Don’t worry, this will still leave plenty of time for me to tweet on @nickmolnar and @thirdi

Online marketing

Let’s continue with the fishing analogy. Just like in fishing you might drop the line down into a school of fish, but if you don’t have the right bait they won’t go for it. Conversely, if you drop the right bait down for the kind of fish you want but it’s nowhere near enough to them you won’t catch anything either…maybe a boot. And just like you can feel nibbles on your line, clicks act in the same way. It may seem like a lot of people are seeing your ad, but nibbles don’t catch fish, and clicks don’t mean you’ve made customers. So how do we interpret click statistics and consumer behavior online?

If a lot of traffic is coming through your site via an ad then you know that it’s doing its job as far as getting eyes on your site. However, we have to look deeper than that. These numbers tell us a lot, but they don’t tell the whole story. When you buy ad space from another site make sure you are able to get the analytics too. Find out how long people are looking at the ad if it’s a pop up- if it’s one second it usually counts as a click to your ad space provider even if users closed the pop up right away. As far as the provider is concerned, someone saw your ad and that’s the name of the game.

Quality clicks are what you are looking for unless you just want to generate blind, rapid site traffic. Many sites do this, and generate impressive ad revenue from it. But if you own an actual product or service and want to connect with a consumer base you need more than ads, you need content. Potential customers need to be engaged. Attention spans have shrunk and we don’t notice traditional ad media anymore- not to the extent that we used to. Even banner click through rates have been declining. Being able to advertise without people knowing that they’re being advertised to is the trick today. Some may find this underhanded, but in the marketing biz it’s seen more as subtlety. Social media has created new terms of engagement that have helped consumers and companies connect in a more fluid and continuous manner, sticking has begun to replace clicking. This is really where understanding consumer behavior online happens, in the dialogue played out in words and actions online. But for a small business it’s hard to imagine the kind of social media presence that a major company with a large consumer base enjoys (or is conversely beholden too as Forrester researchers often stress) There are some basic and simple things that you can do though, to better understand how your web marketing is working.

Find out who is looking at your ads and who is looking at your site, not individual names and addresses and such, but where they are, how long they are staying, where they are going on your site, what they may be looking for if you can discern it. “How are these people behaving?” is the key question, not “how much are they clicking?” .

If you are able to understand these and other things you’ll see that the water is in fact clear, and not deep and dark as it may have looked before. And you’ll know where to put your line and what to put on it a whole lot easier than when you were when fishing in the dark.

Thirdi

I was recently talking with Boris Mann of Bootup Labs and he postulated (and I agree) that due to their cost effectiveness and proximity to great cafes, pubs and restaurants, that Gastown and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside have become hot spots for software startups. No offense to Yaletown, for years it’s been the trendiest and most upwardly mobile neighbourhood in the city, but because of this it’s also become quite expensive. And while he was excited that parts of Vancouver’s inner city (the Flack Block in particular) had become magnets for fledgling technology companies, when talking about the city as a whole he seemed a little less sure that Vancouver could be included right now in that top tier of globally competitive cities like Boston or San Francisco. “Vancouver itself must grow up and be recognized as a whole. We *need* to point to universities westwards (UBC) and eastwards (SFU Burnaby Mountain), the Microsoft Dev Center in Richmond, the EA buildings in Burnaby, and so on.”

As authors like Richard Florida have stressed, cities need to attract and retain top talent in order stay economically healthy and competitive. It’s a constant process of keeping up with Boston, with Tel Aviv, with the Bay Area, in amenities, quality of life, culture, safety, aesthetics and other supports, and making sure that companies have access to the best possible research facilities and a highly educated work force. That work force is both created through the quality of nearby colleges and universities and through the gravity that is naturally induced by an accumulation of the above mentioned things. When an innovative or large company appears on the scene it creates gravity, it creates spin-off companies, and it challenges everyone to raise their game. So it’s important to both see those companies develop here , or move here.

