Brad Brown

 
Twitter is a service where self-absorbed people (like me) send each other updates as to what we’re doing. For example:

BradBrownDotCom: “My pants are on - it’s time to get to work.”
Aquaman826: “Don’t forget your “Home of the Whopper” belt buckle.”

In the old days before the Intrawebs™ , the equivalent of Twitter was the party line, where you’d dial a number to talk to other losers. Twitter makes such despair more accessible to the masses, and with celebrity spokesman like Ashton Kutcher, it’s bound to become much more popular before it closes due to lack of revenue. Before Twitter disappears, I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon and review my most popular messages (called Tweets). Taken out of context, they’re quite funny, and I feel that I should win an award for my efforts.

If the swine flu gets me, I’ll leave my shark-mounted lasers to the Twitter community.
 
@RoseanneD - a man in a jean vest is 4 men short of the Village People.
 
I’m every woman (with a pot belly & a quick temper).
 
Somali pirates can’t swim.
 
Mounting the lasers on the sharks in an effort to surprise the Baptists while they’re at church.
 
Why is Gail King orange?
 
There’s a very fine line between shish kabobs and fajitas. I learned that yesterday when the kabobs fell apart.
 
If you decide to stalk me, send me a Hickory Farms gift pack with plenty of cheese. Thanks.
 
@MikeDoe - So what you’re saying is that the essential dating toolkit should contain is: Botox, Vodka, and Rohipnol. I’d buy that for a $ .
 
Medieval Times parking lot - 15 minutes - Ford Fiesta jousting. Many will enter, only one will survive.
 
BradBrownDotCom: Census? Will you be carrying a taser for self-defense?
Jebbica: - I’ll just beat potential rapists with my microcomputer.
 
It’s a trip how a programmer could switch so quick from wearin’ Dockers to smokin’ on chronic at picnics.
 
“Failure Coach” - that has a nice ring to it. I’ll see you at the Ramada Inn!
 
Sun visors and sexual assaults decrease with decreasing fraternity enrollment. I kid you not.
 
Why can’t Madonna adopt us all?
 
Who smokes the crack, who steals your snacks? Baby, it’s the guitar man!
 
Does Smokey Robinson have a glass eye? Or is he stoned?
 
Ain’t no party like a Twitter party cause a Twitter party don’t stop. If you see a young metrosexual Twittering, you gots to give him props
 
If I were an astronaut, I could be drinking Tang right now.
 
@pinkshepherd - your productivity astounds me. Are you high on meth?

Photo by Mat Honan

Hungry from a hard day at the chikin samich factory, BradBrownDotCom longingly eyes his tomcat’s drumsticks.
 
Sitting on the couch, just a thinkin’ bout my fitness.
 
@hrtsnlaserbeams - Wait till you get to the monkeys. Odds are one will be masturbating in public. Mark my word.
 
Recession-weary BradBrown.com outraged by smaller scoops at Baxin Robbins.
 
I thought that they were German, but to my surprise, we climbed aboard their taco-shaped UFO, and headed for the skies.
 
It makes my taco pop.
 
Chris Brown and Rihanna record a duet. I’m guessing “Killing Me Softly.” Thanks, I’ll be here all week.
 
The primary benefit of working at home is that if anyone goes nuts and starts shooting, it would just be me. Easy to defend against.
 
I’m going to wrap myself in bacon and assume a fetal position in front of the orphanage.
 
@marvlove - My advice is to panic and trample your co-workers - but use your own judgment.
 
Snapping into a Slim Jim.
 
If the government collapses and we do end up in the Thunderdome, you will know me by the trail of the dead. And my bowl haircut.
 
Christ! Without Blockbuster, there will be no place to get Richard Grieco or Shannon Tweed movies.
 
Remember: Together, we can’t make a difference. Let’s just move to the gulf coast and become shrimp fishermen.
 
The war on prosperity is bringing me down. Let’s quit and move to Costa Rica before China forecloses on us.
 
I think I’m unattractive enough to appear in a Rooms-To-Go commercial.
 
Ask your doctor if Brad Brown is right for you.
 
@ELROSS - You sure have a pretty mouth.
 
