Beaconfire Wire

For as long as I can remember, our PM team has debated internally the value of the PMP certification for project managers. For many big corporations and the government, it is a key qualification for project managers. As a comparatively small company, this is not a prerequisite for our PMs. In fact, we generally prefer our PMs to have evolved into the position organically over time.

Why you ask?

From my experience, good project management is more a function of personality type and experience than a taught skill set. Sure, there are tactics and techniques that can be learned from a classroom and in books – but those are not what make a project manager successful. A good project manager has those skills, but more importantly, is detail oriented; able to keep a handle on a nearly unlimited set of discrete tasks; can manage diverse groups of people, ranging from internal teams to clients to vendors; and have the intestinal fortitude to tackle tough issues immediately head on.

None of that can be taught. It is a product of going through the meat grinder and having a personality that fits the job. My bias is routed in experience with other organizations’ PMP certified project managers – PMs who routinely struggle to make all of the pieces work together while simultaneously massaging the egos and personalities of the various parties involved to make them work in unison. Don’t get me wrong – I see value in the knowledge required for the PMP certification. I just think it is a toolset that needs to be employed by someone with a specific set of skills – otherwise it is ineffective.

Testing a Web site is a pretty big, and not often inexpensive, task. Cara already posted about some inexpensive tools for user-testing wireframes. But for your design, there’s an opportunity to go even lower-budget than that.

To do testing truly on the cheap, there is a new tool called fivesecondtest.com. It’s a way to test designs in five seconds or less. You upload your design, and then you can either invite specific users to test it, or you can open your test to the entire 5 second community. You have the option of creating memory tests or click tests. And as the name suggests, a tester looks at the design for five seconds, letting you know what items stand out on the page.

Of course, this is a very simplified approach. There is no task-based testing. As the site states, the tool is meant to “help you easily identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.” Nothing more, nothing less. And if you open up your design to the entire five second community, you’re likely not getting results from an average-joe user, but usability and design experts.

There are some paid plans that allow you to do some more sophisticated testing. But if you’re budget is beyond tight, it may be worthwhile to just upload an image and see what the testers say.

We hear it all the time. “Yeah, there’s an app for that.” It seems that, for every task you want to do, there’s a digital application that goes along with it, from organizing your recipes to promoting world peace.

If you have ever tried to coordinate your web team and client stakeholders, you know that often, email just doesn’t cut it. Emails get lost, deleted, lose their history trail, and can be disjointed. So when trying to get web teams and their clients to collaborate, what is the killer app that helps get everyone together?

The answer…none (at least, none that I’ve seen). No one single application is perfect at fostering true collaboration from the inception of a project through to completion. A good tool used by creative designer and client to cement the vision for a Web site is probably not the same tool that will help a QA tester communicate bugs and issues to the core tech team.

We at Beaconfire use a few tools for different phases of a project. Here are some examples of how Beaconfire uses some of its tools to foster collaboration.

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Much has changed since humanity acknowledged the word knowledge and started to classify the various subject matters into categories and taxonomies of learned disciplines.
The definition of knowledge is outside the scope of this article because of simple reasons. I am not as qualified as the university professors, or librarians who pour their blood, toil, trouble, and tears into the understanding of knowledge and wisdom.

What I do know about is what knowledge is online. Since Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Yes. He was knighted.) created the World Wide Web to link documents together on the then nascent Internet, knowledge became more than monolithic documents or books that were linked loosely via citations and references. Instead of specifying in APA, MLA, Chicago, or Turabian style where the source of a particular knowledge was, one could directly link it using something called “HyperText”, or what some know as “Hyper Text Markup Language”. Today, all websites that you see online are built with a combination of HTML, some JavaScript, and possibly some Flash or Java.
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We all know that testing your wireframes to make sure your priority audiences can complete key tasks on your website-in-progress is a good idea – but is there an inexpensive way to do it? I was alerted to an online tool yesterday that can help you conduct tests quickly, easily and inexpensively, too.

Optimal Workshop’s Chalkmark (http://www.optimalworkshop.com/chalkmark_alt.htm) makes usability testing a snap. First identify the tasks you would like your audience to complete. Next, upload the image of your wireframe. Invite your audience(s) to participate and then wait for the results to roll in. The test results are returned in the form of a heat map (see image). You can immediately see where people chose to click on your wireframe to complete the task you put forward. Of course Chalkmark can’t give you all of the information you would get from true wireframe prototype testing, but if budget is a concern, some information is better than no information. And feedback directly from the audience your site is trying to reach? Priceless.

chalkmark heat map

Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. With so much talk about the “death” of traditional news media and the growth of online alternatives, we asked our staff: How do you get your daily news? Do you still read a newspaper?

