Today is the last day that I’ll be working until after the holiday, so I’ve spent the day exchanging gifts and listening to Christmas music as I’ve worked. I also did some decorating this weekend, and wrapped a ton of presents, which means that things are very festive here at Pure Incubation. (Of course the decorating was minimal, because when your apartment is your office and you live in your office, well, there isn’t much room for too many decorations!)

One item that I did pull out was an awesome nativity set that I got from my friend Maria a couple of years back. I have looked for this set online multiple times because I have gotten so many compliments on it, but have never found it anywhere. You can’t really tell from the picture, but the characters are tiny, only about an inch tall each.

Cara also sent me a link to some really cool nativity sets from around the world, and I thought I would share some of my favorites here.

I hope that all of you have a wonderful holiday season. I’ll be back at the end of December!

From Mexico

Peru Nativity

From Haiti

Nativity from Honduras

I realize that the online holiday shopping season is drawing to a close, but I thought I would share these three money-saving tips that I discovered this year when shopping online. I hope that they will save you some cash. Oh, and if you have any other online shopping, money-saving tips, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks!

1. Group a lot of items into one order to take advantage of the free shipping deal. I hate paying shipping costs. Paying for shipping is actually the only reason that I do ANY of my shopping at the malls these days – I just can’t bear to pay $20 in shipping for my $20 item. A lot of sites offer free shipping for orders over a certain amount. Amazon.com (my favorite online retailer) offers free shipping for orders over $25. Crate and Barrel has free shipping on orders over $100. If you group a lot of items together and buy them all from one place, the shipping charges are erased.

2. Comparison shop using awesome online tools. There are a number of shopping sites that will allow you to comparison shop if you know what you want, but not necessarily where you want to buy it. For example, I bought Chris (my husband) a Ray Allen Celtics t-shirt for Christmas. To find the best price, I used a number of sites to compare prices. I looked up Ray Allen t-shirt on Amazon, I checked out prices on Google Product Search (which used to be called Froogle), and BizRate, which is an online shopping comparison tool. This not only let me get a quick look at all the various styles of shirts, but it also let me find the price that fit my budget. (Don’t worry, I can write this with no fear of Chris seeing it because he doesn’t read my blog. If you know him, please feel free to give him a hard time about this fact when you see him next, as long as it’s after Christmas!)

3. Make sure you do a search to find coupons. I’m not a big coupon clipper. Don’t get me wrong, I love when I have a coupon. But it’s rare that I take the time to pour through ads to find a coupon for something I might be buying at some possible time in the future. I am, however, a huge user of online coupons.

I was turned onto the online coupon tactic through buying domain names. I always register my domain names through GoDaddy.com, and it has a perpetual coupon (code: OYH3) that lets me buy .com domain names for $2.50 off. Since my company owns almost 400 domain names, you can see why this cost-savings is appealing.

UPDATE: The “perpetual” GoDaddy.com coupon is no longer working! So try this one: OYH7. Although if this doesn’t work, make sure that you search Google for “GoDaddy coupons” before buying. (Hat tip: @longest)

This year, I tried out this tactic with online shopping. Online coupon hunting doesn’t have a 100% success rate – sometimes I could find a coupon, and sometimes I couldn’t. But if you do find a coupon that works, it will be worth the time you spent looking. There are many sites that are dedicated to online coupons (Coupons.com, CouponCabin and CoolSavings are just some of them). But I prefer to use Google and type in my search, such as “Coldwater Creek Coupon.” In that real-life example, I found a coupon that saved me 40% off my entire order, which was as good as $20 in my pocket.

Happy shopping!

I can’t emphasize this enough – if you are a professional, if you need to market anything, if you know anyone who is on Twitter, if you have a business or work for a company, if you use the Internet, GO AND SIGN UP FOR TWITTER TODAY. Here’s the link: https://twitter.com/signup

Just do it. Stop hesitating. Sign up now.

Twitter takes awhile to understand. So you need to get started today. If you use Facebook, it won’t take you too long to catch on – it’s just like the “Status updates” that you’re used to writing and reading from your friends every day. (By the way, if you’re not on Facebook, SIGN UP NOW!)

