MusTech.Net!

I’ve found a great new way to syndicate your blog and help drive targeted traffic to your site.  You can see it in action on the right side of my site http://www.mustech.net. It’s called Blog Rush.  Similiar to Sphere, which you can open by clicking on the Sphere link at the top of any my posts, it provides related information about topics that would be of interest to you readers.  Like Blogmad and BlogExplosion it builds upon the concept of link exchanges.  Blog Rush will list the name of your post and create a clickable link back to your site in a nice looking widget.

I am very excited about this free possibility as it builds upon people who link from your site or use your Blog Rush I.D. … the earlier you get this up and running the more effective it will be for you as it will target more traffic on those that join from your link.  It’s one of the easiest and potentially most effective tools I’ve seen in a while for syndicating your information and pulling in related posts from others.   I don’t have a complete picture of it yet (time will tell if it is effective) as it will not start tracking my stats for another 12 hours or so, but I wanted to let all of you bloggers know about it as early as possible in case it does provide to be a worthwhile endeavor.  This may turn out to be a “must have” for bloggers or it may turn out to be a lot of hype…  I’m thinking it will turn out to be of some help for bloggers, especially for those that have low to moderate traffic.

It is very hard to get the information on our blogs out to the “world” and this looks like it has great potential, especially if it targets similar blog postings to our sites.  It includes a tracker as well so you can see if it is working.  Blog Rush integrates well on WordPress and as it is java based, most likely will work on any blog or web platform.  My advice, if you have a blog, try it …the sooner the better.  If if it doesn’t pan out in a month or so… well, remove the widget! No harm, no foul.

If you are looking for more SEO articles to help your blog, check out these ones from our site here.

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Wow, here is an electronic gadget that I would have never thought… The wind-up, portable, super duper, EMP-MX71 Eco Media Player:

This little guy has 2GB (or 1 GB, reports vary) of Ram built in and a slot for a SD card.  It can play mp3, mp4, avi, wmv and mpg files.  1 minute of cranking provides 40 minutes of operational time and power (you can charge your cell phone from it)!  It includes a FM Radio (able to record FM broadcasts), stereo in line jack, voice recorder, photo viewer and USB port for quick charging and transferring files.

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I’ve been using Flickr quite a bit lately.  I’ve decided to use it as the core online photo service for distributing our marching band photos to everyone who wants them.  Flickr allows you to upload 100 megabytes of photos per month and share them with the world for free.  In addition, you can do amazing things with Flickr like share your photos through email or an RSS feed.  It’s the ease of use of Flickr that was the deciding factor in choosing them.

Here is an example of an embeded Flickr Stream of our band show at Carnegie Mellon today:




There are a number of great Wordpress plugins for Flickr as well.  Check out this great article from Mashable about 50+ Media related Wordpress plugins. 

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Understanding just how much a kilo-something, mega-this, giga-what or terra-anything is can be quite confusing.  In my classes, I’ve found, when talking about megabytes and gigabytes, using an illustration can be quite helpful.  Most new computers today have in excess of 1 gigabyte of memory installed and today’s newest hard drives are terabytes in size (raid devices -in the petabytes!). 

In order to better understand the immensity of these numbers, I’ve made a comparison sheet using distance and the thickness of a standard CD as an example.  I hope you find it entertaining, if not mind-boggling!

FYI- the prefixes, in order from smallest to largest, are: deca, hecto, kilo, mega, giga, terra, peta, exa, zeta, yotta…yotta, yotta!

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The thickness of a CD is approximately 1.2 mm or .048 inches. 

[Not a stack] 1 CD  = 1.2 mm or .048 inches.
Not much to see here; look at one on your desk

[Decastack] 10 CDs stacked = 12mm or .48 inches
Almost ½ of an inch!
 
[Hectostack] 100 CDs stacked = 120mm or 4.8 inches
You’ve seen this many in spools on shelves in stores

[Kilostack] 1,000 CDs = 1,200mm or 48 inches
As tall as the average 5-6 year old

[Megastack] 1,000,000 CDs = 1,200,000mm or 47,244.1 inches
3,937 feet, ¾ of a mile long

[Gigastack] 1,000,000,000 CDs = 745 miles
The distance from NYC to Chicago -less 50 miles

[Terrastack] 1,000,000,000,000 CDs = 745,645 miles
Over three times the distance from the Earth to the Moon

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