Vancouver wins hands down in aesthetics, quality of life, safety (minus the earthquake we’re all waiting for) and other supports (dining, leisure, soft laws concerning marijuana?) but there are some things that we’re lacking. It might be cohesion. Is there a disjointedness caused by the geography and inter-competitiveness of the partner cities in the region? As Boris points out, some collaborative effort between competing clusters or competing cities might just make one big cluster and put us in that upper echelon. But while Richmond, Burnaby and Surrey have either seen some large software companies locate offices there or have announced major plans to create office and mixed use developments, Vancouver has been running out of space fast.  Well actually that’s not true, we’ve been running out of space for companies. A slow and steady exodus of tech and software companies out of the downtown core would be a devastatingly bad thing (for Vancouver) if Richmond and/or Surrey started to displace Vancouver as the main cluster of high tech and software companies in the Lower Mainland.

Because of the profitability of luxury residential condos, developers haven’t produced enough commercial office space in the downtown core to accommodate any large companies that may want to have offices there. Microsoft had to locate in Richmond, and some would say so what?That’s still Vancouver right? But that’s millions of dollars a year that local businesses in the downtown business district aren’t getting from coffee breaks, catering, office supplies, etc. And not only that, but if any technology and software companies or other service providers want to do business with a large company like Microsoft, they could have had the convenience of a quick taxi or brisk walk between offices, grab a drink with associates after work and bounce casual ideas around, but now they’ve got to head down to Richmond (boring). SFU, BCIT and UBC campuses downtown or relatively close, Microsoft in Richmond. Thirdi office in Yaletown, Microsoft in Richmond. See the pattern here? It could be argued that Microsoft is not always the friendliest company especially to startups, but I use them only as an example. If a large company with a reputation of working with startups or smaller firms wanted to find a space in Vancouver proper it would be extremely difficult, as Microsoft proved. And perhaps most importantly, if a local company started to experience strong growth and needed to take on more staff and more space where would they expand to? The fact that there is simply no commercial space left in Vancouver and none really being built, means problems down the road if you ask me. And city council isn’t terribly excited to add more commercial high rise space downtown because of the risk of blocking resident’s views by obstructing our “view corridors“. So it’s a bit of a catch 22 in my opinion, companies want to come here for the beautiful views but we can’t offer them office space because it will block the beautiful views. While cheap office space for startups in Gastown and the DTES is great, this large scale component of Vancouver’s ability to attract and retain larger companies may have a very negative impact on our ability to become a true global leader moving forward.

It’s an old debate, well old so far as social media news goes, but the debate on where to draw the line between professional and personal lives only becomes more pressing with each new way to expose one’s lives.  In a post from the New York Times, an estimated 45% of employers used social networks to screen employees.  An estimated 35% of applicants were then rejected because of the results from those social networks.  Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, the amount of places for employers to find you seem endless.  It’s all getting a little crazy.  What’s next I ask – will my future potential boss try to search out my FourSquared account and judge me based on where I shop for groceries and drink coffee?  Sometimes I ask myself why I even bother writing up a resume when I could just send them my various profiles.

To be fair, networks like LinkedIn are fantastic networking opportunities.  Through sites like LinkedIn and Monster, you can connect with millions of others in your industry and search for jobs much easier and quicker than flipping through a newspaper.  On the negatives though, there is a very uneasily drawn line between what is legal and what is moral.  Legally, a company may have the right to search and find whatever public information you happen to have out there, using it as a means of evaluating you as an employee.  The onus is thus on you to control the access they have to your information – but is this belief just?

