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It's time to turn the Internet industry on its head and take control of our own data.  Google has essentially gotten where it is today by copyright piracy of every Webpage it's spiders could get their legs on, and piracy of our intellectual property – the usage data we create as we interact online.

I advocate total self-control and self-management of all our intellectual property, which includes our content and all our usage data – every single click and keystroke – where we decide who uses it and how much we want them to pay us to use it.

We might need to employ newly established agencies to help us manage our valuable intellectual property, but they would be agencies who work for us as individuals and help us control who accesses us with their marketing, who accesses our information, content and data and what price they should pay us to use what we create.

The current paradigm allows piracy offences in orders of magnitude greater than the piracy the general public is accused of perpetrating against the record and movie industries.

Until that changes, along with new citizen-focused laws designed to protect us from such blatant piracy, I suggest keeping as much of your own content as you can on your own hard-drives or servers, under your own protection and control.  Or at least get yourself a great publishing deal!

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/googles-drive-to-dominate-your-digital-life-20120425-1xk41.html#ixzz1t21MjJyp

The Internet is increasingly becoming the predominant place for marketing and public relations (PR) to be conducted.

In the networked world, everything is in the public space, so everything is publicity – good and bad.  The role of Online PR is to maximise positive publicity, minimise negative publicity, create a buzz and set up a business to attract interest from journalists, bloggers and ordinary Internet users.

Here is a great video about Online PR http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOzylUcfUeQ

Online Public Relations (Online PR) activities can involve:

• Blogging
• Activity in discussion boards
• Responding to negative comments and resolving issues
• Digital press releases
• News announcements on your Website
• Utilising online PR news wire services
• Writing articles
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Developing online networks
• Posting information on social media Websites
• Direct contact with journalists and bloggers
• Running competitions
• Initiating discussions and calling for responses to polls, surveys, articles or interviews
• Re-posting links
• Documenting all publicity received as news announcements and links on your Website

Benefits of Online PR:

• 
Generate publicity for your business, on- and off-line
• Build brand awareness
• Build your reputation
• Counteract any negativity about your business
• Increase traffic to your Website
• Establish yourself as an expert in your field
• Grow your business

Online PR is an exciting area of work, because the Web is constantly changing and evolving, with new opportunities and channels opening up all the time.  Traditional PR is still valid, but anyone who ignores or underestimates the value of the new media landscape does so at their own expense.

Do you want to sell something online?  Accept payments from customers and clients?  Operate an online store selling a range of products?  Welcome to the world of eCommerce.

Online shopping is a booming business – just think of eBay, Amazon and the hundreds of sites, big and small, that we all visit or know about.

There is a misconception that setting up an online shop is easy – mostly perpetuated by the companies who want you to use their shopping cart software.  Sure some software is relatively easy to set up, but an eCommerce project is a lot more than just the shopping cart.  Just like a real shop, there are countless considerations:

• Domain name
• Design and branding
• Layout
• Catalogue
• Features
• Currency
• Payment methods
• Payment gateways
• Security
• Hosting
• Choice of software
• Policies surrounding such things as refunds, privacy and delivery
• Suppliers and stock
• Quality control
• Order fulfilment and processing
• Website updating and maintenance
• Customer relationship management
• Marketing the business
• Competitiveness and size of your market
• Overall traffic levels of people searching for your type of product
• Copy writing
• Photography
• Postage and delivery
• And many more aspects too numerous to list.

Cyrius has been responsible for setting up a number of successful online stores, so we know everything that is involved.  To get your online shop up and running, you need to work with a company who can guide you, advise you and manage the entire production process to ensure it is a success.

What we do:

• Full assessment of your needs and goals
• Research your market
• Determine the right solution and budget
• Design the Website
• Produce the Website
• Market the Website
• Provide ongoing consultation on every aspect of the project and your business, to ensure your plans are realised

To get your eCommerce project up and running, or to rescue a project that has run in to trouble because it was not managed professionally from the beginning, contact us.