Reminiscing about seeing Randy “The Macho Man” Savage eat a bloomin’ onion at Outback in 96. Those are the memories I cherish the most.

 
As you can see, Twitter provides some of the most stimulating one-sided conversation you will find on the Intrawebs™. I highly encourage you to join today and follow your favorite celebrity wannabees, including me!

“The faster we kill the planet, the sooner Jesus will get here.” - Bob Mannseichner
 
“Shun the non-believer!” - The Unicorns
 
I was talking with my buddy Butch Michaels, of the Discovery Channel program “Butch Michaels’ Outdoors” [not to be confused with Brett Michaels of “It Burns When I Urinate”]. Butch mentioned that he had started using paper towels made with 80-percent post-consumer paper. This was quite an about-face from the guy I knew years ago. We spent the summers of our college years working for a medical waste disposal company in New Jersey, and we regularly emptied our trucks into the Atlantic. This wasn’t of our own volition; it was company policy!

Photo by Wonder Ferret

Butch and I both grew up, and I think we started to realize that although individual actions may not seem to amount to much, a combination of efforts from millions can lead to real change. Our conversation spurred me to ask myself, “What can we do as bloggers, besides spouting empty rhetoric, to help the environment?” It took me a while to think of substantive ideas, but once I did, they started spilling out of my tired, suburban head. I thought I’d share those ideas with you.
 

Use Darker Background Colors

The amount of power consumed by a CRT or LCD monitor is directly proportional to the intensity of color displayed, much the same way a higher wattage bulb is brighter than a lower wattage bulb. An LCD consumes anywhere between twenty-five and fifty watts of power. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume each one of your readers has a twenty-five watt 17″ LCD. The power consumption, per various background colors, is shown in the table below. All measurements were taken by monitoring the voltage and current of an Acer AL1716FB 17″ LCD using a Kill-A-Watt Electricity Usage Monitor.

Wattage versus Color Displayed

Watts	Color (hex value)
25.00	White (#FFFFFF)
23.12	Yellow (#FFFF00)
17.45	Purple (#CC99FF)
9.73	Light Blue (#3399FF)
4.21	Dark Blue (#330099)
1.20	Black (#000000)

 

As the chart shows, by using darker colors, you can decrease the amount of energy your readers consume when they read your pages. For instance, if you switch from a yellow background to a light blue background, you’ve just saved 13.39 watts per reader. By way of comparison, for every seven readers you have, you will save the equivalent of a one-hundred watt light bulb.
 

Purchase Carbon Offsets

A carbon offset is a financial instrument representing a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Let’s say that you drive a large SUV, and due to your lifestyle, there’s no way you could live without it. To assuage the guilt you feel, you can purchase carbon offsets as a way to reduce the overall worldwide carbon monoxide accumulation. The carbon offset represents an investment in an emissions reduction device, such as a tree or a windmill, in a more needy country such as China.
 
In the case of your blog, you can purchase offsets to reduce the carbon foot print of the server running your website, as well as to account for the pollution caused when that server is disposed of. The only way to completely eliminate the environmental damage caused by your blog is to quit blogging, and obviously, that’s not going to happen.
 
The one bit of advice I want to give you is to be careful where you purchase your offsets from. Most offsets are sold by companies owned by rich oilmen, so even though you’re saving the planet, you’re putting money in the pockets of those who are also destroying it. I recommend purchasing from the smaller companies with no ties to big business. For instance, I purchase my carbon offsets at an amazingly low price from a small company in Russia, whose primary goal is to replant trees in Chernobyl. Over time, the trees will purify the radioactive soil, and in theory, they can eliminate the radioactivity altogether (over hundreds of years). The hope is to make Chernobyl inhabitable again.

Photo by Mike Baird

Minimize the Use of YouTube

In the old days of the web, the only two things you could display on a web page were static images and text. Static images begat animated gifs, and animated gifs begat MPEGs and AVIs. Soon, video and animation were everywhere on the web. As a result, the processing power needed to browse the web has increased over time. Gone are the days when you could expect good web browsing performance out of your old 80286 processor PC.
 
