Articles

By Stefan Sojka

As my life becomes increasingly interwoven in a tangled web of networks, gaining a perspective of how I fit in has become my life’s mission.

Network science is very new.  Sure networks have been around forever, but no one really stopped to think about just how complicated and powerful network behaviour is, until the mid 90s when the Internet kind of shoved it in our faces.  Albert-László Barabási’s book ‘Linked – How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science and everyday life’ is an easily digestible summary of the Princeton Press scientific publication he co-wrote, “The Structure and Dynamics of Networks”.

The mathematics is staggering, describing how the simplest of connections and interactions can evolve structures and behaviours as phenomenal as our very own selves.  Individuals within a network need only perform the simplest of tasks to make this happen.  This is how civilizations, viral outbreaks and multinational corporations come to be.  Networks cause FaceBook, Beached Az, spam, Google, blogging and crowd-sourcing.

The more I think about it, the more embedded I seem to be.  So, it’s time to use these networks to my advantage.  The best thing I can do inside a network is to be active.  The simple tasks of emailing, clicking, posting, rating, linking and uploading are my means to participate.  My networks co-exist on- and off-line.  So here’s how it works and can work for you, if:

I join my local Rotary Club, a member invites me to join my local Chamber of Commerce, the local council holds a “Home-based Business Week” workshop and emails the Chamber asking if anyone would like to present.  I put my hand up.  At the talk, someone from NSW DSRD (Now Industry & Investment NSW) is there and invites me to speak at another event.  Someone at that event from the Department of Innovation invites me to a Hong Kong Trade and Development Council event in Sydney.  HKTDC asks if I would like to attend a trade show in Hong Kong, sponsored by AusTrade.  Much net­working ensued there.

Two months later.  I get a call from the Sydney Morning Herald asking me about my experience.  I get a decent sized article in the SMH business section.  Someone from Crikey.com.au calls me to ask how I do my PR and how I managed to get publicity in the SMH.  I tell them “it just happened because I work my network”.  They are intrigued and are interviewing me for an article about PR.  I will post that interview on my Website, along with all the other news stories about this chain of events.  I start popping up in Google for all kinds of searches because of all these activities.

I am now writing about all of this in this column, which I landed as a result of meeting the editor on a chat channel in 1995.  This column will become another news story on my Website.  Someone will read it and contact me about something.

And on it goes.  Such is the science, and behaviour of networks and what happens when I work them.

Perpetual promotion.  Try it for yourself.

By Stefan Sojka

Online advertising is booming.  The more people click, the more hungry business becomes for the eyeballs (and wallets) of the clickees.  This is the fattest cash cow on the planet.

I love Wikipedia – not only does it give me great info to fuel my column with excellent pages like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_advertising, but it is non-profit and has no advertising on it.  Unfortunately, commercial reality dictates that Wikipedia will remain an extremely rare species.  Our future is destined to be paved with clicks of gold.

Google is by far the biggest player, with about 70% of the total on-line ad market – which works out to be about 400 gazillion dollars, enough to etch their logo on the sun, send a team of programmers to Andromeda to explore new markets and save the Google Earth on google.org.  They are the biggest for good reason – their system is very good.  It gives advertisers more control than anybody else, more reach into huge search and content markets and an ever-improving delivery of relevant ads to Web users as they refine their system.  Google’s search behaviour statistics get cumulatively refined at a rate of a few billion facts a day.

Web users want to find stuff and businesses want to be found.  It’s the perfect scenario… in theory.  The truth is that there is still a long way to go before clicks and sales are perfectly in sync.  Anyone who has used advertising programs knows that only a small proportion of the original search traffic converts into sales – and when you are bidding for every click, that can get a little scary at times.

So here is a brief glossary of on-line advertising terms to help you maintain your sense of humour while things evolve:

Auto-Bidding – Letting two computers – yours and your competitor’s – play poker with your credit cards.

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) – How many people accidentally clicked on your advert.

Bounce Rate – How many people realised it was an accident and hit their back-button… AFTER you paid for their click.

Cost-Per-Click (CPC) – How desperate you and your competitors are for business.  (I once saw a CPC for search term “mortgage” at $180 – for ONE CLICK!)

Return on Investment (ROI) – Putting your credit card statement and cheque account statement side by side and seeing which is bigger.

Page Rank (PR) – Discovering how insignificant you are compared to Apple, YouTube and get.adobe.com/reader

The reality is that on-line advertising can work spectacularly well.  Inefficient as it might be at times, it is far more targeted than mass media.  It is getting ever more sophisticated, especially when you consider sites like FaceBook.  They know everything about you and can serve you an advert for “getting ripped in 4 weeks without exercise” the moment you update your status to “man, that all-you-can-eat buffet was awesome!”
Maybe it will all get too hard for small business, who simply can’t afford the rising click costs or the time to devote to learning the schemes and systems required to capitalise effectively on all this paid traffic.  Perhaps it’s time to get back to our marketing roots – old school.  A giant inflatable gorilla, a sandwich board and bullhorn!