Susan, Administrative Assistant: When I was taking the metro, I would count on the Express for my daily news.  Now that I’m driving again, it’s all about WTOP news radio.

Amy, Functional Consultant: Indeed, I read the Washington Post every morning on my commute.  Sometimes, if I glance a picture or graphic in The Express over another commuter’s shoulder, I might read a little of that, too.  During the day I get my news from various news feeds on my iGoogle page – particularly CNN.com Headlines and “Top Stories” which pulls headlines across an array of providers (Bloomberg, The Post, The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc).

Tim, Functional Consultant: I haven’t read a paper in years.  During the day I get news via RSS feeds that I follow in Google Reader.  I listen to NPR radio shows via podcasts which I listen to during my commute.  Since picking up an iPhone, I increasingly get news via NPR, WSJ, Washington Post, and other apps.  In the evening I watch Jon Stewart who rounds out my daily news picture.  For real in-depth analysis, I read monthly and weekly magazines (Harpers, the New Yorker, and The Economist).

Andy, Project Manager: Every day I read DemocratandChronicle.com for local news, the Washingtonpost.com for national and political news, and search Google News for economic and financial stories of interest to me. I also read the print version of the Economist every week religiously.

Kristin, Project Manager: I listen to news radio on my drive in. Otherwise, re: papers, only on Sundays…it’s a luxury to sit down and read a paper these days…

Marissa, Functional Consultant: I get a Sunday Newspaper, but I don’t really read it for the news – I read it for that “Easy Like Sunday Morning” feel. I have an RSS Feed set up to send me local news. As for National News, I don’t have a specific way I follow it. I’m on the Internet all day, so somehow the really big news always trickles down to me somehow. I’m ashamed to admit it, but my most steady source for National News is the Daily Show.

Jeff, Principal Consultant: Yes newspaper every day. Something about seeing stories I wouldn’t normally choose to read.  I also use the AP news widget on blackberry when I don’t have the paper or want to see newer headlines.

Ali, Marketing Consultant: Washington Post online in the morning.  Facebook status updates in the evening.  Blogs on the weekends.  I spend about 2 minutes scanning the Post in the morning and click “read later” for articles that interest me.  This tags them to Instapaper on my iPhone so I can read them on the metro on the way home.  At night, I usually scan status updates for articles, blog posts or videos friends have found interesting.  I let them serve as an information filter.

Lynn, Principal Consultant: I use my Blackberry a lot and use the Google News Reader.  But I still enjoy sitting down with the physical newspaper over my morning breakfast.

Shiloh, Marketing Consultant: During the week I listen to NPR and supplement with my Facebook feed (my friends know what kinds of articles I’m interested in) and, if I’m lucky, episodes of the Daily Show/Colbert Report to put it all in perspective. I read the newspaper but only on weekends.

Amadie, Marketing Consultant: On the weekends, I love to sit down with the print newspaper – the Post on Saturday and Sunday, and the Sunday New York Times – and read them pretty much cover-to-cover. During the week, though, time is very limited. I follow several reputable national and local news sources on Twitter and scan the headlines throughout the day, and catch the top of the hour news on the Today Show while getting ready and the Daily Show each evening.

Jo, Marketing Consultant: I used to read the paper on the metro every morning, but I find it too big and awkward to read in a crowded train.  Now, I read the Washington Post via their mobile site on my way to work, supplemented with blogs later in the day.  And, of course, I need my dose of fake news from the Daily Show.

The holiday season is almost upon us, and that means (apart from family time, good cheer, and lots of food) that you’ll probably be asking your supporters for money.

And so will everyone else.

Holiday fundraising is a fine balancing act.  On one hand, you want to make a strong push: ask early, ask often, ask for a lot.  On the other hand, at some point you get diminishing returns, as your less-enthusiastic supporters get sick of reading your fundraising emails (and maybe even unsubscribe!), and even your die-hard donors are just skimming your messages.  At the same time, it’s a fair bet that their inboxes are being flooded by fundraising messages from other non-profits; you want to stand out from the crowd, but not be part of the noise.

