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!