Tonight I was checking my e-mail and on the ad bar I noticed this ad:

Well, I am always up for a good Hysterical Video so I clicked it and was treated to this Video (Check out the Gecko in the background, and the ‘money you could be saving with Geico to the right). I was a big fan of the Numa Numa guy (Gary Brolsma) when he hit it big back in 2005, so I appreciated the ‘virtual shoutout’ with the Spoof of a Spoof.
What we should take from Geico’s current campaign is that there is power in YouTube and that viral videos do gain viewers. Geico has done such a good job establishing their brand that there is no links to Geico’s website. They also have created 3 other Viral Video Spoofs (VVS) to drive traffic. Check out the YouTube profile [itstheGecko]

Also to capitalize on March Madness check out the basketball next to the Geico at the top of their webpage, and also the drawing of a basketball court for the background of the page. Marketing with current events in mind at its finest.

Oh, if you are interested in downloading the catchy tune that you hear when the money you could be saving is around you can do that too.

Some of you might be familiar with Matt Lauer getting all the attention when he travels the World for the Today Show in a feature called Where in the World is Matt? But, some of you might not of hear of the other Matt.

The ‘other Matt’ is a 31 year old programmer who decided to see the World one day and took off on a trip around the fantastic orb. To document his travels he danced at every place he visited, since his first trip 3 years ago he has become, as he self proclaims, quasi-famous. Below is his most recent video, but I encourage you to check out Dancing Around the World website. He has definately inspired me to try to travel more to the beautiful places where he has danced.

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Weird Al was instrumental in helping me get through most of my high school years without a date. To this day I still get strange looks from my beautiful wife when I belt out songs from his current album Straight Outta Lynwood. Even though I have been a life long fan of Weird Al, I have never seen him in concert. Well, today I am happy to say that will change on August 6th when he rolls into Dallas. To build up to the concert I am adopting Weird Al Wednesday here on somemakemoney.com.

Each Wednesday I will post up a video that hopefully will make you laugh and get stuck in your head like it does in mine. For those of you who have never been introduced to Weird Al, be prepared, his name is accurate. Weird Al has made a nice living create parodies of current hits. To give you a taste, here is the famous song ‘American Pie’ turned on it’s head to tell the story of “Star Wars : Phantom Menace”.

PC World in all their wisdom have brought forth the Top 100 Best Products for 2008. Even though there are 7 fun fill months left in the year we can get the Best Products now, well in time for Christmas. Looking through the list I began to notice that there were a lot of ‘free’ products. So, I composed a list of all the ‘free’ products so you could enjoy them without having to go through the whole list. Some of them are old favorites, and some are ‘Johnny-come-lately‘ sites. The number one product is a new video site called hulu which provide HD content. one of the cool things about hulu is the ability to create ‘clips’ and embed them on your site as below:

Well, lets now take a look at all the ‘free’ products as defined by PC World –

• 1 – Hulu (video site, free/ad-based) [http://www.hulu.com/] – Go check out ‘The Office’, ‘Family Guy’ and other full length episodes with short 15 second commercials
• 3 – Facebook (online social network, free) [http://www.facebook.com/] – Current Social Networking Big Dog
• 6 – Flock (browser, free) [http://www.flock.com/] – Commercial Release in November 2007 this is a fast mover. Social Networking Junkie Browswer of choice
• 10 – Wikipedia (open-source encyclopedia, free) [http://www.wikipedia.org/] – Go and read up on something, or make something up about something
• 14 – Craigslist (online classifieds and discussion, free) – [http://dallas.craigslist.org/] – the ultimate classified site
• 15 – Scrabulous (PC game, free) – [http://www.scrabulous.com/] – Scrabble anytime and everywhere
• 19 – Twitter (social networking site, free) [http://twitter.com/] – Let them know right now what you are up to.
• 21 – Mozilla Firefox 3 (browser, free) – [http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/] – Are you not using it to read this post?
• 22 – Safari (mobile browser, free) – [http://www.apple.com/safari/] – iPhone users hunt the web (geesh, what a terrible attempt at a play on words.)
• 23 – NPR.org (news site, free) – [http://www.npr.org] – The mission of NPR is to work in partnership with member stations to create a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.
• 25 – Google Maps – Street View (mapping software, free) – [http://maps.google.com] – Big Brother is watching
• 27 – Google Docs & Spreadsheets (Web-based productivity suite, free) – [http://docs.google.com/] – We don’t need no stinking Office
• 30 – Flickr (photo-sharing site, 200 photos free, unlimited photos and storage $25/year) – [http://www.flickr.com/] – Great source for Creative Common licensed photos
• 41 – Google Gmail (e-mail, free) – [http://mail.google.com] – E-mail conversations read with ease
• 43 – Mozilla Thunderbird (e-mail, free) – [http://www.mozilla.com/thunderbird/] – More than marionette e-mail.
• 45 – Washington Post (news site, free) – [http://www.washingtonpost.com/] – Bringing you more than just news – scandal too
• 46 – Yelp.com (online social reviews, free) – [http://www.yelp.com] – City Reviews by us common folk
• 48 – The Consumerist (blog, free) – [http://consumerist.com/] – Worth an RSS subscription
• 49 – AdventNet Zoho (office suite app, free) – [http://www.zoho.com/] – See #27
• 50 – OpenDNS PhishTank (security site, free) – [http://www.phishtank.com/] – You must help me I have 203 Billion Dollars which you can have 25% of if you let me know everything
• 52 – NYTimes.com (news site, free) – [http://www.nytimes.com] – More news
• 60 – Vimeo (video-sharing site, free) – [http://www.vimeo.com/] – HD Video Sharing
  