In an extreme case, imagine that you are a celebrity…say Brad Pitt (or Angelina).  You have an entire team of publicists out there whose sole purpose it is to control your image – basically what information is out there about you.  Yet despite these people being dedicated full-time to the purpose of controlling your image, there is still tons of unsolicited and incorrect information out there – and much of it is stuff that you are utterly unaware about.  That incorrect, or unsolicited information can have dire consequences; for example, rumours that you are a prima donna convinces some director not to hire you, or faked pictures of you and a mysterious person make major trouble for you with the significant other.  If celebrities cannot control all their information, then how can the entire onus be on a normal person to control their presence on the web?  Yes, you can set your Facebook settings, and yes you should not make stupid tweets about your boss, but is it fair that employers actively search out your private life online?  In the NY Times article, more than half of employers stated “scandalous photos” as the reason why they rejected an applicant.  What one deems as acceptable can vary greatly.  Should we be judged for a simple Halloween costume, or a birthday party?  What if the “bad evidence” is years old?  Or what if you have a very common name and they look at the wrong profile?

As a professional, when you apply for a job, you present your set of skills and abilities that qualify for you for that position.  Granted, your personality is a factor for getting hired, but should only be applied so far as your communication/interpersonal skills and your work ethic.  If employers get to search applicants, then applicants should be presented with a detailed report on the personal lives of the persons interviewing them – then at least you would both be on equal ground!  Our private lives are called that because they should, and deserve to be, private.  Employers do not have the right, in my opinion, to pre-judge and produce biases against our personalities before they even meet us.  Whatever information one may find on the Internet, you will never know that person’s full story.  I realize that many will argue against me, but in this age where privacy already is beginning to seem an antiquated thing, I think it is all the more important to try to make a stand.  All I ask is that we just refrain from throwing stones and instead, sit for a moment in our glass houses.

The idea allegedly put forth by Russia’s Northern Fleet and espoused by Chavez is that the U.S. has been using its HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) Which according to the official government site is “…to further advance our knowledge of the physical and electrical properties of the Earth’s ionosphere which can affect our military and civilian communication and navigation systems” This program has been in operation since 1990 and is a favorite of conspiracy theorists, though it has been overshadowed somewhat by the CERN Large Hadron Collider and its massive space-time fabric ripping experiments. In both cases these are highly advanced technologies employing highly advanced theoretical and applied knowledge, and as the old adage goes “People fear what they don’t understand”

We don’t understand the experiments being done at HAARP and CERN’s Hadron Collider so they must be inherently evil and created to control/destroy/enslave us as they are also funded and supported by the Government…another thing we don’t understand. The logic is relatively straight forward.

If we don’t understand advanced economic theory we like to say the World Bank, IMF and United Nations are enslaving the planet intentionally with debt. If we don’t understand how a disease like AIDS can have no cure we blame the US military for inventing it for population control reasons. (or big pharma or someone else) If we don’t understand why Haiti, a country suffering for so long, can be hit with a devastating earthquake we can conveniently blame the US (again of course) and their experiment in Alaska that focuses on ionic phenomena in our atmosphere. Look closely, there must be a connection.  This is fine and dandy for regular paranoid blue collar guys, but when heads of state are talking like this I think we pass a threshold of acceptable conduct.

Technology is arguably the most important and distinguishing thing that separates us from our animal cousins. Yes many other animals use tools, sea otters use rocks, birds use twigs and twine, ravens have proven themselves able to problem-solve with tools as well, but when we’re talking about experiments to recreate the big bang, experiments directing energy through and off of the ionosphere I think we definitely demonstrate a uniquely ambitious trait to understand the construct of our reality- and the rough edges where it may end. But I would prefer to leave that to scientists and philosophers and have the politicians focus their mental energies on more constructive things. What international politics needs more than anything is sanity, and Chavez loves to inject a huge dose of anything but into the mix.

Here are a few thoughts off the top of my head as to why his comments are completely absurd and why thinking like this is potentially very dangerous when considering the future of our already strained geopolitics.

1) Earthquakes happen all the time firstly. It’s not like a major earthquake happened in the middle of some precambrian shield in some highly unlikely place; although intra-plate earthquakes are also possible. Haiti and all the Caribbean countries lie on a complex series of plates and faults. Chavez is an idiot.

