Saturday, February 27th, 2010

Remarkable Stats on the State of the Internet Video

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

I thought this video shows a good view of what the state of communication in the world is like these days.  It is kind of overwhelming to think how things have grown to the state they are at now or I should say last year.  Just think where we are now in 2010.   

Here are a couple of thoughts to ponder. 
How do you set yourself apart from all the content that is created online?
What do you do to filter thought the information that is available to us now?
Is there anything that you can NOT learn from watching a video online?

How do you keep from being overwhelmed with the content that is online?

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Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

An 18-year-old, accused of stealing a laptop in Melbourne and surfing porn on it, thought he was home free after evading police for two months, but he came undone when he logged on to Facebook.

The laptop was reportedly stolen from a staff member of ladder manufacturer Branach in the vicinity of Narre Warren, in Melbourne’s south-east, on June 8.

Fortunately for Branach, the company is a client of Sydney-based managed IT support firm Navigatum, which can connect to and control any of Branach’s laptops and diagnose technical problems from anywhere.

Using remote access software called Kaseya, Navigatum senior network technician David Stevenson set up an alert so that, whenever the stolen laptop was used to log in to the internet, the software would send him an email.

“I can tell when he’s online and from there I can jump on to my laptop and start watching what he’s doing,” Stevenson said in a phone interview.

“We were watching him for a little while but, because he was logging on at really random times like really late at night, we set up some scripts to capture [screenshots of] what he was doing on the screen every 30 seconds, and that was then uploaded to our server.”

On top of that, Stevenson installed a keylogger on the laptop “so we were able to log all of his keystrokes and passwords and websites that he visited”.

Stevenson said it was a few weeks before the user first began browsing the web with the laptop on June 24.

The screenshots, seen by this reporter, allegedly showed the thief browsing for porn videos for the first few weeks. He allegedly sourced the racy clips by conducting Google searches for terms such as “porn” and “porn videos”.

But Stevenson knew that, if he bided his time, the user would slip up eventually. It wasn’t possible to identify him immediately because the stolen laptop did not have a webcam.

Towards the end of July, the teen logged in to his Facebook account and, within an hour, he was arrested and charged with the theft, Stevenson said.

“From his Facebook account we managed to get his date of birth and school that he went to, and from there we were able to track him down,” Stevenson said.

This reporter saw the screenshots of the Facebook account but these, along with the alleged thief’s name, cannot be revealed for legal reasons.

Victoria Police confirmed the incident and said the teen was charged with theft but had yet to face court.

Stevenson said the police told him that, thanks in large part to his detective work, they were able to get the alleged thief to admit to a string of car thefts in the area. He also dobbed in two of his accomplices, Stevenson said.

“They [police] weren’t impressed with the amount of paper work they had to fill out so I’d say they managed to retrieve quite a lot,” he said.

Stevenson’s high-tech vigilante detective work is one of the first cases of geek justice found in Australia but it follows a string of similar cases overseas.

See the full post.

Pathway Solutions is now using Kaseya for our network managment for clients.  We have been able to speed up response time and keep up with backups, updates, and trouble tickets much faster since we initiated this.

Find out more by visiting us at http://www.itpws.com

Scott Kintz

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Thursday, August 6th, 2009

Twitter was brought down for several hours today by what is called a DoS attack  (Denial of Service).  This is done with several computers that are taken over by viruses and used to launch attacks against your own network or on other networks or services.  These computers that are overtaken are called Zombies.   If your computer isn’t equipped with up-to-date anti-malware software and the latest version of your operating system, you could  be part of the problem.

Twitter has confirmed that its outage Thursday morning and subsequent intermittent problems were due to an ongoing denial-of-service attack.

Typically a DoS attack, which is often called a distributed denial-of-service attack, results when multiple computers simultaneously try to access the site in question. Usually the reason that happens is because the attacking PCs are infected with malware that does the dirty work for whoever is behind the attack.

* Using a good anti-malware suite from a reputable vendors. Pathway Solutions can help you do an analysis to see if you are infected.

* Making sure your operating system has the latest patches. Visit Microsoft and Apple security pages for information.  Using a provider to make sure that you are up to date is a worry free way of taking care of this.