Sometimes, less is more.  What’s one way to strike a healthy balance?  Send fewer messages, but make them count more.  In a word: segmentation!

Your donors aren’t all the same.  So why should they get the same message sequence?

If Suzie always makes an honor gift for Christmas for each member of her family, don’t send her a slew of emails for months before and after.  A couple friendly reminders ought to do it.

Or, if George makes a year-end donation on December 31st every year, like clockwork, to help his tax status, you probably don’t need to ask him to buy a gift membership.

The beauty of email fundraising is that it’s dead easy to create message variations, custom email lists, and detailed reporting.  Your data won’t be as cut-and-dry as the examples above, but with a little analysis and brainstorming, you can probably come up with a manageable number of segments that capture the most common behaviors of your supporters.  Then, you can send each message only to the segments that it fits.

And to take “less is more” a step further: not every email needs to be a fundraising ask!  If every email you send is asking for money, your subscribers will come to expect that any new email from you will be… another ask for money. They can guess that without even opening it.  Let’s face it: it’s no fun to be asked for money over and over, no matter how worthy the cause.

Instead, mix it up a little.  Cultivate your supporters – and let them remember how much they value you.  Share a story about your work.  Thank them.  Let them know how much they mean to you.  Any message that has value beyond fundraising can help you deepen your connection with your supporters… and that has value of its own.

So when you’re setting up your holiday fundraising, beware of list fatigue!  Keep your messages relevant and properly targeted.  Fewer messages could mean more happy supporters.

I love analytics. I love diving into the data, looking at the numbers and finding new and actionable insights. But there is one thing about analytics I don’t love – monthly dashboard reports. You know what I mean – a spreadsheet showing visits, pageviews, new visitors, etc., compared from month to month in nice little columns, filling in a neatly formed Excel graph. While not always actionable, these reports do show big-picture trends, and your bosses and boards love that. In the world of analytics, monthly dashboard reports are a necessary evil.

However, I could never get Google Analytics to give me data in a form that really fit any of my monthly dashboard report needs. I’ve spent hours clicking, copying, pasting, and reformatting in search of the perfect dashboard report.

The tedium may come to an end, thanks to an Excel Plugin called Excellent Analytics. The plugin uses the Google Analytics API to allow you to run customizable Google Analytics reports right in Excel. And after you create a query, a few clicks will update the numbers in next month’s report.

So after you invest some time to set up your first Dashboard report with Excellent Analytics, all you need to do next month is copy and paste a few columns as values, and update your query. I tried it out for the first time this month, and I went from spending almost 4 hours on a dashboard report to 45 minutes.

Now that’s efficiency only an analytics geek could love.

… You really won’t want to miss THIS.

Remember back in August when we asked for your help to get our panel ideas accepted to South by Southwest Interactive? Well, this last week we have been dying to share really exciting news with you, but have been sworn to secrecy .. til NOW!

Thanks to the hard work, brilliance and tenacity of own Shiloh Stark, Jo Miles and Michael Cervino, “Will Kiva Kill Your Non Profit: Donations 2.0″ has been chosen, featuring Skylar Woodward from Kiva.

From sxsw head honcho’s email:
“We received more than than 2300 outstanding proposals via the SXSW PanelPicker — so being selected for the event means that your idea represents the best of the best of the best. Congrats!! And, thanks again for putting together such a great proposal.”

Does it get any better than that? See you all in Austin!

The economy is bad.  Donations are down, and you’re under pressure to bring them back up.  What would you do if someone offered your organization $10,000 a month for online advertising?  You’d snap it up, right?  And spend a few hours a month managing it?

Or would you apply, but then leave your ads languishing, unattended, for months on end, using only a fraction of your money?

I’m always amazed at how many eligible organizations haven’t signed up for the Google Grants program… and of those who have, how many are not using or managing their grant.  I’m not one to evangelize a product (in fact, Beaconfire is technology-agnostic), but Google Grants is unique in its scope and availability to nonprofits.

Applying for the program is, in many cases, an easy choice.  Here it is in a nutshell: if your organization meets certain criteria, Google will give you $10,000 per month in advertising on their Adwords tool, to use however you like.  (Adwords are those little text ads you see next to your Google search results.)  There are a few restrictions – for example, your bids are limited at $1, and you can only advertise within Google search results, not on other networks.  But it’s a great way to reach potentially interested web searchers, especially on topics where your site doesn’t rank on the first page of search results.