2) While earthquakes can be caused by damming of rivers and underground nuclear explosions, the suggestion that HAARP can somehow create earthquakes is a stretch. Video footage shows strange aural clouds over China before a major earthquake struck there in 2008 but before a quake happens it is common for large amounts of gaseous vapors trapped beneath the surface to escape. In fact, Japanese seismologists have successfully predicted earthquakes (though not by any usable amount of time for public safety) by monitoring levels of gas like Radon, looking for spikes in the air. Gasses, as we know, can affect how light passes between a source (say the Sun) and our brains. There were no reported auras or crazy lights and colours around Haiti before this quake anyhow which would help relate it to the supposed HAARP induced quake in China. Chavez is a moron.

3) As far as the middle east is concerned, the United States knows that its greatest asset in Iran are the Iranian people within the country itself. Iran is not just full of Islamic Fundamental extremists, in fact they are the minority. Killing hundreds of thousands of Iranian civilians, many of whom are engaged in political and social activism in a massive earthquakes is likely the last possible thing the US would want. Chavez (and the person who made the alledged Northern Fleet report) are clearly just stirring the pot. A little critical thinking goes a long way.

Why is this dangerous? Because people BELIEVE this stuff. Iran will have another earthquake, possibly in the near future. In fact there is a 100% Iran will have earthquakes. The next time an earthquake occurs we now potentially have an army of paranoid idiots convinced that the US is about to invade the country, which is also unlikely because its troops are preoccupied in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Haiti.  The next time there’s a tsunami, it’s the US and their newfangled all purpose natural disaster creating HAARP. A hurricane, it’s the US and their newfangled all purpose natural disaster creating HAARP.

If this kind of talk enters the mainstream, as it clearly has, it becomes dangerous. It’s already easy enough for battered teens living in Kabul and Baghdad to blame the US for their woes, now being told by a celebrated world leader (oh yes he’s celebrated in some countries) that natural disasters befalling their countries are caused by deliberate efforts of the U.S. through its own advanced and misunderstood technologies is just fuel for an already paranoid firestorm.  Stoking the flames of paranoia in the world is the last thing any world leader should be doing. Once again I stress my belief that we need sanity, clarity, cooperation and critical thinking from our leaders.  Leave the science to the scientists Chavez and leave the paranoid delusions to the rest of us.

For more information on HAARP

For more information on CERN Large Hadron Collider

For more information on global economics

For more information on Thirdi

Mao Zedong winds up to slap Secretary of State Hillary Clinton right in the mouth

I exaggerate of course, but who would’ve thought that China hacking into millions of private e-mails stored on large American corporations’ servers could ever cause tension between the two countries? In response to Hillary Clinton’s recent criticism of  that country’s internet policies China responded with sharp words of rebuke aimed at both the Secretary of State and the country. In one interview with state-run Xinhuanet.com. Beijing Association of Online Media Chairman Min Dahong said “How China’s Internet develops and how it is managed are Chinese people’s own affairs,” He then added that  “On the Internet question, China doesn’t need any lessons from the United States on what to do or how”

I couldn’t disagree more with his first comment. How ‘China’s internet develops’ to me is like saying how China’s air or rain develops, it is inevitably linked to the larger internet-ecosystem around it. Policies shaped to serve internal political culture or needs denies China the full power and utility of the world wide web. The internet is increasingly becoming a global concern, much like diseases or climate change, it affects too many people for countries (especially one as populous and economically robust as China) to be thinking about it in insular terms. Creating isolated policies and localized practices will leave the Chinese people in their own feedback loop of information if China retreats into its own cyber island of controlled virtual space.  And as we move forward that’s the last thing I would hope to see.

The world needs an engaged and participatory China if we are to tackle the global problems we face today and future ones of tomorrow. Working to make a universally safe and open internet is an important step in that process and one that can improve relations between China and its trade partners rather than create bones of contention. Considering all the other problems causing tension between China and the US these recent hacks and the blowout from them is the last thing we all need.