Well, the fireworks have all exploded, the champagne has stopped flowing and the sun has risen on 2012.  Pope Gregory XIII introduced our calendar in 1582 after making a few allowances for discrepancies around the fact that an Earth year does not divide exactly into a precise number of whole days.  With a few adjustments here and there, the years have been pretty much ticking over like clockwork ever since.

Regardless of the religious and ceremonial significance of various calendar dates, one year more than anything is a complete cycle of seasons, with New Year being near enough to the summer solstice for us southerners.  10 days either way doesn’t seem to stop us from reflecting back on the last 365 days it took to bring us back to where we started, facing the sun in the summer heat, enjoying some time off work, assessing the year that was and looking forward to another one.

2011 was a dynamic and exciting year at Cyrius Media Group.  It was also a year of consolidation, housekeeping and rationalisation, clearing a path for the future.  We had some significant achievements, challenges, hard work and a lot of fun.

Perhaps our two biggest achievements for the year were the launches of both the public Website and internal staff intranet (which they call their InfoNet) for the City of Ryde Council.  The public site was a huge collaborative effort between Council staff in various departments, including IT, Community Life and Records Management, the graphic design team at Spoonful Design (http://www.spoonfuldesign.com.au/), and our own people at Cyrius, particularly our senior Web programmer, Shawn Drew.  Council uses a Document Management System called TRIM, with an attached Web Content Management System called WCM.  XSLT is the language that WCM speaks and Shawn did a magnificent job in adding to his multilingual capabilities.

The Website is a huge part of Council’s communication and information delivery and customer service strategy – not to mention branding, event promotion and community relations – so there was a great deal to be asked of the system.  After much planning on the Council’s part, collaboration with the CMS developer and all the stakeholders, the site launched in June 2011.

Within days of the public Website launching, all hands were on deck to revamp the staff Intranet to the same standard, using the same system.  This project brought in more departments, including communications and customer service.  The InfoNet is an integral part of internal information management and facilitates access to documents and information that staff needs to deliver to the public.  The launch of the InfoNet was planned for the staff ‘Celebrate Success’ day.  We certainly all celebrated success when it went live that day!

2012 begins with the commencement of third in the trilogy – the City of Ryde Councillor Portal.  We are very much looking forward to bringing that in line with the other two city assets.

While all this Council work was being undertaken, we had a few other irons in the fire.  Throughout the year we launched about 6 other Websites and revamped or maintained many more.

The year ahead is certainly charged with both promise and uncertainty as we all participate in the great global experiment called modern civilization, enhanced with the Internet.  As we have seen recently, the Web challenges many nations to reform their politics and it challenges many others to collaborate on solving some of the big problems the world faces as population outstrips resource availability and financial systems feel the strain of having been set up before the world became so switched on.

Cyrius believes that the best thing that we can do is engage both locally and globally.  Global engagement means sharing the best ideas and best practice – ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’, as the TED Conference says – and local engagement means putting those ideas into practice on a level that is achievable.  Cities are the new unit of civilization, as our creative director discovered at the 2011 Asia Pacific Cities Summit in Brisbane.  They are small enough to be quantifiable, flexible enough to be able to adopt innovative solutions and approaches and with more and more of the world’s population living in more and more cities, once an idea is tried and proven in one city, it is easy to implement in every other city.  Sites like www.citymart.com and www.mindmixer.com are just the kind of catalysts for such change.

It’s an exciting time for anyone participating in the process and we are very much looking forward to doing what we can to help push things along.

Happy New Year!!

By Stefan Sojka

Can you believe that it is nearly Christmas – AGAIN??!!

Here we are half-way through November.  The Christmas decorations are up – the parties are being planned – and some have already been held!  Is it just me, or is time really speeding up?  We have a bunch of Websites on the go right now – and of course everyone wants everything finished before Christmas – so we can all sun ourselves on the beach, sipping cocktails, knowing that our Websites are working!