By Stefan Sojka

Lately I have become fascinated with three things:

1. The recent discovery of hundreds of planets orbiting stars in our galaxy ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrasolar_planet )

2. Advances in understanding of life on the microscopic scale.  Watch this ( multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife.html ) and prepare to freak out when you realise this is going on inside you in 100 trillion different locations

3. Henry Markram’s Blue Brain project – an attempt to build a detailed, realistic computer model of the human brain                        ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS3wMC2BpxU )

I guess I am quite fortunate to be a member of the only species on earth capable of even beginning to comprehend the nature of the universe and to wonder about my place in it.

Here we sit, on the wafer thin surface of a tiny planet, after 4 billion years of evolution, where cellular life forms have tried and tried again to self-organise into the best co-operative self-perpetuating civilizations they can – without a brain between them.  Now our planet owns trillions of brains, including 6 billion big enough to organise the civilization we live in today.  Great apes, aping the same net­working capacity on a global scale that our cells have been using microscopically for eons.

Yet sometimes we seem so dumb.  We struggle in relationships, battle with each other and worry ourselves sick.  When are we going to ‘get it’?

If you ask me, it is when we finally surrender to the process.  Life got us to where we are, so it’s time we started living.  Whatever I am doing, wherever I find myself within society’s matrix, I really have no other choice but to try to be the best ‘me’ I can be.

As I take stock of the year that was and get set for the next orbit around the sun, it’s time for this revolution’s resolutions.  I am going to honour and obey my cellular civilization and I am going to maximise my contribution to human civilization.  In other words, I am going to be healthy and do good work.

And if you aren’t going to do the same, then get out of the way.  I am going to start choosing my clients, rather than letting them choose me.  If they aren’t operating at least on the same level as I do, ethically, I’m not going to let them drag me down.  I’m pursuing perpetual promotion.  Onwards and upwards.  Evolution and creation.  I’m stepping up and stepping out.  I’m not going to let evolution’s efforts to get me here be in vain and I sure don’t want to find out that there are civilizations living on those exoplanets more advanced than ours.  Aren’t we supposed to be a competitive race?

We’d better start working as a team.  In 2010, let’s all lift our game, raise our standards and spend each day on our human scale, using our microscopic inheritance to fulfill our cosmic calling.

In a galaxy, 4 billion light years from here, beings just like us might be observing an exoplanet we call ‘Earth’ preparing to come alive.  Closer to home, inside my own head, I can imagine this scenario …and feel pretty glad to be here.

By Stefan Sojka

As much as we can’t imagine life without computers now, for the entire history of humankind, up until the computer, one could hardly imagine life with one.  Everyone just got on with it.  Sydney Harbour Bridge was constructed with pencils and paper, slide rules and the occasional abacus.  The entire workforce was managed with ledgers, index cards and rubber stamps.  Workers were paid by cash and perhaps some of the bigger transactions were done with hand-written promissory notes.  Though typewriters and telephones were in use, most communication was surely face-to-face, or scrawled with fountain pens.

What’s my point?  That somehow everything still worked.  Huge projects, like hydro-electric schemes, subway systems and even the Opera House, with all its curvy complexity, were completed well before anyone “needed” a computer to get anything done.  Systems and networks existed, such as information and project management.  Most importantly; humans interacted with other humans, agreed, shook hands, signed contracts and made it happen.

We are being mesmerised into thinking that somehow it is only since the birth of ‘Web 2.0’ that we have had the ability to socially network.  We forget that before FaceBook, we had a little black book.  While computers and the Internet have certainly facilitated and amplified net­working to unfathomable scales, most real business is done in person.  Politicians might all use Blackberries and iPhones, but they haven’t moth-balled the two houses of parliament just yet.  Most offices still have board rooms.  Trade shows and Expos seem to be experiencing a boom right now.  Computers do make them far more efficient to organise, while at the same time, people are realising how awesome they are at generating new business and engaging with our peers.

Off-line net­working is one of my most valuable assets as a business.  Sure, I want to tip all my contacts into my email list, and refer people to my Website at any available opportunity, but I would be missing out on a huge opportunity if I didn’t work my real-world life as much as possible.

I joined my local Chamber of Commerce and my local Rotary Club.  I attend many business events, Expos, functions and launches.  Recently I joined a chapter of BNI, a hugely successful global network of business owners existing for the sole purpose of promoting word-of-mouth marketing.  Even though my business is very much focused on the Internet, I still like to meet my clients in person and work predominantly with in-house staff.  I am a people person.  Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer to engage face-to-face – at least until virtual reality evolves sufficiently into fooling my senses that I am in the same room as you – and that is still quite a long way off.