I invite both sides to sit down together at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics and come to terms with their differences. Now that they are no longer a smoke free Olympics both sides can stay up late chain smoking their way to a mutually beneficial resolution. I will happily mediate these discussions and will provide catering and DJ services as well.

My rate is $2,500 per hour for this kind of work, please include a list of any allergies or food sensitivities well in advance.

The extension .cm remains one of the most popular extensions for scam sites and spreaders of malware; it’s the country code top level domain (ccTDL) of Cameroon. So make sure you put that o in your .com! Some commonly used TLDs that have become specific to industries are in fact country code top level domains (ccTLD), these are referred to as vanity ccTLDs. The increasingly common .tv extension is in fact a ccTLD for the island nation of  Tuvalu but it is used for the television (”TV”) / entertainment industry. The country code extension for the Federated States of Micronesia is .fm and is frequently used by FM radio stations. Businesses in Los Angeles have become fond of using the .la extension, which is in fact the ccTDL of Laos. So before you give up on your dream URL because .com or .net is taken don’t be afraid to look at the alternatives, but be aware that some extensions can have negative associations, such as .cm or .cn (China) China is apparently looking at ways to crack down on abuse of its ccTDL by cyber scammers. In a way that’s incredibly hypocritical though isn’t it?

On top of country codes which have been used as vanity domain extensions there were several extensions offered in the early 2000s. Some of these have been successful while others have fizzled. Growing out of the the  generic top-level domains which originally consisted of  GOV, EDU, COM, MIL, ORG, and NET,  several new domain extensions became available. Four of the new TLDs (.biz, .info, .name, and .pro) are unsponsored, meaning they are less stringent as to who can claim them. The other three new TLDs released along with them (.aero, .coop, and .museum) were sponsored. Then again in 2003, ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) the body responsible for overseeing and regulating domains introduced six new TLDs (.asia, .cat, .jobs, .mobi, .tel and .travel) these TLD extension were sponsored, as are .edu and .gov etc. Meaning there is a body of regulators that oversees authenticity of those claiming to belong in these domains or wanting inclusion in them. Someone homeschooling their kids in small town USA will not likely be approved for a .edu domain name, reserved for colleges and universities,  while a survivalist militia group in middle of nowhere USA will also likely not be given a .mil extension no matter how militant they may become. That is reserved for official military only. But hey, you can always try.

So before you go out looking for a URL with .ca or .net or .com know that there are dozens of extensions available now and more to come. the Dot Eco domain .eco has been slowly simmering for the past couple of years and once made available to the public (if you your company is an environmentally responsible or sustainable operation) this domain extension could be invaluable to you. Visit here for more info on this domain extension. Some domain extensions may fit your business better than others, and they are an extremely important decision for any company to make. For more information of TLDs or Generic Top Level Domains visit here. To contact Thirdi go here.

The internet is to blame of course. Just as the ol’ www has led to an increase in ruined relationships, chubby kids and the spread of before-and-after photos of Heidi Montag’s plastic surgery, it has also been the death knell for print newspapers. But, like I said, we’ve known that for a long time.

So, then the next step in the evolution of news was that people were going to get their news from online sources, some of which included websites for traditional media like the sophisticated NYTimes.com, the slick and shallow CNN.com and that grumpy, old, uncle who likes guns and hates gays, FoxNews.com.

But it seems like that whole paradigm isn’t quite happening either.

The research firm Outsell released a study recently, about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 US news consumers. And the results, as they say, are shocking. News aggregators like Google and Yahoo are wrecking everything. Well, actually its us news consumers who are ruining everything, with our short attention spans and over-worked lifestyles.

According to the study, 44% of those who visit Google News just read the headlines. They never actually click through to visit the actual site where that headline came from.

