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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

There is a great campaign every February called "Feb-Fast", encouraging Australians to give up alcohol completely for one month.  Clearly it was inspired by someone who no doubt went a bit overboard during the silly season and thought it best to go into self-imposed rehab for a month.  They can't have been alone in their thinking, because Feb-Fast is now a very successful yearly charity drive. Click here for the Website and see for yourself.  They have celebrity ambassadors, a leader board of fundraisers and plenty of corporate sponsors – not a bad Website either!

I didn't drink too much over the silly season, but I did indulge in facebook way too much!  In my down-time, my facebook up-time was ramped up beyond acceptable levels.  This is partly due to the fact that, well, almost everyone I know is on there, so I thought I could hardly avoid going there if I want to stay in touch.  It is also because I was involved in a few creative projects and so I figured it was the best way to hook up with my collaborators.  I am not so sure now...

Using facebook to network and collaborate is not that efficient.  If you have built up too many ‘friends’, as I have done, you end up with an overwhelming stream of distracting posts ranging from fascinating videos and links to ridiculous images people really should have thought twice about before posting and way too many photos of dinner plates full of food.  On top of all that, there is a constant flow of alerts, not to mention chat requests, responses to old posts I had made and a never ending raft of facebook changes that I end up having to stay informed about.

In the end, the productivity I thought I was getting involved with became about 10% of the total time I was spending on there.

Remember, facebook, although it looks like it was set up for us to use, really exists for the benefit of the owners of the site.  Their policies and how the site develops is primarily driven by how they might maximise profits while not appearing to be pushing their luck with their audience.  This is why there have been so many controversies over the years.  What is good for us may not be good for them and vice versa.  In the end, public opinion might stop them getting carried away, but since they have so much control, they will always win (unless, of course, another site or another platform takes off).

Perhaps by taking a month off facebook, I might spend some time contemplating this.  Where is the Web going?  What is wrong with the way it works and how might it function better and more in line with the public good, rather than for the benefit of a select few?

Besides these grand questions, I just reckon it might be a good idea to give it a rest and find out what life is like without social media for a month.  Who knows what might happen with all that new found spare time?

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!!

Here is a link to an article which gives 10 ways to boost your online reputation.  We advise just these kinds of strategies to our clients, especially the ones with a specific goal to build their reputation.

http://mashable.com/2011/02/16/become-online-influencer/

It takes time, but if you plant enough of the right kind of seeds, you will generate the desired effect, especially if you are operating in a niche market.

Welcome back to work everyone!  We hope you had a great time over the silly season and the typically laid-back and relaxing January that follows.  Some people only managed a few days off, before getting stuck straight back into things in early January (usually tying up those pesky pre-Christmas loose ends).  The Australian tradition has always been that the year doesn’t really officially begin until we have all had a big barbecue on Australia Day!

So here we are, February 2011.  How are those New Year's resolutions holding up?  What about the big plans and schemes you hope to unfold as the year rolls out?  If you live in Queensland or Victoria, many of those plans might have been literally washed away – or perhaps the floods and other extreme weather have inspired you to commit even more strongly to your stated goals and ambitions, despite the setbacks.

Are you ready to start 2011?  Any projects in mind?  New Website?  Revamp the old Website?  Marketing your business in a new way?  Whatever you have in mind, start early... because you know things always take longer than you expect.  Have you put a plan together?  A to-do list, or mind-map?  What about considering the resources you might need, both in terms of budgets and materials, but also time and support from associates and suppliers?  From our experience, it is highly likely that you might be in need of a little support from someone who might have been on the journey that you are planning on embarking on.  We can help you sort out all your plans and ideas and start getting it into gear.

Here at Cyrius, we had a very interesting year last year, in our little Web design world, here in Sydney.  We took on some exciting and challenging projects, new clients and even managed to completely re-design and re-launch our own Website.  2011 looks to be the year where all that ground work last year might well have been preparing us for take-off.  We also scaled back in a few areas to make ourselves more flight-ready, allowing a few projects to be passed on to some of our associates, so that we could really concentrate on the ones we are passionate about.  Perhaps this is what you are planning on doing.  De-cluttering and simplifying, so you can really focus on what you want to do.  What better time to do this than right now, freshly into a new year and full of motivation!

Here's to the year ahead!

By Stefan Sojka

I just read this article about the Physics of Angry Birds in Wired Magazine on-line:  http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/physics-of-angry-birds/  It made me think about how such 'simple' looking games are programmed and the maths and geometry built in...

Programming is generally fairly unmathematical – sure, it may seem like a similar type of activity that similar types of people might perform, but without the maths component, programming is quite limited to instructions and functions devoid of physical behaviours – motion, shape and change over time...

The better a programmer understands maths as well as programming, the better the motion is going to be, which is why a lot of programs and games seem to have rather clunky motion... the programmer simply wasn't that good at maths.

Any good coder ought to have a pretty good maths qualification to complement their programming abilities.  Ask for their resume.  Look for the evidence of mathematical genius. :-)  We have used a couple of maths genius coders over the years – and it makes a huge difference to how their finished work turns out.  Everything is smoother, and their ability to get things done is far better than programmers who only learned programming code.

Most animation and video programs, such as Adobe After Effects or Flash have the ability to key in mathematical formulas, outside of their standard presets (which are largely mathematical in foundation as well).  Anyone who knows how to get in and tweak the formulas is going to have a whole new level of control and ability to perform what you might require.

Programming is powerful, but throw in some pure maths and you make magic happen.