* Avoid clicking on e-mail links that take you to Web sites you’re not familiar with (malware is often distributed through “drive-by downloads” from unrepeatable or infected sites). Recently I have seen where you will get an email from yourself with an attachment that is infected.  This is a common way that the attack is introduced to your network.

For more help with securing your network and making sure all your systems are up to date and virus free visit http://itpws.com

Pathway Solutions. Inc.
scott@itpws.com

425.374.0888

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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

We hear the buzz words about the social networks from the News, Late Night TV, even the Whitehouse and your local politician how everyone is Tweeting and they have a Face book page and are hooking up with old contacts through Linked in. How can you use these tools with your business to help drive traffic to your site? (more…)

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Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Microsoft recently launched the new decision engine called BING. Bing has now take over as the default IE Search rather than Windows Live and MSN live.

A decision engine works towards helping you find specific items such as purchases and travel. It can also help with everyday purchases as well and help to find your business listing. Bing pulls information in from several locations. Multiple Source Types: Web, Images, Instant Answer, Phonebook, Related Search, Spell, and more. (more…)

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Saturday, February 28th, 2009

• LinkHounds – a free information site about linking from Back Link Analyzer

• Linking101 – Larry Sullivan’s linking information website.
• Linking Matters – Ken McGaffin’s site about link building, offering the free Linking Matters report
• Andy Hagans – Andy  works for Text Link Ads, and also runs the Link Building Knowledge Base
• Alliance Link- Debra Mastaler’s link building site
• Eric Ward – Has been on the web a long time. He is a site announcement expert.
• PR Web – press release service.

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Saturday, February 28th, 2009

A recent study by InsightExpress, exploring participation trends across social networks, as well as how receptive their members are to advertising, found that  43% of the online population reports using a social networking site.  And, no matter their age or number of profiles, social networkers see advertising as a hot topic.

An almost simultaneous study by Netpop , “Social Networkers US,”  shows that social networkers are much more likely to shop and spend more online than their non-contributing peers. Social networkers buy a variety of products and services and spend an average of $101 online per month, the study found. This compares with non-contributors to social networks, who spend $80 per month.

The Netpop study found that social networking has grown 93% since 2006 and 76% of US broadband users (105 million) are active contributors to the web via social media. In addition, approximately 29%, or 40 million broadband users, are regular contributors to the web specifically through social networking sites and are spending increasing amounts of their online time communicating with each other, both one-to-one and one-to-many.

The top sources used by social networkers, says Netpop, when making shopping decisions are search engines, brand or manufacturer sites, online-only retail sales and auction sites. Some 6% also use social networking sites to decide what to buy.

Insight found that social networkers, when asked how willing they are to see advertising on their social network, claim that they are less willing to view marketing messages on sites where it is currently most obvious. This preference reinforces the idea that social networks are a unique medium in which advertising campaigns must be executed with great care.

What  are social network demographics:

In looking at the social network landscape, Netpop offers these Key findings about US social networkers:      

• Social networkers in the US are most likely to be single, employed women, age 18-39 and living somewhere between Indiana and the Atlantic Ocean, or along the west coast
• A typical social networker connects weekly with an average of 18 people one-to-one, and 110 people one-to-many
• Social networkers spend an average of 36% of their online time talking and sharing. This compares with 29% for non-contributors to social networks
• Social networkers use multiple modes to communicate and stay in touch. These include IM, texts, blogs and microblogs

Among social networkers who report having two or three profiles:

1. 25.6% are 18 to 24 yearss old
2. 23.3% are 25 to 34 years olds
3. 14.7% are 35 to 44 years old
4. 15.6% are 45 to 54 years old
5. 18.4% are 55 to 64 years old

Among people with four or more profiles:

• 31 percent are between the ages of 25 and 34
• 14.1 percent are 55 to 64 years old

It is my option to not try and tap into the advertising of the social network with your company put to participate in the social network function and connect with those who are a part of the social network function.

Your profile, link backs and professional opinion will go a lot further than your advertising on the social sites. Invest your time in the social network field and you will help build your transparent persona online.

Pathway Solutions, Inc.
Scott Kintz

To review this whole article or to see the data used in this article go here. 