  Pulse (HD) from Jason Chen on Vimeo.
• 61 – SideStep (travel site, free) – [http://www.sidestep.com] – Search all travel sites on one site
• 63 – TellMe (mobile search, free) – [http://www.tellme.com] – Gotta love XML Voice Tech
• 69 – USB Safely Remove 3.3 (utilities, shareware) – [http://safelyremove.com] – Figure out what ‘Mass Storage Device’ you are stopping before it is to late
• 72 – Cerulean Studios Trillian (instant messaging, free) – [http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/] – Use Yahoo, MSN, and AOL all at the same time
• 78 – Mint (personal finance site, free) – [http://www.mint.com/] – revolutionary, patent–pending Mint money management software
• 81 – YouTube (viral video site, free) [http://www.youtube.com] – If you do not know about youtube, then, well – we need to have a talk.
• 90 – Ubuntu Linux (operating system, free) – [http://www.ubuntu.com/] – The linux OS that Dell load on some systems
• 92 – Digg (social news site, free) – [http://digg.com/] – Find what others are reading
• 94 – Meebo (Web-based instant messaging, free) – [http://www.meebo.com/] – No need to download a prgram to chat on MSN, Yahoo, or AOL
• 96 – Partition Logic (partitioning software, free) – [http://partitionlogic.org.uk/] – Partition Magic, Drive Image, and Norton Ghost welcome a new challenger
• 98 – Audacity (audio editor, free) – [http://audacity.sourceforge.net] – Audacity is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds
• 99 – Lifehacker (blog, free) – [http://lifehacker.com/] – Cool things to help you streamline your multitasking self.
• 100 – Jing Project (image/video production app, free) – [http://www.jingproject.com/] – Cature you desktop as an image or screencast. Pretty cool stuff – go get Jingy with it.

So there is the list of all the free products the Top 100 Products for 2008. I hope you find 3 or 20 you can use.

One of the joys of blogging is taking part in worthy causes and making others more aware of RSS is definitely worth a post. Not a day goes by that I do not explain what RSS is to someone. I was amazed at how few people knew about RSS, until I read that only 5.4% of internet surfers use RSS feeds over at rssday.org

Spread the Word

I want to ping 4 of the bloggers I have interacted with contribue to the RSS Awareness Cause.

So what do you say:

David over at pureblogging.com – who is busy launching a new techy blog
Jay over at onlineopportunity.org – who is sharing the Limitations Of Keyword Research
MsDanielle over at msdanielle.com – who just turned 31 – Happy Birthday
And Enkay over at Enkay Blog – who is in Recovery Mode – Hope it is going well

I know you 4 could spread the word to several folks who like us all discovering new ways to let the web help them.

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Trying to get my blog back into shape to handle comment and thus comment spam, I am was thrilled to read Michael Martine of Remarkablogger post Create a Comment Blacklist in WordPress – Download My List of Spam Words over at pureblogging.com. In his post, Michael shares his SPAM keywords for you and I to use in our comment blacklist and comment moderation inside WordPress 2.5.

Defensio – Kind of sounds like me trying to speak a foreign language

Michael also bring to light an alternative Comment SPAM defense plugin to the Wordpress included Askimet. Defensio boast that it defends against 99.77% SPAM. More importantly other bloggers,both 1pixel [power by wordpress] and ActiveReload not powered by wordpress, are posting that Defensio is also not as likely to give you that false negative(i.e. trap a non-spam comment).

