diggin this little band from Texas called All Save One. The song Godzilla Handle is number 3. I like the line -- "Putting a spoiler on a Honda Civic does not make it a sports car." -- Very true.

My First Google Base Post

OK, here is my first Google Base post...

Fantastic Pictures From China

We've been doing quite a bit of work recently with our client's Chinese divisions, including site translations and email communications so I have had China on my mind this week. I came across these absolutely fantastic pictures. Check em out here!

PRWeek says Start Your Search Engines

Our PR team over at Mason and Onofrio put a nice little article on my desk this morning from the latest issue of PRWeek. I have been talking to the PR team for a while on how to use our SEO tools to research and integrate keywords into their press releases to be picked up by the major engines and news sites. We also work with them to RSS enable their clients news pages so they are also indexed by the RSS search engines as well.

Anyway, the article does a good job of summarizing the three major tenets of search engine marketing:

1. Keyword rich text
2. Good clean code and site architecture
3. Strong link development

The article also uses a new term for social book marking:
Folksonomics - ways to organize digital content in a transparent and community-minded way. Very interesting way of describing sites such as spurl and del.icio.us.

They also touch on Google Base. I've been reading about this for a little while now, but I don't actually think I ever posted about it! My initial thought was that this was one of the Google experiments that wasn't quite ready for prime time. However the interesting idea about this is that people upload their content to Google instead of waiting for Google to come and spider their site. Kind of a search index push instead of search engine pull. If this takes off, it could be another avenue to get your product, service or offer into the Google database. Interesting.

Check out the full article here.

Every Geek's Dream

An article in the Wall Street Journal talks about tech support to the stars. One guy who works for Geek Squad has been on tour with U2 since 2004 to make sure Bono's XBox is hooked up. Imagine kickin back with Bono and playing video games? That's just about the coolest thing I've heard in a while!

Interesting Search Engine Optimization Study

Mike Davidson has an interesting post in his blog that gives some concrete examples of ways to get your page higher in Google.

Back Up Your Hard Drive

OK, we know that we should back up our important files, but do we actually do it? NOOO...
Here's a great lifehacker article on using free software called SyncBackupSE to automatically backup your data to an external USB or firewire drive.

Graphic Designer Redesigned The Google Front Page

Andy Rutledge has proposed a new design for the Google home page. Very interesting to see the insights of a web designer. He did the same thing for Ebay. Check it out!

If You Can't Post 2 or 3 Times A Week - Don't Blog

Well that's the opinion of Meryl K. Evans and Hank Stroll at marketingprofs.com.
I have been on blogging vacation for quite a while now, but I will try to stick to the 2 or 3 times a week rule at a minimum.

Google Buys Radio Ad Firm; AdWords Headed To Radio Distribution

Google is to acquire dMarc Broadcasting, a company that puts ads into radio stations, paying up to $1.1 billion for it. Google plans to distribute AdWords via radio this way. Says Google VP of advertising sales Tim Armstrong in the press release.:

"Google is committed to exploring new ways to extend targeted, measurable advertising to other forms of media," said Tim Armstrong, vice president of Advertising Sales, Google. "We anticipate that this acquisition will bring new ad dollars and accountability to radio by combining Google's expansive network of advertisers with dMarc's talented team and innovative radio advertising technology. We look forward to working together to continue to grow and improve the ecosystem of the radio industry."

Study States the Obvious?

Andy King writes "Web designers have as little as 50 milliseconds to capture the interest of potential customers, according a new report by researchers at Carleton University.

You only get one chance to create a good first impression, make it count. A clean, professional, and fast-loading site can ensure that your first impression will be a good one.

How to Design Web Accessible Pages for the Color Blind

We have a client site going live next week. During our normal quality control testing procedures the client called me to see if the site would be viewable by people who are color blind. The base corporate color is a shade of maroon. Actually my brother is color blind as was my grandfather. I asked my brother to check the site and it passed with flying colors (no pun intended ;-) ).

But it got me to thinking about other sites that include Red and Green. How would they fair?

Check out How to Design Web Accessible Pages for the Color Blind for more info on this.

Free Fonts

My oldest Son Evan LOVES fonts. He likes to install them and collect them and print them out.
He is going to go crazy when I show him this site.

A HUGE LIST OF FREEWARE FONTS

Tax Time Again! - Use Your Favorite Tax Software For Free

The IRS has a list of free online tax filing software. If they had their way, EVERYONE would file online. It's quick, easy and efficient.

Last year I purchased a copy of Turbotax and also filled out all the information on their free website version. The final outcome was IDENTICAL! I'm going for the free version this year at:
http://www.taxfreedom.com/

Firefox 20% market share in Europe

A new study out from XiTi shows a major gain in Europe in the use of Firefox.

Baker Street Blog - How to do great creative without being clever or talented

In the early days of motoring, Michelin weren't selling enough tires. They had to persuade people to drive more. So they invented Michelin Guides, which contained everything you needed to plan a motoring holiday, from maps to restaurant reviews. They made it chic to travel hundreds of miles to Switzerland and Italy in noisy, uncomfortable cars. Thousands did, and millions do it today. Wearing the tires out as they go. Genius.

WOW, It's Been a Whole Month Since My Last Post!!!!

I've been on vacation from the blog for a while. I am just starting to catch up on the goings on.
One interesting article in btobonline.com says that online video is projected to show a big growth over the next two years. They report that online video ad spending in the U.S. will reach $640 million in 2007, approaching triple this year's online video ad spending of $225 million. By 2009, advertisers will spend $1.5 billion on video ads online.