Unfortunately, all this processing power comes with an environmental price. The greater the need for video, the greater the need for electricity to power the processors playing that video. Studies have shown a correlation between the increase in the complexity of websites over time, and the increase in the number of hydroelectric and coal plants built in the US. To stem the tide of newly-built power plants, we as a blogging community must band together and reduce the amount of video we display. I don’t think our readers would be missing much either; most of the videos I see on YouTube are either of scantily clad women, or skateboarding dogs. Video conservation ™ - it’s a win/win situation; in addition to reducing the electricity consumed by your users, you also increase the text they’re forced to read [hopefully articles of an educational nature].
 

Conclusion?

I hope you find these three tips helpful. Eventually, after you think about it, you too will come up with ways to reduce your blog’s carbon footprint. When you do, please share them with the BradBrown.com viewing audience. Together, we can make a difference.
 

Frequently Asked Questions

• Your blog is still pink. When are you switching to darker colors?
   
  As soon as the designer finishes with the new template, I’ll switch. Expect to see a change around mid-August.
   
• I can’t afford carbon offsets. What can I do?
   
  Buy a large bag of wildflower seed from your local garden supply. In the dead of night, throw this seed out onto the grassy median of your town’s busiest highway. The flowers that grow will absorb carbon dioxide, and provide a relaxing visual for morning commuters.
   
• You do realize that there is a difference between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide?
   
  Not really. I’m still busy figuring out the differences between tangerines and Clementines.

Last month, a retiring SEO friend of mine gave me the gift that keeps on giving - a database of AdSense statistics for about a thousand websites he managed. These sites are composed of about one-third “make money online” sites, one-third general blogs, and about one-third celebrity-gossip sites. Most of these sites had PageRanks ranging from 1 to 6, so they represent low to medium volume sites. While the sample set was not from a totally random selection of sites, I thought I’d scrub the data anyway to determine what display properties (size, color, etc) provided the greatest revenue. For this article, I show the relative significance of ad size relative to clicks.
 
The first table ranks ad sizes based on relative number of ad clicks for text and image ads. A rank of 1 represents the most number of clicks, and 12 represents the least. The results tend to validate the results I’ve seen elsewhere, with larger rectangles and leaderboards producing the best results.

Popularity versus Size for Text/Image Ads

Ranking	Ad Size
1	Medium Rectangle (300×250)
2	Large Rectangle (336×280)
3	Leaderboard (728×90)
4	Banner (468×60)
5	Half Banner (234×60)
6	Skyscraper (120×600)
7	Vertical Banner (120×240)
8	Button (125×125)
9	Wide Skyscraper (160×600)
10	Small Rectangle (180×150)
11	Small Square (200×200)
12	Square (250×250)

The next table ranks ad sizes based on relative number of ad clicks for link units. I haven’t seen many articles on link unit sizing, so I can’t compare my results with others.

Popularity versus Size for Link Units

Ranking	Ad Size
1	200×90
2	180×90
3	120×90
4	160×90
5	468×15
6	728×15

 

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why are you giving this information away for free?
    
   In the grand scheme of things, it’s of no use for me. Hopefully, in time, it’ll decrease the number of “How to Make Money with AdSense” spam emails I receive.
    
2. Do you have any information about ad placement?
    
   No, but my source for this data says that in general, placing the ad anywhere where it’s initially visible when the user first sees the site is best.
    
3. Can I have access to your dataset?
    
   Yes, just not immediately. One day in the distant future I’ll post a CSV file for you to download.
    
4. Will the same placement work for other programs like Amazon Associates?
    
   I would think so, given the assumption that clicks are based on size and no necessarily ad content.
    
5. Do you have hard numbers that weight the percent increase in clicks of one size over another, instead of the relative ranking which you’ve given?
    
   Yes, but I haven’t extracted that exact metric just yet.
    
6. Aren’t you worried that giving away this information will decrease the payment per click you receive for this site?
    
   BradBrown.com is more of a stream of consciousness exercise for fun rather than a profit center. The advertisements I do have do bring in good pizza money, so deceased revenue only means less binge eating and significant weight loss (look for my upcoming “How to Lose Weight And Revenue Via AdSense Placement” article).
    
7. Do you have any information on ad colors and their relation to clicks?
    
   I do have some and will publish that in the near future.