If I can work the world just like our forefathers did, then enhance all those engagements with Web technology, like collaboration tools, Web-based communication and marketing, I’ll be unstoppable.

By Stefan Sojka

I’m trying to work out exactly when the amount of information in my life permanently exceeded my capacity to ever realistically deal with it  It was probably some time in the 80s, when my discipline for cataloguing my cassette tapes slipped.  Not long after, I got my first computer and the 3.5” floppy discs started filling up shoeboxes.  Now, I have 9 computers, 12 terabytes of internal hard drives, thumb drives, pocket drives, Memory sticks, iPods, MiniDVs, SD cards, MiniDiscs, VHS tapes, DVDs and CDs – not to mention the filing cabinets stuffed with printed, flattened wood pulp and shelves full of half-read books, magazines and newsletters.

In January, I thought I would take two weeks to re-organise and re-name everything in “My Documents” in a New Year resolution attempt to stem the relentless eruption of data enveloping my rapidly unraveling existence.  I found 200,000 files!  I got through the first three folders (all beginning with ‘A’) before my two weeks was up.  I hadn’t even started on my email file, with 20,000 email addresses submerged within, the 3,000-plus Websites I bookmarked, hoping to visit them again or the instruction manuals for all the software I told myself I was going to master.

Biological evolution didn’t really see this coming – otherwise we would have evolved brains that could instantly expand and re-format in response to this information explosion, an elastic skull and cells that can retain our lifestyle data as efficiently and accurately as they retain our DNA.  The reality is we are only marginally smarter than orangutans.  While we haven’t changed much biologically for many thousands of years, our networks, civilizations, institutions and technologies have overpowered our individual mind’s capacity to cope.  We are drowning in our own life-stream.

All this social net­working hasn’t helped.  No Flickr account is going to store every photograph I own.  No YouTube channel could ever collate, manage and stream the thousands of hours of video in my possession.  No FaceBook page is going to organise and manage every person I have ever had anything to do with.  All these sites have done is added to my password collection and created more folders on my computer full of the files I wish I had the bandwidth to upload.  If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would deduce that social net­working sites have been promoted precisely so as to increase my inability to do anything about anything, snowed under as I already was before I signed up.  How can I affect change in the world when I can’t even get around to re-naming DSC128769.jpg to something meaningful?

Maybe it’s time to evolve in a different way – to a state of acceptance.  Give up hope of ever sorting it out.  Get ruthless and start deleting.  Reduce the torrent to a gentle stream, make a nice little list of the things to sort out that will truly make a difference in my life and work on that.  Let the rest just float on by.  It’s cassette cataloguing time!

By Stefan Sojka

It’s not as difficult as you might think to become an Internet superstar.  The Web is engineered precisely to facilitate such phenomena as FaceBook, YouTube and the ‘Evolution of Dance’ dude.  In this simple how-to guide, I’ll show you how it’s done.  The key is to be everywhere and do everything.  In a networked world, the one with the most nodes wins!

Remember Neo, in the Matrix?  Remember how he/you felt when he/you realised he/you were the one?  “That’s right”, grinned Morpheus.  This is your ‘I know Kung Fu’ moment.  You are the Internet, and the Internet is you.  Your DNA is the meme.  You’re unique, just like everybody else.

Have Geek Will Travel
You will need your own personal nerd.  The Web, for all its point-and-click convenience, is a ridiculously complex environment.  He/she will configure your server cloud, sync your mobile devices with your laptop and ensure your Websites are cross-browser compatible, fluid, elastic and WC3 compliant.

Arsenal
Rule-of-thumb:  If it was reviewed on Wired, TechCrunch or EnGadget, buy it.  Essentials include an HD video camera, podcasting microphone, iPhone, digital pen, electric car, pocket laser projector, Adobe Everything and a DJ console, so you can guest DJ at all your own launches and seminars.

Go Viral
The best way to permeate cyberspace is by infecting it.  I don’t care whether you wipe out on a skateboard or David Hassel-scoff a hamburger, what’s important is that the video is a calculated strategic element in your self-replicating pandemic.

Blog
Blog long.  Blog often.  With 112 million blogs, you do have to work hard.  Strategy is everything.  Post comments on the top 100 blogs with witty retorts and demoralising put-downs, always linking back to your own Blog.  Fear not, once the momentum of all your other activities kicks in, your archived ramblings will re-surface like the creature from the black lagoon.

Social Butterfly
Two mantras:  1. “Add Me” 2. “Thanks for the Add”.  Set targets – say 5,000 per day, per site.  Here is your starting point:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_net­working_websites.  Nurture every friendship, acknowledge everyone’s feelings and compliment their every photo upload.  This is your fan-base.  You are a one of their's.  It’s a 200-million-way street.  Drive it.