Once you have your grant, making good use of it is not hard. It doesn’t take a lot of time, either – just a few hours to learn the basics, and then a couple hours a month to maintain your account.  Yet, this is where a lot of organizations seem to falter.  You’re busy, and you’ve really been meaning to build out your campaign, you’ve planned to check and see how it’s doing, you’re going to get to it any day now…

It’s easy for “any day now” to stretch on for months, until you’ve forgotten all about your Adwords account.  And if you’re not paying attention to it, then it’s almost certainly not performing as well as it should.

An Adwords campaign is like a garden – even once you’ve planted it, you need to check on it and pull the weeds, add new plants as the seasons change, and generally keep an eye on things.  If you don’t, the weeds will take over, the bugs will eat your tomatoes, and you won’t get the results you want.

If you already have a grant, log into your Adwords account right now.  How much of your $10,000 did you spend in the past month?  What was your average clickthrough rate?  How many ad groups (topics) do you have?  If you haven’t been actively maintaining your account, chances are that you could do a lot better.

Of course, there’s no cost to under-using your grant – you’re just missing a big opportunity.  How big?  If you were using all of your grant money, and getting a modest 1% clickthrough rate, you’d be driving 10,000 extra visitors to your site each month, to landing pages of your choosing.  That’s not nothing.  If you follow a few simple guidelines, you can take much better advantage of that opportunity.

To me, these are the biggest things to watch out for:

• Log in at least once a month. Ideally, you should monitor your account once a week.  It may only take 15 minutes, but you can look for opportunities and trouble spots, and stay aware of how your campaign is doing.
• Use multiple variations on your keywords. Include plurals and misspellings.  Mix up the word order.  You’ll get more impressions… and thus, more clicks.
• Test variations on your ads. Even if you don’t have time to be scientific about it, include at least two different ads in each group.  You’ll often see that one does much better than the other.
• Watch your quality score! Each keyword is assigned a quality score, on a scale of 1-10, based on its relevance to your ads and your landing page.  You can see it by customizing the columns on your keywords view.  If your quality score slips, Google will start to place your ads lower in search results, which will in turn hurt your clickthrough rate.  One easy way to improve your account performance is to weed out (delete) any keyword with a quality score of 4 or lower.  If you’re seeing a whole lot of low quality scores, take a look at your ads and your landing page.  Are the keywords really relevant?  If so, tweak your ads to match them better.  If not, you probably shouldn’t use that keyword.
• Don’t just advertise on your brand. There are pros and cons to buying ads for brand-related keywords.  But it’s safe to say that if your brand keywords make up a major portion of your campaign, you’ve got a lot of room to expand.  Think creatively: what might your potential supporters be searching for that you could provide them?  What resources on your website could make a great landing page?
• Watch ROI… but not just ROI. When you’re paying for an ad campaign, you want every dollar to count – to drive new donations or acquisitions.  But if you have a grant and you’re currently not using all of it, you can afford to drive traffic to useful pages with (gasp) no clear conversion action.  You’ll be increasing your traffic and building brand loyalty… and some of those visitors probably will convert, too.

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to Adwords, but it’s a solid starting point for revitalizing your account and making good use of your free advertising dollars.  And in this economy, isn’t it nice to get something for free?

Myth #1: Monthly breast self-exams save lives

Most of us think that regular breast self-exams are a no-brainer, but the evidence actually shows that breast self-exam does not save lives or detect breast cancer at an earlier stage.

This myth, along with 30 other myths and truths about breast cancer, will be highlighted throughout the month of October by the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC).

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and NBCC is doing what it does best – getting us to think critically about our assumptions and keeping us focused on the important part: finding a cure. To help translate this message online, Beaconfire partnered with NBCC on a redesigned homepage and new site skin that draws attention to common misconceptions about breast cancer and offers concrete action items for people ready to take the next step.

Today, I had the honor of speaking on a great panel sponsored by Google and the Ad Council along with Jane Kirchner from American Farmland Trust, Andrew Marshall fromthe Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) and Carley Graham Garcia from Google.

Huge props to Kate Emanuel of the ad council for pulling it all together and inviting me to join the assembled rockstars. For anyone playing the home game who would like to see my part of the presentation, enjoy!

Great facelifts are not just for the Hollywood elite anymore. In these challenging economic times, organizations are discovering the wisdom of reorganizing their existing wesbsite real estate rather than going under the knife for a complete site redesign. Think botox vs. nose job – If you had limited time, resources and a pretty low pain threshold, which would you choose?