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Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

An effective websites will take considerable planning, development and effort on your part to get everything how you want it. Once you’ve made your initial investment and have your site up and running, the job continues in keep it updated and maintained.

Your web site content is like the oil in your car. You have to update and change it every so often or it will not longer be effective. Despite all the time or money you put into its design and hosting, if you neglect it, it will provide modest or little benefit in return. The success of your web venture will rely much on the amount of attention and maintenance you put into it.

Here are Four Reasons Why Regular Web Maintenance is Important (more…)

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Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

Site Layout and Design:

When you have your site designed there are several ways to have a site built. With the technology for pages always changing you want to be flexible on how you can update your site. Do not get locked into a design that you have to depend on someone else to change a sentence or make a correction.

Here is a quick overview of the design process that Pathway Solutions uses to design each site.

Separate the functions:

· Content:
The content of your site is stored in a MySQL data base and is accessible by you through the Content Management System (CMS) anytime you want to access the content for each page of your site. (more…)

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Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

How to optimize your site:

For most small businesses there are a few simple rules that you need to know and follow to help with your search engine optimization:

1. Have a good understanding of your offering

2. Know what your unique selling position is

3. Know your competition

4. Understand the resources that are available to help your campaign

5. Learn good SEO practices

To help identify your core offering it is a good idea to work on an elevator pitch for your company. How would you explain your company and your core offering if you had 20 seconds to do so. Generate a two sentence pitch that explains who you are and what your company does.

Pathway Solutions, Inc. is an outsource network infrastructure and web development company. We specialize in helping small business with planning and implementing their technology needs from networks, computers, phones, printers, workflow and online web presence.

Now that you have a good elevator pitch this can be used as a start for your keywords, page descriptions and submitting your site to the search engines.

(more…)

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Monday, January 5th, 2009

SEO What is it?

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimization,”. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Black and White Search Engine Optimization

SEO techniques can be classified into two broad categories:

White hat techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design. White hats tend to produce results that last a long time.

Black hat those techniques of which search engines do not approve. Black hats anticipate that their sites may eventually be banned either temporarily or permanently once the search engines discover what they are doing.

The Core of white hat SEO is fairly simple:

· Understand how your site pages are viewed by the search engines.

· Design your site for human visitors first and optimize the pages for Search Engines 2^nd.

· Know your key words that are effective in search results

· Customize the tags for each page to be unique to the content that you have on that page

· Do not be overly aggressive with SEO techniques such as keyword stuffing, and hidden text

· Create new content for your site and optimize that content for the search engines

SEO Basic Training Part 3 of 4

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Friday, November 21st, 2008

Truth 1. Getting noticed by spiders, robots, and crawlers

Spiders, robots, and crawlers are your friends. In the name of search engine optimization, you’ll not only learn to love them, but you’ll actually go out of your way to attract them to your site.

In SEO, spiders, robots, and crawlers are more or less synonymous, but don’t worry unduly—none have legs or feelers. So, let’s consolidate and just use the term “crawler,” shall we? Just bear in mind that you’ll sometimes want to attract robots, or lace your site with “spider bait.” All belong to the same principle.

(more…)

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Sunday, September 28th, 2008

Social network applications such as twitter have a high noise to value ratio. So can it be used in a way to benefit the every day business?  Or is the noise ratio too high to get any use out of Twitter in your business?

I guess the first question that needs to be asked is do you know what Twitter is?

I recently dug into Twitter a little more and had a chance to discuss this with some other professionals at the infocamp held in Seattle this weekend.   But this got me wondering if Twitter would apply in a business application or if it was more for the social network personal use.

Before anyone can comment on this I guess you have to understand a little more about how Twitter works. This is a good video that explains what Twitter is in common language.

(more…)

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Thursday, July 10th, 2008

A common question we hear from people is whether or not it makes sense to go to college to learn web design. The short answer is “yes”, but the long answer isn’t much sexier, it’s just “yes, quite a lot.” The web was once a thing your high schooler could build for you with modest adeptitude, but those days went away as soon as the users of the web realized that your kid’s design, however well intentioned, looked and worked terribly. (more…)

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Monday, May 26th, 2008

If you’ve ever seen a site made entirely of pretty Flash pages, you know it can look unique and very catchy. Almost “Flashy,” if you will. But if you’ve seen enough of these sites you’ve likely noticed some obvious problems, but there are many more considerations lying beneath the surface you might not have even considered.