Fortunately we have a new Website building and management system, with Content Management, CRM, blog, news, FAQs, statistics, templates, newsletters – everything a business needs in a single Website to get up and running, attract new business and manage existing business really well.

So, yes, Christmas is fast approaching, but we are steadily working away on designing, building and managing a number of great new Websites, ready for a huge 2009.

By Stefan Sojka

We operate in an industry that is built on an incredibly complex array of technology.  One of the most frustrating aspects for us and our customers is just how many different opportunities there are for technology to go wrong – on or off-line – with computers.

There are literally thousands of links in any chain between people on the Internet – even inside a single computer!  There are dozens of service providers.  Some we know about:

• Your ISP
• Your domain name registrar
• The company who built your computer
• The company who built your Website visitor’s computer
• Your Web developer – us

…and some we don’t:

• The owner of the submarine cable or satellite
• ISP installation contractors
• Server maintenance company
• Domain name authority
• Browser software developer community
• International Internet standards bodies
• Network router suppliers, like Cisco Systems
• The list goes on and on.

Besides all of the above, a successful Internet experience depends on the people at either end of the exchange.  Here are some issues that can and do happen along the way:

• Sound is used, but the end user doesn’t have speakers
• Visitors to a Website run an ancient browser, so the site doesn’t display correctly for them
• People run security software with settings that disrupt even safe activity
• An ISP’s DNS server has issues, causing some sites to be inaccessible
• An ISP like Telstra can get a massive surge of Spam and slow everything down
• Software gets installed and causes a conflict
• Website hosting software gets upgraded and some functions stop working due to a different configuration
• This list also goes on and on!

Over the past 12 years we have seen it all.  One day we will probably write a book about it.  Suffice to say we have come to accept technological issues as part of day-to-day life in the computer world.

When things go wrong, we are often the first people to hear about it, even if it is not our fault.  Sometimes we are not informed, when we should be – as customers think that perhaps their ISP is to blame.

What we would like to say about all of this is that we hope you understand a little about the scope of the industry we are all participating in.  We hope you accept that it is in the very nature of something so complex that things will go wrong.

In saying this, we are always here to help.  If you need advice or are becoming frustrated with a technical issue or service issue, please let us know.  We might just be able to help you work out where the real problem lies and who the real culprit is.  Sometimes it is something we can fix.  At the very least we can point you in the right direction.

If after we investigate a problem, we find it is our fault, we are bound to sort it out for you at no charge.  If it turns out to be one of the other many links in the chain beyond our responsibility, we will either recommend a solution, or arrange to fix it for you.  In these cases, we will charge a service fee for our time.

As one of your business service providers, we are here to help you manage this very complicated maze of technology that impacts – and helps – your business.  Nobody likes the ‘issues’ part of the equation – it certainly doesn’t seem very productive.  However, by effectively managing these inevitable problems, we do get to enjoy the huge benefits of the technology for all the times things are running smoothly.

With your understanding and our support, we can all move forward in this exciting digital world.

By Stefan Sojka

Here are a few messages that come up in your Internet Site statistics, and a brief explanation of what they mean.  These are some of the 'hits' to a Web page that don't amount to a person viewing an actual page on your site.

Code 206 (Partial Content) means that only part of the file was transferred.  This error is generated when a user clicks the stop button on their browser while downloading a page, or aborts a file download while it is still downloading.

Code 301 – Moved Permanently – The requested data was found at a different URL to the one given.  301 usually occurs if a user entered the address of a directory instead of a specific file.

Code 304 – Not Modified – This does not really indicate an error, but rather indicates that the resource for the requested URL has not changed since last accessed or cached.