All kidding aside, these days a “facelift” or a “site refresh” may be just what the doctor ordered for several reasons:

1. Your organization has rebranded, updated your collateral, or changed your identity in any way that resulted in a lack of overall visual cohesion.
2. Your site was last designed when Front Page was the cool kid on the block, IE 6 was the best browser on the market, and it’s just begun to feel dated.
3. Your whole site is in flash, no search engines can find you, and you cannot edit it easily.
4. Your information architecture and labeling is largely sound, but could use a tweak to update the language based on some user testing results.
5. You don’t have the time or the money for a complete redesign, but feel your organization’s message and mission are suffering because of a less than optimal site design and user experience.

While I’m a big fan of the transformative power of a fresh coat of paint for your website, here’s a few road-tested suggestions to consider before you drink the facelift kool-aid.

1. Assemble a small, nimble and responsive team to do the work. Do not skimp on a great PM who is no pushover but knows which battles are worth fighting.
2. Take the time up front to define the project requirements and keep them narrowly focused. Make scope creep an offense punishable by organization wide ridicule. Seriously.
3. Commit to a launch date and do not change it unless cats and dogs start falling from the sky. Same for major deliverable deadlines. This will be the “Project that never ends” if you don’t.
4. Do not let process bog you down. Be flexible enough to try a simpler way of doing something even if it represents a shift in “how you’ve always done it”.
5. Set reasonable expectations for the project amongst the organization’s stakeholders, and make sure you keep the lines of communication open at all times.

At the end of the day, the mark of a successful website facelift comes down to effectively using your available resources to help your users better engage with your organization.

And by the way, you look FABULOUS. Did you have some work done?

P.S. If you want to learn more about effective design strategies for your website, don’t miss yours truly (and some other cool folks) speaking on Oct 1st at this Google/Ad Council seminar: “Extreme makeover: Taking your website to a new level”

The Gift: Before

Problem:

The holidays are coming up again, and once again you waited too long to buy your gifts.  You can’t find the items in stores, and when you find them online they won’t ship in time.  They don’t even offer an e-card that nicely displays the gift you purchased.  The best you can do is print out the item’s product page and stick it in a card… only, what you print out has the item’s price tag in a glaringly large font size, along with headers, advertisements and who knows what else.

Solution:

Firebug.

Even some developers who use Firebug on daily basis may not realize some of the powerful capabilities it has for quick and easy DOM manipulation.  Among its other capabilities, Firebug lets you edit and even delete parts of an html page directly in the browser, without the need to save or open the page in an editor.

The Gift: After

Starting with the “Inspect” button, you can quickly jump to any part of the page and Firebug highlights the inspected element.  From there, you can right-click and either edit the content or delete the element entirely.

A minute or two of clean-up and you’ve got a respectable rain-check for gifts with a minimum effort, all without ever clicking the “save as…” button on your browser.

Sometimes a client needs a change.  When you’re talking about websites, that change can be the whole enchilada: a new (or first time!) content management system, a comprehensive content audit with audience matrices and  IA work, a big build with tons of new functionality.  Or it might just be a creative design refresh with some minor tweaks and enhancements,  resulting in the appearance of a major revision at a lower cost and quicker implementation — the website facelift.

A website’s search can be similar.  Many clients we talk to are convinced that their site search doesn’t work and needs to be torn out — and sometimes that’s true.   We can gut the whole works, put in a new Google Mini or MS Search Server, spend hours dividing your site into collections, setting up separate searches based on audiences or site sections, but that’s not always necessary.  As a counterpart to the website facelift, the site search facelift seeks the same result: more for less.  How? By applying lessons from your search metrics, particularly what the top search terms of people seeking information at your site are and then making specific corrections to content.

While a site search facelift has several techniques to improve results, one of the easiest steps you can take to improve search results is to review frequent search terms and provide recommended links through your search engine for those terms.  The term used is dependent on the search engine, but is commonly referred to as “best bets” or “suggested results”.

Perhaps your search engine doesn’t make those frequently searched for terms reports available? Don’t have that data in the first place? Don’t be so sure – if you’re using Google analytics, most of the time that information is available to you irrespective of your search engine technology.

The best thing about this method is that it generally follows the 80/20 rule where 80% of your searches are coming from 20% of the search terms people use.  Start with the terms most frequently searched form and you are automatically handling the search results in the order that will gain the most benefit from clear, recommended content suggestions.  And while there’s a lot more to a full search facelift, this is a quick way to get some significant results.

