The Mason Technologist

Welcome AAAA Members!

Be sure to post a comment to let me know if you found The Mason Technologist from the link in the latest AAAA newsletter. I would love to get some feedback from other agencies to see what cool things they are doing with their clients in the online world. I hope you enjoy your visit. Come back often, you're always welcome.

Rise In Broadband - Bad News for TV

eMarketer reports on a recent study by Forrester.

By 2010, 62% of US households will have broadband access to the Internet, 53% will own a laptop and 37% will use a digital video recorder (DVR) to gain control over how and when they watch TV.

The Forrester survey, of nearly 69,000 people in the US and Canada, found that broadband Internet users watch just 12 hours of TV per week, compared with 14 hours for those who are offline. Those using a dial-up connection watch 12.5 hours of TV.

Blogpulse InfoPorn

Check out Matt Galloway's graphs on Tom and Nicole
To use Wired's term, this is some serious InfoPorn.

Matt takes the simple little search I did back on 7/12 and blows the doors off of it!
This is a really good example of how to use Blogpulse to accurately measure buzz !

National Geographic Special on 9/11

Check out this video trailer. I wish I had this channel on my cable system...

Dell Modifies Their Blog Policy

Well, according to Jeff Jarvis, Dell will now be monitoring and replying to bloggers. I wonder how long it will take them to contact this guy.

Talking About how 'Google Is Talking'

I just installed GoogleTalk, Google's long-expected entry into the IM and VoIP market, has arrived. Google Talk is a full-fledged IM client based on the open Jabber protocol with VoIP thrown in for good measure. According to Google, you can access Google Talk's servers with any Jabber-compatible client like Trillian, Gaim, Adium X, and iChat.

Have a GMail account? Let's chat...
I'm really curious to hear how it sounds.

The Value of the Press Release in Search Engine Marketing

In a recent post from Paul Chaney, he discusses the importance of optimizing press releases. He states:

"The real value of press releases these days is how they help you with the search engines. If you use a service like PR Web and pay the $30 '?donation'? you get picked up in Google News, Yahoo! News and others."

Stacy Williams reports that keyword-optimized press releases are read five times more than non-optimized releases. Not only that, the average cost per read is less than one cent.

Larry Sivitz has these SEO PR pointers on writing your presreleasese for PRNewswire and PRWeb :

• In the top portion of the page in the first sentence of the first full bodied paragraph (plain text: no bold, no italics, no style)
• In an H3 or larger heading (H1, H2) on the page
• In bold Â? second paragraph if possible and anywhere but the first usage on page. In italics - anywhere but the first usage. In subscript/superscript
• In the URL We will advise on directory name, filename, or domain name
• In an image filename used on the page
• In the Alt Text tags of any image file(s)
• In the Title Attribute of the image file(s)
• In the Link Anchor text to another site
• In an Internal linkÂ?s text to another page within the site

Pandora Rocks The House



What do Greg Brown, Martin Sexton, ColdPlay, and Supergrass have in common? Hmmmm, I don't know, what DO they have in common? Well, I plugged these singers into a new website that just launched called Pandora to see how they handled the mix. Thanks to an invite from Michael Arrington, I was able to get a sneak peak at the new music service that calculates my musical preferences based on data collected as part of the Music Genome Project.
The best part is it streams the whole song in high quality audio without any plug-ins needed!

This is the coolest service. It kept me entertained all day. It started getting a little off track at one point, but I clicked the button to tell them I didn't like the song and it kept me groovin without one repeat! Even cooler, it gave me a chance to hear some bands that I always wanted to listen to such as Apples In Stereo and Red House Painters. One thing I wish it had, was a way for me to tag an artist in my 'clips' list so I could check out more of their stuff later. I found that I ended up writing down new bands on a sheet of paper, but it would be cool to tie all this to my Pandora profile online! The other suggestion I have is to make it easier to send feedback. Right now there is a link to an email address off on a subpage somewhere. It would be easier to have a support form to help us report any bugs, errors or suggestions that we have as we test out the system. But over all this thing totally rocks.

I have already forwarded this to 5 'music lovin' friends and they are literally dancing in the isles! My wife is listening to it right now as I type this and is LOVING it.

You have to check it out! I have 20 more invites so shoot me an email if you want one.

Excellent List of Essential Free Windows Software

If you are a Windows user, you will definitely want to book mark this site: http://nedwolf.com/
All of this software is completely and totally free. No shareware, no nagware, no adware.
Reviewed constantly, categorized conveniently, with always-current links and versions.

I've downloaded quite a few utilities off of this site and added them to my USB Thumb drive just in case I need to install virus scan, antispyware, or personal firewalls. All free!

New Era of Participatory Public Relations

Steve Rubel posted his
10 Commandments for The Era of Participatory Public Relations. The take away message the PR folks: Embrace the new era of the empowered consumer

The Changing Face Of Influencer Relations

I was reading the article: Jeff Jarvis vs. Dell: Blogger's Complaint Becomes Viral Nightmare

In it, they interview Steve Rubel who states:

"Every company is going to have evangelists and vigilantes in the blogosphere, and they need a group of people focused on influencer relations, who are kind of watching all these different conversations and figuring out how to amplify the evangelists and how to calm the vigilantes."

Influencer Relations - Interesting term, isn't this what Public Relations firms do? Well, yes, but in the world of RSS and Blogging, the definitions of "Influencers" is changing. Influencers used to be primarily the media and industry analysts, but the list of influencers has expanded. Today, the purchasing process is influenced by a broad array of friends, colleagues and peers, pundits, academics, authors, researchers, and many others.

In an Article by David Kirkpatrick at Fortune Magazine he talked about how Google and Apple don't understand the importance of the new influencers. How will this affect them in the long run? He contrasts this to Microsoft's comparative openness with employee bloggers.