Authority
You are now an Internet marketing genius.  It’s time to share your knowledge.  www.squidoo.com makes it easy to build a soapbox and begin proselytising.  When you have posted enough material, go to www.lulu.com and self-publish your how-to book.

Life Stream
Upload your entire life to the Internet – and tag everything.  Quantity, not quality.  If you upload enough old photos, school reports, love letters and phone disconnection notices, you will come up on page one in Google for everything.

We live in a paradoxical universe.  Ubiquity is singularity.  If you are everywhere, you will be in one place – at the top!  ‘X’ marks the spot and you have the X-factor.  ‘Me, Star Wars Kid’, you ‘FailWhale’.  See you at the end – and on the cover – of 'Time'.

By Stefan Sojka

We all know the Internet is an excellent place to promote our business, read the news, do our banking, trade shares, make travel arrangements, upload baby photos, catch up with old school friends, steal music, watch porn and laugh at kittens — but how often do we stop and wonder whether the Web might actually be useful for something a little more beneficial to everyone, not just ourselves?

I have to admit that after a lifetime of being marketed to, I am as self-absorbed and hedonistic as anyone else in this post-modern, super-capitalistic world we live in.  But something lurking in the deeper recesses of my conscience had me yearning for a higher purpose, seeking to contribute to the common good, not just my primal urges.  Perhaps an even deeper primal urge had begun to surface – an urge to share, to co-operate, to work towards the improvement of this poor planet’s well-being and the well-being of every living thing on it.

I can hear the cynics among you saying “How selfish is that?  Of course, if you help the world, you are really benefiting yourself in the end.”  Marketing people take note of this elegant paradox.  Working toward the common good is, well, good.  Enter the new networked world of ideas.

The Internet is the perfect place to spread ideas.  Whether it is an opinion, a way of seeing things or some highly complex scientific breakthrough, the idea explodes through the Web like it does in our own mind.  Right now we need ideas more than ever – so praise the Flying Spaghetti Monster that memes, movements and methodologies are permeating every corner of cyberspace.

www.globalideasbank.org – pre-dates the Internet, but since launching on-line in 1995 has collected over 4,000 ideas.  Anything from ‘seed embedded fertilizer paper’ to ‘training barbers in the early detection of melanomas’, GIB is our planet’s suggestion box, and you are invited to pitch in.  Social enterprise is on the rise – get in on the ground floor.

www.openarchitecturenetwork.org – taking file sharing to the next level, architects are now uploading and making building plans available to the third world.  With a focus on affordability, sustainability and helping local communities, this excellent resource provides direct access to the world’s best architects to the world's remotest villages.  Ideas are literally popping up everywhere in the form of houses, schools, hospitals and community centres.

www.worldchanging.com – the domain name says it all really.  From political ideas to alternative power generation, this site is devoted to making a real difference.  Their philosophy is that most of the ideas already exist, it is just a matter of getting them going.  Sign up, print out a few pages, and march down to your local council right now.

www.bigthink.com – ‘We are what you think’ – This is like YouTube with a brain.  No 'LonelyGirl15' around here.  Experts and opinion leaders expound their viewpoints on all manner of topics.

www.longnow.org – 10,000 years is a long time…or is it?  Some of the Internet’s big guns – Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly and a bunch of others are building a 10,000-year clock, and re-configuring our human time-scale.  After all, we are all going to be someone’s ancestors, we may as well get used to it and start thinking about how we might be remembered.  Were we the ones who consumed ourselves into oblivion, or created ourselves into utopia?

www.ted.com – This famed festival of ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’ provides an endless stream of amazing ideas, breakthroughs, perspectives and inspiration.  There is a huge library of past presentations, from bio-mimicry to cosmology, computer origami to alternative energy, with a few comedy and musical presentations thrown in.  This is one of my favourite sites, and I am desperately squeezing my creative juices to come up with my own TED talk.  So far all I can come up with is a rather droll exploration of the delicate interplay between magazine deadlines, writing quality and editor wrath.

Any better ideas?

‘til next month…

By Stefan Sojka

As business owners and consumers, we’ve all been on both sides of the complaints discourse – the complainer and the complained about.  While I shudder at the thought of receiving a complaint, I know it’s the most valuable thing my business can receive.  Bring it on.  When it comes to making complaints, I’m not exactly in the ‘grumpy old man’ category – yet – but I certainly don’t hesitate to provide feedback if I think it will lead to my service provider making real improvements.

Thanks to the Web, the whole customer feedback loop is now in hyperdrive.  Word of mouse.  Disgruntled customers don’t just tell their friends, they tell the whole world.  Get used to it.  Be proactive and ask your customers for complaints so you can address them before one of them has a chance to set up www.yourbusinesssucks.com .  The Net is no place to hide from your shortcomings.