Code 404 – Not Found – Your Web server thinks that the HTTP data stream sent by the client (e.g. your Web browser) was correct, but simply can not provide the access to the resource specified by your URL.  This is equivalent to the 'return to sender – address unknown' response for conventional postal mail services.  This error is easily created if someone tries a URL with valid domain name but invalid page, e.g. http://www.ibm.com/aaaaaaaaa.html.

Code 500 – Internal Server Error – Your Web server encountered an unexpected condition that prevented it from fulfilling the request by the client (e.g. your Web browser or our CheckUpDown robot) for access to the requested URL.
This is a 'catch-all' error generated by your Web server.  Basically something has gone wrong, but the server cannot be more specific about the error condition in its response to the client.  In addition to the 500 error notified back to the client, the Web server should generate some kind of internal error log which gives more details of what went wrong.  It is up to the operators of your Web server site to locate and analyze these logs.

Feel free to Google any of these and other messages that you might receive, for more information.  All servers generate a bunch of these over time for all the above reasons.  If Code 500 happened a lot, there would be something to worry about.

The 404 message count in your stats can get large because it is likely that spammers and hackers run applications that look for possible files to attack, so they might run a script that looks for numerous files that your site might have – ones that have a statistically higher probability of having security vulnerabilities.  "submit_data.html" for example... or "log_in.html" that someone might have embedded the password into the page.  Since they try a few of these on millions of Websites, every site gets a certain amount of 404 messages.  The other reason could be people simply typing in the address wrong, though on our server we have a spell checker that automatically corrects all of these.

By Stefan Sojka

Dear Customer,

I have had a look at your newsletter and images.  There is a problem that needs fixing at your end to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

Whether you email a file or upload it, you have to ensure all files are optimised to be as small as possible.

5 Megabytes is usually the absolute limit, this is especially true for email but also can be true for Web uploads.

The reasons are because:

1) Australia’s Internet is very slow and expensive.
2) ISPs will often block emails with attachments with a combined size that exceeds 5MB.
3) Uploading to Websites takes too long and you might get time-outs.
4) People who either download or receive large emails are often on very slow connections and the emails and downloads will either take a very long time, or will time out and fail.
5) All of this is contrary to the way computers and technology is going, where large files are normal, especially photographs.  Your average phone these days is able to take photographs larger than 5MB.
6) Kevin Rudd really needs to get his “Broadband Revolution” happening as soon as possible! :-)

So, for anyone trying to run a club newsletter, Website, email list, etc, the most important thing at the moment is to know how to keep file sizes down, and to do that every single time.

If a photo is going to print, it is OK to be large, as print quality is better with a big file.  But that is only possible if you are taking the file to a printer on a disc.

If the newsletter is being emailed or uploaded you must convert the photos to screen resolution small files – i.e. 72dpi JPGs.  A typical 5MB photo might be able to be reduced to 30–40KB – even less.  Even a screen resolution newsletter will print fine on most people's domestic printers.

So you need to:
a) Prepare all photos BEFORE importing them into the newsletter.
b) Optimise the newsletter itself.  If you are using Adobe Acrobat to generate the PDF, it should give you options for screen resolution and file size optimisation.

That way, you will not have any more problems with file size.

You might also need to look at image file formats.  If you send people EPS files, then whatever program you use should also convert these to JPGs, if you intend to send them to end-users or upload them to the Website.  EPS files are usually for print industry or graphic designers to work with.

I hope this information helps you.

Since this is an urgent issue right now, we can solve this immediate problem for you if you want.  He is the fastest and the best.

He will:

a) Pull the newsletter apart and extract the images.
b) Optimise all the images in the screen size they need to be displayed.
c) Re-build the newsletter with the new images
d) Discover and fix any other potential issues with the PDF file.
e) Optimise the final file.
f) Upload it and email it back to you, ready for distribution.

We will charge accordingly for this work.  /hour + GST.  I can’t tell you exactly how long it will take, because we have to pull the file apart to see what is going on.  As a guide, it might take 1–1.5 hours.