Full on Defensio Review

Holly over at Woman Tribune wrote a very in depth review of Defensio. If your curiostiy of this new SPAM smacker has been piqued, then I suggest you read her post. But before you do that, go grab that keyword list and add another layer of protection to your blog without consuming many resources from your server.

It has been a while since I posted on SomeMakeMoney.com. There is no one reason to point at as to why I have been absent. The crazy thing is, I have kept up with a number of blogs through Google Reader. Yet, I have not found it in myself to contribute either via comment nor posting.

Change Jobs

There has been one major change in life since I last posted. I have changed jobs. This is a good move both financially and career goal wise. I was not being challenged by my old post and found myself losign some of my edge. Although, I could of use some of my time to focus on my blog, but instead I found myself kind of just going through the paces of life. Well, I am not one to just go through the motions so I made a change and here I am again. Ready to be apart of the blogosphere once again.

Blog Investing

In this first post back I want to remind all of those of that blogged what I have learned due to my absence. Having a blog is like a long term investment. You should always being contributing to your investment while making decisions that spur growth. Your blog should be treated with the same diligence. Consistent posting will help grow your blog, and allow you to make decision to help exponentially grow your readership and community.

Welcome Back

If you are reading this on your RSS reader of choice, please stop by and say hello. If you are new to this blog I promise that if you stick around I will do my best to break down what I have learned and continue to learn about making money online and being a solid member of this online society.

Well, it seems as though I have been MIA for almost 2 months now. I will get to why in another post, but I wanted to get back to my blog and what better way than to share with everyone a site that is very relevant to this time of year. My 4 year old daughter wants to carve a pumpkin this year, so since I have never really carved a pumpkin before I surfed over to Google to find the best tools to use to carve a pumpkin. The 2nd result is what grabbed my attention ExtremePumpkins.com – Extreme Pumpkin Carving. I have looked through about 90% of this site and cannot wait to share my results with everyone. If you are wanting to learn about carving a pumpkin from someone who really enjoys sharing his knowledge head on over to Tom Nardone’s awesome pumpkin carving site.

Here is some handy work from Tom:

I know I did not put a traditional jack-o-lantern picture with this post, but as I was searching for a cool one to share I came across the picture you see above. The reason for posting it was because it is a pumpkin paying tribute to the picture I posted with my 300 DVD post.

Well, it is officially here! College Football 2007! I love watching college football. There is just something about the student body getting behind their team. I try to watch every ESPN College Gameday on Saturday Mornings, although I am sure that my 4 year-old’s soccer games will conflict sometimes. I hope everyone enjoyed the opening weekend of the 2007 College Football Season. I look forward to fun, event filled race to the BCS Championship. Who do you think is going to finish #1 this season? I think West Virgina has as good a shot as anyone, especially after the way USC played in it’s opening game.

Ever since I purchased my Canon PowerShot S3IS camera last year I have been sold on Canon cameras. That is one reason I am pumped about Stay At Home Dad, Geek Style give-away of the Canon PowerShot SD750. Its smaller profile will allow me to have a digital camera with me more often, because the S3IS is just way to bulky(although the 12x Optical zoom is nice). Smug Mug has also thrown in a Professional Account for the winner, and 15 Power User Accounts for 15 Runners-Up.

Mike has only had Stay At Home Dad, Geek Style up for a little over a month and he is quickly closing in on the deadline for this contest, which is August 31st, 2007 11:59 PM. Mike is using his blog to document the life of his daughter in more than pictures. Matter of fact he is going to have his little girl chose the random winners by using rubber duckies. I suggest he fills a bathtub with the rubber duckies and sits her in it. The first 16 ducks she picks up are the winners.

I really like the writing style of Mike and have subscribe to his RSS feed. I believe he will provide some great post and an idea or 2 for me to blog about. I encourage you to head on over to his blog and enter his Stay At Home Dad Digital Camera Give-Away .

One last thing for Mike, since I am a father of a 4 year old little girl and a 7 month old little boy, I can relate to what he is experiencing with Alex. Today I read a quote from another favorite blogger of mine freakedoutfathers.com and I think it is something all parents should read.

The guys who fear becoming fathers don’t understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent.

~Frank Pittman, Man Enough

Thanks for the contest Mike and good luck with your blog, business, and family.

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