What started about 10 years ago with a few enterprising netizens using Web pages to get even with companies who did them wrong, is now a global consumer activist movement.  Consumers are empowered, businesses are held to account.  www.thesqueakywheel.com has a proven strategy of listing complaints and automatically emailing the company every time someone views the complaints page.  Naturally they have a very high success rate!  www.ripoffreport.com is another great site, as is www.complaints.com.

www.notgoodenough.org is home-grown and has a 54,000-strong membership base, actively discussing, reviewing and advising business and consumers on customer service.  If you end up on the ‘gripes’ list, all is not lost – just be sure to do something about it.

Choice www.choice.com.au has evolved fabulously from its print roots to become a formidable force.  A founding member of Consumers International way back in 1960 – www.consumersinternational.org – Choice is involved at every level, sitting on an incredible selection of boards and committees, promoting best practice, standards compliance, service and quality.  Of course the Choice Website has plenty of scope for user interaction, including nominating yourself for election to the board.

Customer complaints and comments can show up anywhere online, it’s scary.  You never know who is saying what and how deep any feelings run until you take a good hard Google at yourself.  Deep in a discussion board about ISPs and broadband has sprung up a thread about the pros and cons of BarterCard – forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/731669.html with a couple of hundred posts and many thousands of views.  This kind of stuff is happening everywhere about every business.  All the corporate marketing in the world can’t erase these opinions – it pays to find them and heed them.

Another Aussie site www.complaintline.com.au has a cool motto – “To complain is human… to get results is divine.”  One could complain that the site needs a graphic design once-over, but the content is excellent – covering 125 categories, suggestions on how to resolve issues amicably and support for businesses to better manage their complaints.

On the government front we are very fortunate in this country – The ACCC www.accc.gov.au and the Ombudsman www.comb.gov.au provide well funded top-level support, while every states’ Fair Trading department inform and encourage good complaints management and outcomes for all parties.  Just Google your state for more.

It’s a bit of a serious column this month, but I’m in the middle of some major business improvements myself, and my customers’ feedback was the major impetus for change.  With the silly season well and truly upon us, we all want that glow of satisfaction that business is good, and everybody loves us.  Any complaints?  Write to me!

By Stefan Sojka

Isn’t it just like the Internet to spawn yet another trend without anyone ever expecting it?  Microblogging is suddenly exploding out of a few simple lines of code the way SMS sat dormant in our mobile phones until someone looking for the calculator accidentally pressed the wrong button and discovered it.  Microblogging is SMS 2.0.  Texting on steroids.  Musings gone global.

The current beacon of microblogging is Twitter www.twitter.com.  What started as a sideline dabble by San Francisco start-up ‘Obvious’, has grown so fast that its error message when overloaded – the ‘Fail Whale’ – www.failwhale.com – has become a cult hero.  Venture capitalists have been pouring tens of millions into Twitter, while the whale finds its fins and Obvious tries to work out the most obvious ways to convert ‘tweets’ into cash.

The simplicity and ubiquity of microblogging are its drawcards.  You sign up in minutes, start twittering in 140 characters or less, and you’re away.  Before too long you are recruiting a legion of followers, following legions more while the chit-chat starts to build to an almighty racket.  Now it’s being seen as the best way for breaking news to spread, churches to herd their flocks, corporations to leverage their demographics and friends to hook up.

Microblogging is at home on the desktop, laptop, hand-held and phone, which is what makes it so hot.  Trans-platform communications are barely viable yet:  text is king.  In Japan, where the whole population is glued to a tiny screen, Twitter is becoming a national sport.

A cursory glance at www.twitterholic.com will give you an idea of what is happening.  Follow a few links, and discover a community of hyper-connected trend-setters.

Meanwhile, spin-off sites, services and applications are blossoming – as are the Twitter wannabes and candobetters.  Twitterrific – www.iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific/ – and Twhirl – www.twhirl.org – enable easy reading and writing of your microblogs without visiting the site.  Summise, www.summize.com, a microblogging search tool, was recently bought by Twitter in an attempt to attach more value to their service.  www.snaptweet.com is a nifty tool to link your Flickr images to Twitter.

It’s so easy to imitate this stuff, code-wise, the clones are sprouting:  www.identi.ca, www.jaiku.com (snapped up by Google), www.dodgeball.com (snapped up by Google) and the quirky Plurk – www.plurk.com – no doubt soon to be snapped up by Google!  You might want to also check out www.pownce.com, www.tumblr.com and www.spoink.com.

Tweet this:  I can’t wait til they release more top level domains, so this parade of dumb Website names will finally end!

