The first scheduled Mashable Meetup followed only a month after the idea’s inception, with worldwide popularity. As a new interpretation of an old convention, the meetup has brought the online social media world back from the cloud to face-to-face interaction.

Come join the social media revolution at our Mashable Meetup, Thursday, August 12^th at Michael O’Tooles from 6-10pm. As a result of this event’s increasing popularity, we organized our Meetup to connect and support the Columbus social media community.

Marketing and technology professionals: enjoy drinks, food and lively conversation.

Get your ‘buzz’ on.

Unfortunately, now, when I hear the word Harvest, I think of our new time tracking system.  What a downer!

Ok, everyone who likes keeping track of their time yell, “I do!”

Did you hear that?  Deaf silence.  Let’s face it, nobody likes keeping track of their time.  So, why is it so important?

In any business that produces something, whether that be a house, a widget, a piece of software, or in our case, interactive media products; it is critical to know how much it costs to make. In accounting terms, this is called Cost of Goods Sold (COGS). This cost is particularly important to consider when you have multiple projects and various phases of each product.

In determining the true cost of a product or COGS, you may want to ask yourself these questions: Is this product really profitable?  Should we continue to make it?  Should the individual making this product be working on it, or is their skill set better at something else?  Is this product, or portion of this product, something we should continue to make in-house, or outsource? The list goes on and on.

In fact, my best evaluation tool for the financial performance of our company is detailed time tracking. This tool provides more accurate estimates of how long a product will take to produce, and accordingly, how much profit can be gained. Underestimations will lead to less profitability, and overestimations may alienate clients. Additionally, we use time tracking to categorize the products we make into the most and least profitable per hour spent. This is a tool is essential to track how we are doing now, and how to plan for the future. Without it, I simply cannot do my job.

My job is to make this company more profitable, and to do that, I need the compliance of my staff. So, what is the incentive for the one who has to deal with the egregious daily task of detailed time tracking?  Their incentive: Profit.

• Profit allows us to put a retirement plan into place and match 3% of your contribution.
• Profit allows us to add other benefits for you and your family.
• Profit allows us to say, “Hey, it’s Friday!  Let’s cut out early and go grab a beer.”
• Profit allows us to purchase new chairs and desks and perhaps a nicer office space.
• Profit pays for the party at Christmas time.
• Profit allows us to increase your salary, or pay bonuses.

Need I say more?

SEM (search engine marketing) is the effective use of on-site SEO and other techniques to promote and increase the traffic of a web site. You can exploit SEM by using techniques such as: articles, back links, forum postings, press releases, and online ads. SEM is not a one-time task; you continually need to update the site with new information and make sure it stays optimized for the search engines.

On the other hand, SEO is the process by which you make your site optimal for rankings by using things like: content, titles, headings, and keywords. In addition, it refers to making your site desirable to the search engine. SEO is not a one-time task, but rather an ongoing process where you add, update or change content on your website in order for the search engines to crawl and index your information.

SEM and SEO are long-term processes that complement each other. Success entails merging your marketing on other sites with optimizing your business’s own site in order to get higher rankings in the search engines. No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

Today, companies such as Google and Mozilla are creating new browsers that explicitly target many of the advanced techniques and languages; they can render pages and scripts quicker and more efficiently.  Google Chrome is leap-frogging the other browsers by almost becoming its own operating system, capable of very quickly running full applications, games and videos without the need of extra plugins.  This near-OS goal is quite evident when you open the embedded task manager.

All of this new power and capabilities is allowing web sites to become more then just plain text/informative sites; full applications are springing up all over the web.  This trend to create more dynamic and event-oriented site has been coined as the term ‘web 2.0′.

As a web developer, I often get requests from clients to convert their old informative sites to new web 2.0 -enabled sites.  One powerful tool in this conversion is what’s known as a javascript toolkit; the name is quite fitting.  A javascript toolkit is basically a toolkit with a set amount of tools provided to the programmer.  Just like with real toolkits, the contents and usefulness is quite diverse.  Some toolkits contain only simple scripts, allowing easy handling of currency or time, while others will provide an entire desktop experience, (literally).

One of the most simple toolkits is prototype.  This framework provides convenient access to the elements on a page for manipulation, such as hiding something, or changing some text.  This toolkit is rather limited in what it can do, but it is small and loads quickly into nearly any web application for immediate use; it can be considered a small but convenient toolbelt, something you can carry with you nearly anywhere.

ExtJS is another toolkit, but is on the opposite spectrum from prototype.  It has the capabilities to do almost anything, from simple number formatting to creating an entire desktop in your browser, literally!  RSS feeds, desktops, forums, moveable resizable windows, image galleries, there’s almost nothing this library can’t do; it can be considered an entire tool shed.  The drawback to all this functionality is its size.  The full compressed size is nearly 1MB, (excluding all the CSS and images required also), while the “debug” version is 2.5MB!  A staggering size given that most websites rarely exceed 300kB, images included.

A happy medium between a toolbelt and the entire tool shed would be the basic toolbox, big enough for most tasks, enough room to add more specialized tools if needed, and small enough to not be a burden.  A library that fits this bill is jQuery, (which is my personal favorite).

This library is actually split in two, the core and the UI part.  This allows you to choose if you want just easy manipulation of elements, or the additional goodies the UI provides.  In addition, the UI component is further customizable; you can build your own custom version of the toolkit, adding in only features and effects you want.  This helps keeps the size to a minimum, saving bandwidth and allowing your customers to see your content quicker.  The minified core weighs in at under 60kB, and the core UI ranges between 40kB up to about 200kB, depending on how many extras you add in.

One part of any good toolbox is the ability to add more specialty tools if they’re needed.  JQuery has a plethora of plugins and widgets that can be easily installed and used.  These allow you to quickly add rich and interactive content to virtually any website.

BlindAcre’s homepage provides a glimpse at some of the effects you can do with this library, including the scrolling content and rounded corners.  Calendars, dragable and sortable content, image zooming, fade in/out, and painless ajax calls are a few of the many things you can add to make your static site into a fully featured web 2.0 site. Most of this is done in as little as one line of code!

So if you have a website to build or maintain and haven’t experimented with the various  javascript toolboxes available, go ahead and check out a few.  If downloading and including them is too much work, Google has a solution for even that with their Ajax libraries API.  With 2 lines of code, you can tap into the speed and reliability of Google’s cloud by having the libraries loaded directly from it.  This saves you the bandwidth of serving the libraries yourself, and the trouble of downloading/uploading them to your server.

Top 10 Favorite Features of HootSuite

1. Track how many people click on the links you Tweet.
2. Pre-schedule your messages and Tweets.
3. It’s Free!
4. Manage multiple Twitter accounts or share your Twittering duties with friends or co-workers (no need to pass on the username and password when somebody else has to add a tweet)
5. There’s an App for that…and it has recently been improved!
6. Keyword tracking; enter up to three keywords or phrases to see what’s happening in your industry.
7. Easily customizable, user friendly and an intuitive layout.
8. Hootsuite has recently integrated WordPress.
9. Quickly and Easily update your Facebook status, Facebook Fan Pages, and/or LinkedIn status
10. It’s Free! Okay, so I know I already mentioned this, but who doesn’t like an excellent interface that is FREE?

I am very eager to see what the next simple and hassle-free features will include in HootSuite. Perhaps an App for the Droid Phone?