Blog

By Stefan Sojka

The meteoric rise of Facebook into the frontal lobes of the Internet may have killed the whole concept of Website design.  It is interesting to note how much more popular FaceBook has become than MySpace, when MySpace promised so much more flexibility with design and customisation of your MySpace page.

FaceBook's Web design is essentially as plain and boring as you can get, yet nobody seems to mind or complain.  Why?

My guess is that it is because most people are not Website designers.  If you give them the tools to customise their Web page design, chances are they will make it look horrible.  Flashing stars, fireworks and clashing primary colours abound on MySpace Web page designs.  FaceBook's approach is to focus exclusively on the content; text, images, links and actions all done within the same boring desiign framework.

From a social networking point of view, this makes a lot of sense.  It keeps Facebook clean and user-friendly and basically prevents anyone from ruining it.  But do we really want an Internet with no design?  Of course not.  That's like saying all movies should be video versions of stage plays, or all food ought to fulfill basic nutritional needs and that's all.  Design is a fundamental faculty of human experience and evolution.

One must keep something in mind when it comes to Facebook's design/brand – it is Facebook's, not the members'.  They own the site, they profit from it – it suits them to have it the way it is and it works for them.  If they ever change it, it will be because they believe it will be more profitable to do so, not because they they think it will be cool to have more design flexibility for their users.  If they keep it, it will be for the exact same reason – it is more profitable to keep it that way.

Even though Facebook might be huge right now, it is not the entire Internet.  It is not the answer to all the world's problems.  It doesn't fulfill every human need.  It is a Website where people can post content, designed to maximise profits for Facebook.

The rest of the world, the non-Facebook world – you know; businesses, community organisations, individuals, social networks, associations and Websites – still exist, still have a future and are still quietly working away on their missions, goals and objectives.  Those objectives are most likely very different from Facebook's.  They may be to make the world a better place, not to rule the world.  They may be to make just enough money to have a good life, not to become the richest man in history.  They may be to have just enough members that each member feels an equal part of the entity, not just one of a billion 'users' feeding a marketing machine.  For them, design might still play a very important role.  Specialist Websites, special interest groups, small businesses, international organisations and media outlets all continue to require appropriately and artistically designed Websites.  Sure, they may all end up posting their links on the bland mass social media outlets, but they are links to the rest of the Web – the exciting, organic, ever-changing Internet, where ideas abound and new paradigms are created on a daily basis.  Facebook has killed Website design at Facebook, but click on any link that anyone posts on their news feed and you will discover a Web that is alive and well.

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?

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

It's like... the numbers never added up.  When average house prices went up by more than an average person could earn in a year, something was terribly wrong.

If everything is over-priced and everyone over-borrows to pay for it all, the only way to keep up is to rip the resources of the planet off.  No-one factors what nature provides – they just take it for free.  Nature is the only real input that feeds the system – minerals, human toil and animal/plant harvesting.  But even pillaging the planet can't be done fast enough to cover the ridiculously stratospheric numbers conjured up in financial circles.

The worker is not much better off than the planet – the debts can't even be covered working 20-hour days, 7 days a week.  Not even interest payments on the house can be covered at that rate, it seems.

You can't dig enough tin ore fast enough to feed the beast of the stock market, no matter how many guns are pointed at the poor Congolese peasants.

So of course the system will collapse.  Thankfully it was the financial system first, not the natural system – you can't eat money.

New models must arise – and are arising.  It's just that governments, business and the general public are hypnotised into thinking "this is the best system we have."  The faulty logic being that communism failed, therefore we must have the best system in the universe.

Just because we have Mac and PC operating systems, doesn't mean there is not a far better way to run a computer than both of them.

That's my socio-political rant for the day! :-)

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.