The first problem is one of functionality. Poorly written scripts are often riddled with bugs. If you’re going to run full-tilt with Flash, you’re going to have to test the heck out of it, and not just yourself in your one browser on your one computer. (more…)

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Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

If you’ve even remotely heard of this latest technological innovation called “the internet”, it’s all but certain you’ve likewise already come to understand the benefit of the blog. See, whatever it is you do all day, you write about, others get to read about it, and by an economy of scale, some of them will consider you an expert. Pretty slick, assuming you actually know what you’re doing.

You have two basic options:

Go through the trouble of setting up your own blog or use a blogging service like the one offered to select buyers over at ITPWS.com. Do it on your own, and establish your own voice, but if you can’t be bothered to invent the mastery of the writing craft, maybe you should consider having it done for you, assuming, again, that you have a business that actually has a product to sell.

If you’re striking out on your own with a blog, and have all the inclination and none of the disposable income, the very best solution (according to every member of our staff, who have collectively launched almost a thousand sites) is WordPress.

You can download a full-featured version to put on your site for free (if your host doesn’t already offer it automatically) or use a scaled-back version on their site. It’s pretty good, interactive, and unless you want it to look like a seamless part of your own site, it should do the trick just about perfectly.

There are other sites with content management systems you might be interested in, such as PHPNuke, PostNuke or Drupal. Each of these are a bit more advanced than you’d need for a blog (and by “a bit” I really mean “a lot”), but if you’ve got the coding prowess or a developer handy to build them out, you can use these base installations to afford greater upside potential in the future. Of course, your native CMS should have that functionality, and WordPress can be configured (even if against its will) to do just about anything you can dream up.

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Monday, April 7th, 2008

Choosing a proper domain name can have a huge impact in terms of how it affects your position and ranking on the major search engines. Search engine ranking can mean the difference between languishing in obscurity or getting so crushed with traffic your host wonders what you’re doing right.

Some Critical Factors Your Domain Name (URL) should:
1. Contain key words, whenever possible,
2. Be as short as possible, easy to remember, easy to spell, and easy to share verbally,
3. A dot-com extension. Forget the .us, .biz, .us and other such extensions. When I tell you to check out Amazon, you assume it’s dot-com, and so does everybody else.

1. Key Words in your Domain Name / URL (more…)

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Monday, April 7th, 2008

Imagine a simple question: how does business blogging work, and a complicated answer article: business blogging works like this, and let’s work forward from there. I always try to answer the most common blog questions within a business framing, but when it comes to tech and integration, though I do my very best, it’s honestly just about anybody’s best guess. (more…)

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Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

Once you’re running a company newsletter or business blog, you’ll have a face in front of customers you’ve never even met. Just like you dress for the business you’re in, you need to talk with a certain professionalism. The same is true for your written materials. It’s just one more impression you make on your customers.

I interviewed a vice president at Washington Mutual some years back, and I asked him about his fancy gold watch. It was a bevel-faced Concord, a $20,000 timepiece, according to him. I asked him why he would wear such a thing and he told me that 80% of his clients don’t notice a nice watch and couldn’t care less, but the other 20% do notice and do care, and it’s that last 20% he needed to impress. (more…)

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Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

HTML Source EditorWord wrapSince your site is an extension of your business, you know you have to treat it like such. You first have to get in front of people and tell them you exist before they can tell your friends about you. The web linking component of Search Engine Optimization is not too different. The more friends you have, the more Google will think of you as the popular people, and from there it can start to grow.

In the early, easily corrupted days of the internet, all you needed was a bunch of sites linking to you, and you were golden. It didn’t matter what they were or the reputation of the sites, it just mattered that they had a link pointing to you. This was quickly exploited, destroyed, and factored out of the search engine algorithms.

Now they look at who links to you and how they link to you. The details are all very hush-hush, but those of us in the SEO game for a decade have it figured out pretty well.

Benefits to having good links pointing to your site:

1 – Search engines will see that you are popular and increase your rank accordingly.

2 – Since there are more sites pointing to you, your site will be crawled by search engine spiders more frequently.

