After being in San Diego for a week having fun at WITS, I decided to only go to Boston for 1 day instead of the full conference.  I woke up yesterday and headed to the airport with no luggage (what an awesome feeling).  I was constantly checking to make sure the usb key with my presentation was still in my pocket.  Once I got seated on the plane, I was given more good news - since all passengers were accounted for we would leave earlier than planned.  A nice 40 minute flight and I am landing in Boston. Read the rest of this entry »

Just got back from my quick trip to Boston Pubcon and before I flew out I made a quick detour to the YPNBlog party.  As always the Yahoo party was great. I’ll post my 12 hours in Boston review tomorrow.

I’m a bit behind my blog reading and I just read Chris’s post about unjust labor practices at Google  and other notable notes.  I was shocked to learn Google used cookies and porn to get their employees to work for almost no money.  Good find Chris

Just got back from another great Webmasters in the Sun event.  For anyone that doesn’t know about WITS, it is a small gathering of Internet people that know each other and like to have fun in beautiful warm places.  This year was even better than last year in San Diego thanks to the great work of Keith, Ted and Floriana.  Here are some of my highlights:

• Sitting in the beautiful California sun and having some drinks (ok ALOT of drinks and great food and great cigars) with good people
• Having 3 luxury boxes to watch the S.D. Padres baseball team (I was told SD stands for south dakota) and also the fireworks display that followed it
• Seeing the face of the game store owner when I bought out almost his entire poker chip supply (thanks to jake and TrueLocal for helping find the store)
• Thanks to Injury Board for getting a full bar delivered to the poker room, it helped keep the game going well after 5am
• Betting if the waitress would say yes or no when asked if she believes in true and everlasting love - I won, she said no 
• I think Lou and Mickey’s restaurant needed an extra roll of paper to print our bar bill
• Having Rae ask people the “death is not an option” question
• Having Keith ask Rae the “f*ck, marry, kill” question
• My scariest moment - a waitress telling Champagne Jimmy that the more expensive champagne tastes better - believe me he knows this and luckily for my credit card he did not get the Krug
• My sad moment - Having my credit card company call me to ask if I had lost my credit card since they noticed alot of large and unusual charges.  This is when I realized I no longer go out and party enough.
• My sadder moment - Going to the airport to fly home as a bunch of people jumped into a stretch limo for a fun night in Mexico. (I really need to party more )

Somehow in between the parties I found time to talk business.  I can’t provide much of these details but let’s just say there are alot of helpful things coming soon that are going to really benefit the Internet community.  It’s gonna take a few weeks to recover from this one.

Sugarrae has a fun picture filled post of Werty’s departure from Canada.  Welcome back Werty.

I just saw a great ad during a morning tv show.  The ad was for Xtra-Pine cleaner.  It is a teaser to visit their site www.cleaninghunk.com.  For all the ladies & my gay friends go enjoy some nice eyecandy.  For all the men reading this you should also visit it and see a good viral site.

Now that just about everybody has gained access to MSN Adcenter, MSN is offering “invites” to make sure you tell your friends how great it is.  Here is a quick snip from the email they sent: 

“In addition to an invitation into the pilot, your nominees will receive a special offer to join our complimentary campaign set-up service called QuickLaunch”

If you have yet to try MSN Adcenter here are some words of wisdom:

• You are too late for the bargains, the bids were undervalued months ago when there was few people bidding.  Now that there are alot of people in the program there are few bargains.
• MSN seemed to have trouble applying their rules and conditions evenly.  In other words it was easy to break their ad rules.  They are have become much better at stopping rule breakers.
• Quicklaunch is helpful if you have no experience in PPC.  If you have some experience you will probably be happier to do your own setup.
• MSN charges a $5 account setup fee.  I don’t like people charging me money just so I can buy ads from them.  Google did the same thing with Adwords.
• The demographics capability is cool but I am not sure just how correct the information
• MSN has a very distinct type of user, run your ad campaigns accordingly

After reading SugarRae’s Polling via MSN IM: Real or Fake I decided to have some fun. Here are some eBay ads that were on Google.  Can you find the fake ones?

Lies
Whatever you’re looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com

Hurt Me
Whatever you’re looking for
you can get it on eBay.
www.eBay.com

Read the rest of this entry »