More and more companies are using Twitter. Dell just announced that it made $1 million dollars using Twitter. Politicians are using the site. So are celebrities and musicians and sports stars. They are talking about it on Fox Business and my brother and husband both have accounts. Santa can be tracked using Twitter. Twitter is moving from the early-adopter crowd to mass adoption and the earlier you start to use the service and understand it, the better off you’ll be.

When I started using Twitter in October 2007, I wasn’t sure that it would catch on. But adoption is skyrocketing (see the graph below from Compete.com). Even if you don’t like Twitter or use it all the time, it will help you in your work if you understand what the service is and how to use it. The only way to truly understand Twitter is to get an account.

Just compare Twitter’s growth (above) to Facebook’s (below). Facebook has more total unique visitors, but the growth its growth slope is slower. And considering that many people who use Twitter never visit Twitter.com (instead using clients such as TweetDeck to follow the conversation), it’s likely that the chart UNDER-emphasizes Twitter’s growth.

You must be part of the conversation, and to do that, you have to be on Twitter. So join today.

Follow me on Twitter here: http://twitter.com/mchang16

UPDATE: I just saw Robert Scoble’s “thought for the morning” and realize that he’s totally right. Twitter is big, but Facebook is getting massive.

I give a lot of attention to performance-based advertising formats such as search and lead generation. While I’m bullish on both at all times, I especially think that they are easier to buy and defend in a bad economy. Today Fred Wilson over at A VC wrote this post about a comScore white paper that described the lift that is generated by display advertising (banners). This article is definitely worth a read.

Banners definitely provide a positive benefit for advertisers. (And this research certainly proves it.) Like television, billboards and radio advertising, they defintely promote brand awareness, and, based on this study, a lift in sales. But the issue still remains that without a research study like this one running to measure the effectiveness of a specific banner, it is impossible to measure its ROI. And in this economy, it doesn’t matter how many studies like these are released, marketers are going to be looking for 1-to-1, measurable ROI.

Photo by Travis Isaacs

Too bad print publications and local newspapers are in such rough shape. This was in my local paper today and I would hate to see such wonderful tidbits lost forever.

Peabody police report
A Jennifer Lane resident reported to police at 12:17 p.m. that a man wearing black and purple knocked on his door, then ran around to the backyard. Police said the suspicious person was an employee of FedEx and was dropping off a package.

We’ve been listening to Christmas tunes this week in the office, primarily tuning into a local FM radio station’s online stream (Oldies 103.3). What plays is exactly the same thing that plays on the radio station, same music, same commentary, same ads. There is also a browser window that pops up with the radio player, and that window is surrounded by ads.

For anyone that listens to music online using some of the services that were created specifically for an Internet audience (Pandora, for example), where music streams continuously, is not interrupted by advertising and allows for greater control and customization over what plays, this type of online music experience is very rudimentary. The AM and FM stations that are broadcasting over the Internet (at least the ones that I have experienced) have not done anything to adopt any Internet or performance-based revenue models. And in this, they have missed a huge opportunity.

Pandora and other Internet-only radio services are burdened by a royalty structure that, until earlier this year, AM and FM stations didn’t face. According to an article from the Washington Post:

“Royalties for Internet radio differ greatly from its satellite and terrestrial counterparts. Internet companies 0.000762 of a cent per song, per listener. Satellite radio companies pay a percentage of their revenue. Under copyright laws, land-based radio stations, traditional AM and FM radio, pay nothing.”

But the radio stations, even with this freedom, did not take advantage of the shift in media dollars to performance-based models. Now that they will also have to pay royalties for online play, I believe that they will live to regret their lack of innovation when they had the chance.

I spent the morning at a doctor’s appointment with my sister-in-law Michele and my niece Willow. Michele asked if I could tag along because the appointment was far from home in an unfamiliar location and my brother couldn’t make it to help navigate. I love that my job allows me the flexibility to do things like this. Things like spending time with Willow and watching her grow up; things like taking tennis lessons during the day, which I did two mornings a week this past summer.

Granted, it’s easy to have this type of flexible schedule when your job is at the company that you own. It’s even easier when you’re the only employee and there’s no one else around. But to me, it seems like offering flex-time – especially in a start-up environment (if the business model allows for it) – is no longer a nice-to-have benefit, but an absolute requirement. What do you think?

Photo by Ford Motor Company

I joined Twitter for the first time in October 2007. My journey using the tool hasn’t always been smooth, as I’ve documented here, here and here. But over time, Twitter has become increasingly useful to me in my business and personal life. Last week, I started using TweetDeck, thanks to a recommendation from @jmeserve, and it has changed my Twitter life.