3 – Real readers representing organic traffic will increase. This is listed last because it is the least of the benefits, but still very real.

There are many different types of links and each one has a different value and purpose. Figuring them out is easier than actually getting them to happen, but knowing what they are each worth is more important still.

Relevant Link Swap – If you can find someone with a similar web site, ask him or her to link to you. If you sell real estate in Seattle, ask a real estate web site in New York to link to you. You aren’t competitors, so trading links in this way can be an effective way to direct traffic without hurting either site’s business. You should never pay for this type of link; that falls under the heading of “sponsored links.”

A word of caution, however, if you’re going to ask to trade links: don’t say “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Instead, post a link to them and say, “I have already linked to you; will you also link to me.” If they say no or ignore you, no big deal, just remove the link.

Make certain too that you’re trading equitable link positions. If they link you on every page, you need to do the same. If they bury you on a links page, you should do the same.

Directory / DMOZ.org Links – Define your business and find the best category within DMOZ.org, and follow the link at the bottom of that page to submit your site for inclusion. DMOZ is a highly regarded directory site and having your link there will automatically include you in Google Directory and many other sites that look for easy content to flesh out their offerings without any work. We have already said that these automatically generated sites perform poorly, but these low-level links will not hurt you and will get your name out in the market.

Don’t worry about hitting every single one, since most of them run on the same database, but if you can find a fair handful, a few hours investment can payoff in the long run.

Sponsored Links – Many sites offer to sell sponsored links. They often appear at the bottom of pages, sometimes at the bottom right. These are the least valuable ad spaces, which is why they are so affordable. Don’t count on seeing big traffic (or any at all), but know that buying them helps search engines find you and realize your relevance.

Since you’re likely going to pay as much as $10 per month for these (assuming your link goes to every page of their site, not some obscure single page, which you should never purchase), you need to make certain this is a high-traffic, high-relevance site.

Contextual Links – If you can find a long-standing web publication to sell you keyword driven links pointing to your site, these are the very best to buy. I worked for a company that would broker deals between leading publications and advertisers where article keywords in news publications like “concert” or “football game” would point to an event ticket reseller.

These help the most because the links pointing to your site are now equated in the minds of the search engines with those terms.

A word of caution, however, if you’re going to ask to trade links: don’t say “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Instead, post a link to them and say, “I have already linked to you; will you also link to me.” If they say no or ignore you, no big deal, just remove the link.

Make certain too that you’re trading equitable link positions. If they link you on every page, you need to do the same. If they bury you on a links page, you should do the same.

Directory / DMOZ.org Links – Define your business and find the best category within DMOZ.org, and follow the link at the bottom of that page to submit your site for inclusion. DMOZ is a highly regarded directory site and having your link there will automatically include you in Google Directory and many other sites that look for easy content to flesh out their offerings without any work. We have already said that these automatically generated sites perform poorly, but these low-level links will not hurt you and will get your name out in the market.

Don’t worry about hitting every single one, since most of them run on the same database, but if you can find a fair handful, a few hours investment can payoff in the long run.

Sponsored Links – Many sites offer to sell sponsored links. They often appear at the bottom of pages, sometimes at the bottom right. These are the least valuable ad spaces, which is why they are so affordable. Don’t count on seeing big traffic (or any at all), but know that buying them helps search engines find you and realize your relevance.

Since you’re likely going to pay as much as $10 per month for these (assuming your link goes to every page of their site, not some obscure single page, which you should never purchase), you need to make certain this is a high-traffic, high-relevance site.

Contextual Links – If you can find a long-standing web publication to sell you keyword driven links pointing to your site, these are the very best to buy. I worked for a company that would broker deals between leading publications and advertisers where article keywords in news publications like “concert” or “football game” would point to an event ticket reseller.

These help the most because the links pointing to your site are now equated in the minds of the search engines with those terms.

How to implement these links

Ideally, you should do these on your own. Nobody knows relevance to your industry and your company as well as you do. When it comes to purchasing links, however, you may wish to hire an outside agent. You should be able to find a single agent who can broker better deals by volume than you may be able to get. First ask your web designer what they know and if they can help you.

And if you’re reading this and wondering what to do, post your questions below with thoughts and ideas about costs and I’ll do my best to respond with specific answers.

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