Obviously this is a big deal, considering that the people who research and report on the news need to get paid somehow. And their paychecks come directly from the advertising on the news websites. So if 44% of news readers just get their news from aggregators, that’s a whole lot of eyeballs that are never reaching any on-site advertising.

So as strange an idea as it may be to contemplate, is it possible that Rupert Murdoch was right? A while back, he said he wanted to ban Google from accessing the news sites he owns, for exactly this reason.

Of course, it’s easy to get a bit histrionic about this whole thing. We see that 44% of us don’t read the articles, but just want a quick espresso shot of headlines. And then we blame it on the fact that we all have short attentions spans, and long work hours… just like I did a few paragraphs ago. But is that really the issue?

Maybe the issue is that “news” isn’t actually different than any other form of entertainment. Once upon a time, when we all diligently read newspapers every morning, was it because we really cared more about the world around us? Or was it simply because there wasn’t anything else to do?

These days, the internet provides endless entertainment for those wanting to surf around and read about stuff. And sure, some of that stuff will be news headlines, and maybe even whole stories. But there’s a heck of a lot of other content out there to keep us entertained. So if I scan a few headlines to get my fix of news, then go elsewhere to read an article about some cute undersea creature, is it because I’m addled by ADD? Or is it just that the internet is awesome?

If last year was the year of social networking, then surely Twitter was the prince to Facebook’s king.  Twitter was the handsome, flashy, prince dazzling everyone’s eyes and drumming up gossip and hype wherever it went.  Come 2010 though, it seems the good days may be coming to an end.  In a recent survey by Hubspot, Twitter’s growth is shown to have decreased dramatically in the very year it was heralded as social media’s brightest new star.  Over the year of 2009, Twitter’s growth plummeted from a high of 13% in March to a mere 3.5% in October.  This has caused much worry and furrowing of brows in Twitterland, but is it really all that bad?

For anyone who was alive during the dot.com era, you would know that bubbles are bad.  They’re bound to burst and maybe it was time for social media’s bubble to meet it’s foamy end.  Yes, 3.5% is still a poor result, but 13% is also a bit unrealistic.  Also, the survey results indicate that Twitter is increasingly growing as a community.  While only 18% of users have more than 100 followers, there has been steady growth in international sectors.  40% of the top Twitter sectors are now located outside North America.  Personally, I don’t see the slow growth as a bad thing.  Twitter was so full of hype that everyone and their grandmas wanted to jump onto the bandwagon, but as a result of that popularity, the hype was more than the reality.  People got bored and moved on; however there still exists a large core of users for whom Twitter has become an integral part of their lives.  Myself, I know that my fingers sometimes itch for a keyboard to type out the random musings I think might be amusing to other like-minded individuals.  Twitter is a bastion for niches in my opinion; it’s a place where small and large communities can come together and collaborate.  Also as the influence of the mobile sphere increases, Twitter is poised for large growth again as it is the perfect platform for mobile blogging with its fast, simple, nature.  If Twitter can harness this slow-down in growth as an opportunity to increase its fast & dirty usability, and encourage its community feel, I think Twitter is poised to increase those numbers again to a realistic healthy growth.

On a more humorous side note, both Thirdi and myself are among the elite 18% with 100+ followers – booya!

So what’s the logical conclusion?

Well, the German and the French governments both recommended their citizens to abandon IE for an alternative browser. There certainly is enough competition in the web browser market for people to choose from. Is jumping ship really the logical move? Probably not; every web browser has their share of security vulnerabilities and this weeks news will soon fade. Microsoft will also release a patch to close this attack vector.

At Thirdi we don’t mind too much which browser you use, but we do prefer you use the latest release so that we can build better performing and more capable web applications. Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari all grew in 2009 taking away market share from the established Internet Explorer. Will this vulnerability only continue that trend?

I think the best thing that will come out of this mess is that more people will be aware of alternative browsers and give at least one of them a try. Who knows, maybe they’ll even enjoy it.