TweetDeck provides a clean and easy-to-use interface that allows me to read the stream of posts from my followers, as well as to monitor my @replies and direct messages all in one pane. More importantly, TweetDeck also allows me to create sub-groups of followers that I want to monitor differently (or more closely). This was a problem that I originally tried to solve by creating a second Twitter account, but I like TweetDeck’s solution so much better. Perhaps the coolest feature of TweetDeck is the TwitScoop interface, which shows me “what’s buzzing right now” using a tag cloud that highlights the topics that are getting the most buzz on Twitter at any given moment. Today I found out about the Chicago Tribune filing for bankruptcy, the fighter jet crash in San Diego, and the new Blackbird browser all from using this feature.

The best thing about TweetDeck, however, is how quickly it has made me more effective at using Twitter. Just today, I spotted a post from @garyvee in real-time, responded quickly, and got a fantastic plug back that resulted in 100 new followers in about 10 minutes. (See the string of messages, along with a screenshot of the interface below.)

Moral of the story? TweetDeck is a powerful business tool, and I highly recommend it. If you’re not using Twitter yet, get started today here and follow me at @mchang16.

And here’s the screen of TweetDeck – it’s a bit hard to see because the screenshot shrunk when it was posted, but the first column is the full feed of all the people I follow, the second column is my “must reads,” the third column is the TwitScoop and off to the right is my @replies.

A fun side benefit of publishing a blog and writing stories for international publications is that I occasionally come across an article I wrote that has been translated into another language. Today I discovered this article, published in Spanish, which came from my original article “10 reasons entrepreneurs should take more vacations.”

This led me to check out some online translation services to compare how they work head to head. I also asked someone who has a rough understanding of Spanish, but isn’t necessarily fluent in the language, to do a translation. The tools: Babel Fish, Google Translate and Free Translation Online (from Smartlink Corporation). Human translator: jack-of-all-trades co-worker, Cara Smith.

(One caveat – since I’m translating the Spanish translation back to English with this effort, it assumes that the Spanish translation was correct in the first place.)

Excerpt 1:

Original - It’s been a long time since you’ve been on a vacation. Admit it – when’s the last time that you took a vacation? A real one. A work trip doesn’t count. If it’s been longer than 6 months, it’s time.

Spanish Translation – Hace tiempo que no te tomas unas vacaciones. Probablemente haga más de 6 meses desde tus últimas vacaciones (los viajes por trabajo no cuentan). Si hace más de 10 meses que no sales de vacaciones… estás en problemas!

Babel Fish – For a long time you have not been taking vacations. Probably it does more than 6 months from your last vacations (the trips by work do not count). If it does more than 10 months that go out on vacations… you are not in problems!

Google Translate – Not long ago that you take a vacation. Probably make more than 6 months from your last vacation (travel for work do not count). If more than 10 months that sales did not leave … you’re in trouble!

Free Online Translation – Some time ago that you do not take a few vacation. Probably do more than 6 months from your last vacation (the trips for work do not count). If more than 10 months you do not go out of vacation … you are in problems!

Human – It’s been a long time since you took a vacation. Probably it’s been 6 months since your last vacation (the work trips don’t count). If it’s been more than 10 months since your last vacation…that’s a problem.

Excerpt 2:

Original - It’s helpful to remind yourself why you’re working so hard. Most of us aren’t working our butts off for nothing. There is usually a dream, a goal, a vision to come at the end of it. For me, I want to be able to travel. So taking periodic vacations reminds me why I’m doing all of this.

Spanish translation - Te ayudará a recordar porque trabajas tan duro. Todos luchamos por uno o varios objetivos y unas vacaciones es el mejor método para recordarte ese porqué.

Babel Fish – It will help you to remember because you work so hard. All we fought by one or several objectives and vacations are the best method for recordarte that because.

Google Translate - Will help you remember because you work so hard. All are fighting for one or more goals and a vacation is the best method for this remind you why.

Free Online Translation - He will help you to remember because you work so hardly. We all fight for one or several targets and the best method is a few vacation to remind to you this porqué.