By Stefan Sojka

About 13 years ago I made a big mistake.  I bought a PC.  There I was, a true Apple Mac devotee, surfing the net, making music, building Web pages and running my business, when it was time to upgrade.  At the time, Apple Macs were relatively quite expensive, compared to PCs, and a friend offered me a second-hand Pentium 90 for $500.  Compared to the three or four grand a new Mac was going to cost, I jumped at it.  I crossed to the dark side.

PCs are cobbled together Frankenstiens, built from a terrible collection of misfitting parts, all with different protocols, standards, compatibilities, etc.  And their operating system is one made by a man whose primary objective was not to make the best operating system in the world, rather to just get his operating system into as many computers in the world as he could.  Windows, an overlay to MSDOS, is a mess.  No wonder the 'blue screen of death' became such a well-known phenomenon.  Clunky, buggy, insecure... and that's just the software – the hardware – with all its associated third party software just adds exponentially to the complexity, and in turn, to the problems.

Since that fateful day of purchasing the PC, I have become a slave to the system.  Endless patches, upgrades, re-boots, blue screens, error messages, downtime – so much down time!  Not only that, but I was set on a path of never-ending spending on new bits and pieces.  My Apple was a single unit – the PC was a box full of junk, each piece of junk requiring replacement at regular intervals.

All of this is fine, if you are a boffin – boffins (nerds, geeks, whatever) love pulling things apart and replacing things.  They love the latest gadgetry – they even love it when things crash, because it gives them a chance to prove how much of a boffin they are as they join newsgroups and search technical documentation in their quest to resolve the problem.  I am not a boffin – I use computers because I want to get things done.

I might have saved three grand on that fateful day I bought my first PC, but I think over the last 13 years, I have probably wasted at least $100,000 in downtime, lost productivity, fees paid to boffins, lost focus (as I spend half my life talking to boffins) and my environmental footprint, with all the wasted junk I have bought, re-bought and thrown away, is about the size of King Kong.

It's time for me – and the world – to wake up.  We don't need PCs – we never did – Bill Gates only made us think we did – because he wanted to control the world.  PCs will always be poor imitations of real computers.  They will always be cobbled together, they will always be ever more complex as each operating system upgrade adds layer upon layer of disguise to try to look like an elegant machine.  All you get is a window to a vista of sophistry.

Looking forward I have decided to replace most of my PCs with Apples.  Apples are not perfect, by any measure, but at this point in time, their elegance, design, reliability, performance and productivity outstrips the PC.  Those funny adverts are true – that's why they work so well.  Microsoft are running scared.  The era of forcing people to bend to your will and hand over all their money for something that will give them more trouble than it's worth is over.  This is the Apple/Google era.  Software in clouds, not shrink-wrapped.  The Internet is complicated enough – managing our lives these days is hard work – the last thing we need is for the devices we use continuing to be the bane of our existence.

I'm switching back.  I'm going home.  Apples are good for you.

By Stefan Sojka

For those who don't wish to invest in the Internet but still want a small business Website that makes a lot of money...

This was a letter I wrote to a client who wanted to arrange a meeting to discuss the possibility of us building them a one-page Website for as cheap as possible – with the intention of having that Website bring in a whole lot of new business

Dear Prospect,

Hope you had a great weekend.

I am sorry to let you know that I can’t make the appointment today at 11.30.  We might make another time, but I need you to consider this email first.

I had a good think about it over the weekend and really we are a little outside the boundaries of the scope of work you said you were looking for at this time.  This being said, I think you might like to consider expanding that scope, with the following in mind:

We offer a much higher level of Internet marketing and development service which generally achieves excellent results for our clients.  Many of them have turned over $1 million and more as a direct result of the work we do.  The investment required to achieve these results these days is tiny in proportion to any other form of marketing/media.  However, the work is highly specialised, using a mix of senior developers, writers, search engine specialists, etc. and the costs to achieve the intended results necessitates us charging accordingly.

A typical investment for Internet marketing and business development might be $10K–$30K a year, and the work includes:

* Complete business assessment, covering all aspects of the business and the potential for growth
* Development of a detailed proposal, plan and quotation
* Design and development of initial Website, with complex programming devices designed to create new business
* Develop and implement a search engine marketing strategy
* Provide ongoing assessment of the results of the marketing efforts
* Modification of site and marketing strategy as results are analysed
* Ongoing consulting

The reason for all of this is because the landscape of the Internet has changed significantly in the last few years.  There is big potential for growth for any business, but it is a more complex and competitive space now.  It is no longer sufficient to put a page up and wait for the phone to start ringing.  Google is setting the pace and expecting people to pay for every click they receive to their Website.  They do offer some traffic through their free searches, but that is mostly limited to the top 5 or 10 sites.  So, one has to be a lot smarter and proactive, leveraging numerous marketing techniques, including Google’s own systems, to reap the financial gains offered by the Internet.

We can do this for you, but we can’t afford to do it without a reasonable allocation of budget to the project by the companies we work for.  The ones that realise this are benefiting greatly from our expertise.  The ones that don’t invest enough, idle along like everybody else.  It is costly work for us, with very high wages and other expenses (software, hardware, service providers, etc.), and we operate on minimal margins.  For those who are prepared to go the distance and budget accordingly, the rewards are there.

We have many success stories – all in proportion to the amount of in-house effort they put in and the amount they invested in our services.

I hope this explains things enough.  Please consider the fact that a reasonable budget would really benefit the business.  If so, I would be more than happy to set up a time later in the week for a full assessment of your needs.

Kind regards,

Stefan