Twitter Glossary

You know you have a phenomenon on your hands when hundreds of words start getting invented.

TwitterBots:  Command-line instructions, issued via Twitter to perform all kinds of actions
Dweet:  A tweet sent while intoxicated
Fail Whale:  The loveable whale that appears when Twitter is overloaded
Fakers:  People who pretend to be celebrity Tweeters
Hashtags:  Using “#” to embed metadata into your posts
Twaggle:  A gaggle of Twitter followers
Tweet:  A blog posting to Twitter
Twitterrhea:  Sending way to many tweets
Twitticisms:  Witty tweets
Twoops:  An accidental private SMS sent to all your followers
Twebay:  To offer something for sale to your followers
Go to twitter.pbwiki.com for more…

By Stefan Sojka

INTRODUCTION

If ever there was a most appropriate time to pull out that much over-used descriptive noun ‘plethora’, the ISP discussion is it.  Australia’s ISP numbers are large (over 600), and their differences vast.  Ever-changing laws, economics, geography, logistics and an eager Aussie population have caused a stampede of operators, large and small to see the offering of a connection to cyberspace as a potentially viable business venture.

From backyard enthusiasts who just love the net so much they wanted all their friends to hook up so they could play MUD games together, to multi-national conglomerates keen on annexing their slice of market share from their competitors and generating a steady revenue stream for their investors, this army of modem-wielding entrepreneurs has switched on this great country of ours and plugged us into virtual reality at an astonishing rate.  In one respect, this is great news for us bandwidth-munching surfers, but the extreme disparity of services available has made it very difficult for anyone to know which dotted line to sign on, when it comes to choosing a provider.

In this feature, we look at a small cross-section of ISPs and compare their respective services, but by no means can we tell you that one is right for you.  Most factors that determine your choice will involve your personal circumstance.  What we can do is give you some parameters to consider, what to look out for, and maybe help you figure out just what it is that you might expect in the way of ‘Internet Service’ from your ‘Provider’.  It’s a buyer’s market with so many providers around, so you need to remember how important it is to shop around for the best deal that gives you everything you need, because it’s definitely out there, somewhere.

One thing is for sure – no matter what you choose, it won’t be the last time you’ll need to make such a choice.  Most people I know, myself included, have used at least three or four different ISPs over the last few years as the deals changed, their needs changed, and the technology continues to change.

CHOOSING AN ISP

What Do You Want?

Before you start being swayed by the hype and hullabaloo of the big-budget ad campaigns, or the convincing spiels of your sister’s friend’s neighbour’s mate who happens to be a computer boffin with his own server in his bedroom, the first thing you ought to do is ask yourself what it is that you want to get out of your Internet experience.  If you have already spent time on-line you may have a fair idea, but if you are new to the medium, your mind hasn’t even begun to be boggled by what’s out there, so you may not yet know how you might conduct your on-line life.  Sure you’ve read and heard all about it, but your own interests, personality and lifestyle are going to go a long way in determining your Net usage – how long you will spend on-line, how fast you will want to access your information and how many Megabytes (or Gigabytes) your thirst for content is likely to consume.

Between Two Extremes

My mother has been on-line for over 5 years and she has never once used a Web browser!  She is convinced that there is nothing on-line she can’t find in her library in half the time, and she is quite happy sending off a few emails every day to friends and family, and receiving the occasional email newsletter.  A friend of mine has spent the same five years with his brain almost hard-wired to the Net, downloading everything he can get his mouse on, making a nuisance of himself in every imaginable newsgroup, discussion forum, chat channel and his own Website.  My mother is happy logging on for a maximum of about 10 seconds a day (total – 5 minutes a month) to check and send her emails (she composes them off-line), while my friend needs the best damn fast and unlimited deal he can get.  ISPs have to try to cater for these two extremes and everyone in between.  That is why there are so many different package deals, and that is also why you really need to know where you fit in to the spectrum of different customers, to have any hope at all of choosing the right deal.

The Bottom Line – Price

The big factors affecting price are time, speed and bandwidth.  Time, because your provider can generally only allocate so many connections to so many people in a given time, and speed and bandwidth, because the more you download and the faster you download it, the more your ISP gets charged by the actual owners of the telecommunications cables and Internet resources which they rent to allow you access, so the more costs they have to pass on to you.

Most ISPs use formulas to average out expected usage between their subscribers, so some light users may be subsidising the heavier users, but generally the deals are worked out so that heavy users are charged at higher rates, or are offered different deals to help offset the costs.  ISPs may offer unlimited accounts, but cut you off every four hours, or limit your connection speed, to restrict your ability to download too much information.  Other accounts offer limited hours and data transfer per month at cheap rates, with additional hours and Megabytes charged at a much higher rate.  If you think you may be a heavy user, you should think carefully about your chances of going over your quota, as it can get expensive.  Most ISPs should allow you to log into their site and check your usage, and you can also get software that sits on your computer to monitor your on-line activity.  If you are a light user, almost all ISPs have very reasonable deals to cater for your needs, and you won’t have any trouble finding a suitable deal.