Human – It helps you remember why you work so hard. Everyone fights for one or various objectives and a vacation is the best method to remember that because (missing a reason here…)

Excerpt 3:

Original - Vacations are fun. At least, they should be. And if a vacation isn’t fun to you, do something that is. The point is, you need to lighten up sometimes, have a little fun, laugh, joke around, remember that everything isn’t serious and at the point of imminent collapse (which is how entrepreneurs usually feel).

Spanish translation - Las vacaciones son divertidas…. ¿Acaso la vida no está para disfrutarla?

Babel Fish - The vacations are funny…. Perhaps the life is not for enjoying it?

Google Translate – Holidays are fun …. Does life is not to enjoy?

Free Online Translation - The vacation is entertained …. Perhaps is not the life to enjoy it?

Human - Vacations are fun. Isn’t life for enjoyment?

To me, it looks like the human with moderate Spanish skills won, hands down. But if you aren’t lucky enough to sit 3 feet away from someone who is willing to indulge your translation needs, I would go with Google Translate. At least in Spanish-to-English translation, with these examples, it had a slight advantage.

Since I’m already this deep into the experiment, here’s one more test. This time, I entered the original text into the English-to-Spanish translation tool, then entered the Spanish result into the Spanish-to-English translation tool to see what would happen.

Original: It’s been a long time since you’ve been on a vacation. Admit it – when’s the last time that you took a vacation? A real one. A work trip doesn’t count. If it’s been longer than 6 months, it’s time.

Spanish translation: Ha sido un rato largo puesto que usted ha estado en vacaciones. ¿Admítalo – cuándo la vez última que usted tardó vacaciones? Verdadero. Un viaje del trabajo no cuenta. Si ha sido más largo de 6 meses, es tiempo.

Back to English: He has been awhile long since you have been in vacations. Admítalo – when the last time that you took vacations? True. A trip of the work does not count. If he has been longer of 6 months, is time.

Original: It’s been a long time since you’ve been on a vacation. Admit it – when’s the last time that you took a vacation? A real one. A work trip doesn’t count. If it’s been longer than 6 months, it’s time.

Spanish translation: Ha sido un largo tiempo desde que ha sido en unas vacaciones. Admítelo – cuando es la última vez que se tomó unas vacaciones? Un verdadero uno. Un viaje de trabajo no cuenta. Si han pasado más de 6 meses, es el momento.

Original: It’s been a long time since you’ve been on a vacation. Admit it – when’s the last time that you took a vacation? A real one. A work trip doesn’t count. If it’s been longer than 6 months, it’s time.

Spanish translation: Esto ha sido mucho tiempo ya que usted ha sido durante unas vacaciones. ¿Admítalo – cuándo es la vez pasada que usted tomó unas vacaciones? Verdadero uno. Un viaje de trabajo no cuenta. Si ha sido más largo que 6 meses, esto es el tiempo.

Back to English: This has been a lot of time since you have been during a few vacation. It admit – when it is the past time that you took a few vacation? Real one. A trip of work does not count. If it has been longer than 6 months, this is the time.

The results of this second experiment are too close to call. But since I’m not strong in languages (ask me sometime about my experience taking Japanese in college), I’m thankful for each of these online translation tools. And of course, for Cara.

Photo by twinkletoez

I am not a huge fan of Digg, but I occasionally watch the online show Diggnation, and I got this idea from a story that they profiled a couple of weeks back. The background to the story is this – when you start typing a term into the search box on Google, a feature called Google Suggest displays suggestions about what you might be trying to type. According to Google, this functionality uses an algorithm to predict the queries that users are most likely to want to see, and does not base the suggestions on a user’s personal search history.

The story that was profiled on Diggnation was about someone who typed in a bunch of terms and took screenshots of the results. What he found was very interesting. To just pick one example – for the expression “Is it safe to…” the results were: look at a lunar eclipse, travel to kenya, reuse the same water bottle over and over, fly when pregnant, paint while pregnant, travel to Israel, travel to Cuba, tan while pregnant, and eat snow. Check out the full list here.

It occurred to me that I could use this tool for research, to help me determine general consumer interest in a topic as well as search term popularity. (The screenshot below is from a search I did to help me gauge interest in various terms for the Orthopedic Product Guide.)

There are other ways to use this tool, as well. The guys on Diggnation did a competition to see how many letters it took for each of their names to be suggested. (They tied.) I played along – but am sad to admit that my name was never even suggested.