Or maybe you could take the advice above and solve the problem yourself.

Please let me know if you would like us to solve this urgent issue.  Hopefully you can manage things better from now on.

Just to let you know the above advice and research I did looking into your problem is one of the services we usually charge for.  However, I am not charging for this, I am doing it in good will.  I want to see you running things more smoothly and with less stress :-)

Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Cheers,

Stefan

By Stefan Sojka

There is only one reason why Google has any money at all – businesses want to be found.  Sure they have other revenue streams now – like licensing out Google Earth – but without those AdWords, Google would be nothing.

Why does Google get so much money out of AdWords customers?  Because it works.  Businesses the world over are willing to pay Google for every click to their Web page from Google's 'sponsored links' panels, because they know that those clicks are qualified leads, which equals potential new business.  If it didn't work, they wouldn't do it.

Sure, some businesses do better than others.  If you sell items worth thousands of dollars and you are paying a dollar or two to attract a visitor to your site, then it is a drop in the ocean.  If you have small ticket items, you had better pray that every Pay-Per-Click visitor to your site has a high probability of becoming a paying customer.  Otherwise your profit margins are going to get squeezed rather tight.

Google has come up with a pretty elegant system.  It makes them squillions, but it also self-organises by operating on a bidding system.  Every single keyword and phrase in the known universe can be bid on, and the bidding reflects perfectly the popularity of the term and the willingness of Website owners to pay to be visited by people who searched for that term.

I did a quick calculation and discovered that Australian banks are willing to set aside a cool $5.1 million dollars a year (around $90 per click!) to appear as sponsored links under "mortgage".  If you think of all the related search terms, each big bank probably sets aside about $100 million dollars a year each for Google AdWords pay-per-click campaigns.  That is a guess, but I am probably not far off.  It kind of helps to explain how Google's share prices remain so high.  It's not just speculation – they are raking in cash every single day – hundreds of millions of dollars worth of cold hard cash.

So much for the level playing field in the "mortgage" search belt.

Cast your eyes away from the big ticket keywords, and you find a massive level of activity by smaller players.  All of them have realised that qualified traffic to their Website is worth big bucks.

Not everyone on-line is looking for a mortgage.  Some people are after plumbers, pest controllers, wedding videographers, wallpaper, rugs, toys, swaddling cloths – anything and everything that anyone else has got to offer, and some things that are not even available yet.  It would be interesting to know how many people in Australia are Googling to buy an electric car – even though none are available.

So the smart small businesses have realised that to grow in the Internet age, they need to be found.  They need Google.  Right now is a perfect time to get into not only Pay-Per-Click, but optimisation for the free (organic) search results.  After all there are only so many Websites on page one of Google for any search term.  It is the only place to be, really.

Cyrius Media Group helps people get found.  It's not easy and there are a whole lot of elements involved – not just in optimisation, but in making sure that if you pay Google to drive traffic your way, you need a Website that will turn those clickers into customers.  Right now people are cashing in big time on getting found.

It's going to get harder, and Google is going to have to re-think their system sooner or later.  Think about it.  Let's take signwriters.  There must be at least a couple of thousand of them in Australia.  How could every signwriter possibly expect to get a fair slice of the Google pie?  How could someone looking for a signwriter possibly expect that the first page of Google results is going to give them the quality service provider they need?  In a country town, they might search for "Signwriters Dubbo" and get only a few results, but in a big city the best signwriter might be a few suburbs away and Google can't help you find the right one very effectively.  Sooner rather than later the current Google model is going to start failing.

So what to do?

1) Make hay while the sun shines – get in there and get found.  Make your site worthy of being found, and your business worthy of being in business.

2) Be prepared for change.  Things change very fast on the Internet.  You need to be aware of what is going on, and plan strategies and tactics to ensure your business' viability no matter what happens.

Check out http://www.cyrius.com.au and get in touch with us to see what strategies we can implement for you.