Setup Fees

Some ISPs charge a small setup fee to cover the software and time taken getting you up and running.  You should weigh up the charge against exactly what it is they are giving you to set you up.  There is no point paying a setup fee if the whole process is going to be confusing, drawn out and frustrating.

WHAT YOU MIGHT GET FOR YOUR MONEY.

Besides the obvious Internet connection, ISPs generally can offer bonus services as part of their package deal.  You may or may not require some of these, so you should make sure you are getting more of what you want and less of what you don’t need.

Web Space?

ISPs are basically charging for an Internet connection, but you may get free Web space thrown in to the deal, as well as an email address, which is pretty much standard.  If you think you might like to have a Website, then free space at your ISP is a great start.  Basic free Web space is not that functional, but can be useful for basic information, or a few pictures or other files.  You must remember that if you change ISPs, you will lose your Web address, so if you are wanting a Website in the long term, you may want to look at other free Website services, or even getting your own domain name, rather than risk losing loyal visitors to your space.  These days, you can get free Web space at hundreds of locations around the Internet; so free ISP space is not such a valuable asset to your package deal.

Tech Support?

Does the prospective ISP offer tech support by phone or email?  Is it accessible 24/7, into the evening, or just during normal business hours?  Have they taken the time to offer a range of common solutions to problems, on their Website? Go and look at their Website and see how much information is provided.  Before you sign up, you should be able to ask technical questions about setting up, and you might get a good idea of just how helpful they might be.

For smaller ISPs, sometimes the tech support, sales team and management are one and the same person. You may prefer a one-on-one relationship with someone who knows his stuff, and may go out of his way to help you - not only to get connected, but also perhaps to upgrade your computer or set up a web site at a later date.

Staying in Touch

A good ISP will keep in touch with their subscribers with regular emails, or postings to their Website. This enables them to inform customers about service upgrades, outages, technical issues, even cultural info their subscribers may be interested in. It is very reassuring to know that your ISP has taken the time to let you know if there has been a problem and that they are doing their best to rectify it, rather than being forced to sit there wondering what the hell has happened to your supposedly fast connection that is crawling along at 1.5Bytes a minute. The Internet is a technical arena, so technical problems do occur. ISPs should keep their customers informed at all times. Check their Site for evidence of how diligent they might be in this area.

The ISP Portal

Many ISPs have turned their own Web Site into a portal that their subscribers can use to access the Internet. Direct access to search engines, communities, chat groups, categorized sites, humour, news feeds, sport results etc. You don’t have to be a subscriber to visit these sites, but often members will get added benefits, and it is all part of adding value to the actual connection service you have paid for.

Hardware

Some hardware suppliers are ISPs and some ISPs sell hardware, so you may be buying your computer, modem and software from the same place you connect through. Some even have special deals of free access thrown in with every computer sold. This can be helpful when it comes to setting everything up, as they are more obliged to make it all work and can’t blame a third party if it doesn’t, but you should be sure that the connection service they are giving you is the kind of service you will want to pay for once the free honeymoon period expires.

SETTING UP AN ACCOUNT

A good ISP should provide virtually all you need on a CD or floppy disc, and full instructions on their Website, covering issues like email configuration, FTP, newsgroups, billing info and what to do if you get stuck. Once you are sure you have the right hardware (modem, leads, phone line) connecting should be no more difficult than going through a simple set-up process, using either your own computer’s system components, or the software provided by your ISP. So long as all the right information is put in all the right places, the options are selected and the boxes checked, connecting should be a matter of putting in a phone number, user name, password and you’re away! Sounds easy, but there are a lot of variables. Your provider should be quite experienced with the kinds of issues you are likely to encounter and should be able to take care of them very quickly, if not eliminate them altogether by providing accurate instructions and good software. For experienced surfers, setting up a new account may be a breeze, but for beginners, it would be advisable to go for the easiest, most helpful option at first, or at least get a friend to guide you through configuring whatever software and/or hardware your ISP has provided.

Speed and Performance

The faster your connection, the more you are going to download, so the more of a liability you are to your ISP. In general, faster connections have greater restrictions on how much you can download and quite often the deals that sound the best on a dollar for dollar, hour for hour basis, may make up for it by restricting your connection speed, or you may find it hard to get on in busy times because they have oversubscribed their modems. Check out the details and fine print on every deal you are considering. The best thing to do with any provider is to try to get some feedback from current subscribers as to the performance of the service. Every ISP I have used has come from word-of-mouth recommendation by existing users. They can verify whether the performances claimed by the ISP are actually up to standard.