A couple of months ago, I was frustrated with several academic journal websites which did not have the necessities of web 2.0 sharing features which can make their site useful to the new generation of scholars.  The suggestions I gave centered around adding “share this” or “add this” functionality that would allow site visitors to add a link to their delicious bookmarks, share it with their friends on facebook or twitter, or possibly send to a friend via email.

These changes are institutional and my message mostly fell on deaf ears. One did get back to me and asked if I could help them as part of their student volunteer staff. We’ll cover that in another article.

The problem of adding such functionality is that it can be a chore if the content itself is not ready for sharing. For example, PDFs are never good material to link to on facebook, because they won’t create a nice looking story feed item. Pages that don’t have images won’t look nice either. Apart from cosmetic errors which can be a hurdle to success in implementing these simple tools, time and effort are always a problem for busy organizations.

There is an easy solution provided by wibiya. They offer a way for anyone that publishes content to add an interactive web 2.0 toolbar which sits at the bottom of your webpage no matter where a user is on your site. Similar to the “Start” bar in Windows and the “Apple” bar in Mac OS, this utility is very useful.
Although it integrates with Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and any website well, the best feature I believe is in it’s ability to create a Facebook community.

What does Wibiya say about itself?

“Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.”

I hope you have time to evaluate if this is a useful tool for your organization. It could save you more time and money than you expect.

True Web developers are like superheroes with magic powers, at least to someone like me, who has only enough technical skills to make me dangerous.

So when we have an opening for a new superhero, I get very excited. When we have two openings, I get downright overwhelmed.

We’re looking for a couple of fantastic developers to join our team and help provide technical solutions to our clients.

Tech Lead / Consultant - The Technical Lead’s powers are experience and leadership.  He/she uses these powers to provide both objective technical analysis, as well as lead the implementation and integration of possible solutions. He/she also possesses the power to do hands-on programming as part of the project team.

Web Developer/Software Engineer with .NET – The developer’s powers are amazing .NET (C#) programming skills and a deep knowledge of Web technology.  He/she will use these powers to implement websites in various content management systems, create custom applications for the Web, integrate Web sites with other client back-end systems, consult with clients on available technologies and evaluate technology options.

To find out more about these positions, click on the “about us” link and go to “careers”.

So put your cape on and join Beaconfire.  Help our clients use technology to make an even greater impact in the world.

I’ll never get tired of saying this. The envelope please – Beaconfire just won four Web Marketing Association 2009 Web Awards including:

Free The Slaves, Outstanding Website
Share Our Strength, Non Profit Standard of Excellence
Wildlife Conservation Society, Non Profit Standard of Excellence

Huge thanks to all our project teams for the great work, and to our award-winning clients for being such Rockstars!

If you’re not busy on Saturday, why don’t you join one of the waterway clean up projects being organized by Ocean Conservancy?  On Saturday, Sept 19th people around the world will be pitching in, diving in, and helping clean up any body of water we can get our hands on (or near).  Last year teams around the world picked up 6.8 million pounds of trash which means that’s 6.8 million pounds less that’ll end up in our oceans.  Over 400,000 volunteers, 100 countries, and 42 states participated in last year’s worthwhile effort.

A Beaconfire crew will be joining the Ocean Conservancy team to work on the banks of the Anacostia River.  You can learn more about this international event (and sign up!) at www.oceanconservancy.org/icc

There’s no doubt that Google is the search engine for most of the Internet.  Over the past few years, the big G has taken almost all of the growth in the search business (90% according to the linked source). And when vendors speak of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), they are recommending practices that are tantamount to Google Engine Optimization.  And why not? Most website administrators looking at their search referrals can plainly see why that’s where to put your effort in.

With the recent agreement between Yahoo and Microsoft making MS Bing the search platform for all of Yahoo’s sites, there’s now a new wrinkle in the SEO game.  Take the two numbers in your referral logs for Bing and Yahoo, combine them together — big enough to matter now? Especially with MS pushing the technology everywhere it can?  Right now you’ll continue to have traffic from both Bing and Yahoo, but moving forward, most sites will only have to optimize for a single additional search engine in the #2 position — Bing.

If you decide Bing is worth watching, try out these tips on optimization.  Remember – SEO is always a bit of black magic rather than hared science, but the rewards can definitely be worth the effort.