If you think you will be a high-end user, it is definitely worth considering cable modems or ADSL, as the speed is exponentially faster, and with a good unlimited download deal, it can even work out cheaper than a standard phone line connection, because you don’t have to pay for a phone call every time you connect. Unlimited download cable modem deals often have you operating at below maximum potential speed, but when you can download so much, so fast, it can be very risky having to pay for every megabyte over and above your monthly quota.

Regional Services

In regional areas, there are choices between major national providers, who have secured local phone numbers through which to hook up to their system, or smaller local operators. In the ISP listings we give you here you can see the kind of coverage various providers have. www.cynosure.com.au gives quite a comprehensive listing on-line.
The difference between local and national providers is the difference between economy of scale advantages, like more connections, 24/7 support etc, against local operators who might be more friendly, take more time with you, and have a local shop or office you can call into for help or advice, but could be under-resourced in other areas. Naturally the more choices you have in your particular area, the better off you are, since you can switch providers if you are not happy. Some areas have very few choices.

One option for remote and regional areas is Satellite Internet, which might have a higher set-up cost, but will provide a fast connection where you might wait years for cable or other high-speed services. Many providers are beginning to offer this option.

More than Just an ISP?

An ISP, after all, is essentially a plug-in point - a connection to the Internet. Once connected, you are free to roam the world and use all kinds of different services, servers and technologies – you can even configure your own computer as a service provider of sorts. So as the industry evolves and matures, it is becoming more and more important for ISPs to move beyond simple connection points and become more involved in their customers overall Internet experience.

The larger ISPs are opening doors to multi-media content delivery, chat communities, auctions, shopping malls, news feeds, travel agencies, banking and stockbroking services. Smaller ISPs are also doing what they can, within their budgets, to provide services like on-line gaming servers, web design and hosting services, consultation, hardware installation, customized programming.

Us consumers are very fortunate that in our desire to get the most out of the Internet, we are encouraging the entrepreneurship of our ISPs to compete with one another and strive to offer us a whole world of opportunities through their technical facility as a direct link to the Web. The more experienced we get at using the Internet, the more we become aware of the kinds of things we require, and the more able we are to choose the right Service Provider for our needs.

We may be content to surf endlessly into the night, so we might be quite content with a budget-priced fast unlimited connection, but we may have far more sophisticated and ever-evolving requirements, so we will be looking for an ISP who can deliver a whole range of services over and above a cheap, fast connection, particularly if we are using the Internet for business.

So long as we don’t make too many bad decisions along the way, we will find the journey both rewarding and enlightening as we stumble ever onwards towards our unavoidable destiny as interconnected humans. Our ISP is our partner in this journey, so they need to understand us, and we need to understand ourselves enough to know that we are both heading in the right direction – at least for the remainder of our fixed-term contract. Who knows, if they play their cards right, we might even renew.

Questions to ask yourself to help determine what kind of Internet Service you may require:

Do you love music (MP3s)? Film? Animation? Multimedia? Or is plain text really your thing?

Do you like the idea of chatting to strangers for hours, even days on end?

Are you an email junkie or a Web Site surfing maniac?

Is the Internet vital to your income earning capacity?

Will your whole world fall apart if you can’t log on?

How technically proficient are you on a computer? Can you ‘go it alone’ or does the idea of having 24-hour tech support make you feel slightly more secure?

Are you likely to want to create your own personal Web Site?

If you want to connect at your business, how many people are likely to want to use the Net at one time, and for how long, and what for, and how many email addresses might be required?

Will you be looking at getting a domain name and building a serious on-line presence for your business as well as just using the Net for email and surfing?

Do you want to access the Internet while you are travelling the world?

Might you wish to access the Net from numerous Australian locations, say at your place of business in Gosford, your home in Sydney, and your holiday home in Perth?

Are you really only wishing to use the Internet for very specific purposes – eg to trade shares, or to research your favourite subject, or to stay up with current affairs?

Will your whole family want to share your connection? If so, you need to ask everyone these same questions.

Do you want to shop, book travel, do banking, have fun, join clubs, change the world, publish your memoirs, trace your family tree, laugh, cry or just look at lots of funny cartoons?

Asking these questions will help you refine some key aspects of the kind of service you might require and as you investigate the services offered, you will see how your needs might fit into the various package deals –

The amount of time you are likely to want to be connected each month; the amount of data you are likely to be downloading; the speed at which you will be happy to operate; the restriction of questionable content or lack thereof; the ability of the ISP to act as a “tour guide” or offer suggestions of other services you may wish to use, like travel and stockbroking; their ability to offer upgraded solutions as your Internet needs grow and change, and the kind of price range you will be looking at to get what you want.