Maki & Brian DeLaet EduCyber founders

August 2005 EduNotes

Inside this edition of EduNotes: Suffering from TADS?, Connecting Online, Google does it again, getting more visitors to your web site and a brief introduction to blogging. Send feedback or questions to edunotes@educyber.com .

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TADS
Do you suffer from Technology Attention Deficit Syndrome? That's what we've named the alarming habit of starting off working (or meeting or conferencing) about something related to your work and ending up being focused on the technology instead.
This often happens when you've got the latest bells ‘n whistles and someone else is so impressed that the focus shifts from the content to the mode of delivery. This often happened (and still does unfortunately) with the rise of PowerPoint presentations. People would be so impressed with the transitions from slide to slide that that became the focus.
Just last week I was at a conference and on more than one occasion, the direction of the presentation threatened to descend into the “How did he do that?” realm instead of the staying in the “Wow, what an incredible message!” realm. And, I confess, I was one of the lead perpetrators as the new iBooks are really something to behold – but that is a story for another day.
If you're not interested in having technology steal your steam, stay focused. When the urge to look at the how instead of the what or why becomes strong, offer to discuss this AFTER the meeting. Or offer to schedule another time when the how of the matter can be the topic.
We're not saying don't use the cool tools. There are some technologies out there that, in addition to being “mind-blowing”, can improve productivity and improve your business. What we are saying is keep the focus on the task at hand or you'll likely blow the day instead.

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Meet Me Online
No, this is not an e-harmony commercial. Options for meeting people online have increased dramatically over the last couple of years. Whether your need is for personal use or business use, you have an interesting range of options.
First, of course, is instant messaging. MSN, AOL (AIM) and Yahoo all have their own product for instant messaging. It's a fast and efficient way to communicate with others in real time without picking up the phone – or while on the phone with someone else. Talking to a customer who wants a product you just ran out of, instant message your vendor and find out if they have some in stock and give the customer an answer without having to “get back to you later”.
An intriguing option we've been hearing more about lately is gotomeeting. We've been happy fans and customers of gotomypc for several years now and the same folks are making it extremely easy to hook up online. This isn't a free service so is most likely to be used for business. We also know of several churches and church organizations using gotomeeting to save costs for geographically dispersed meetings.
Microsoft has their netmeeting program that is now being hooked up with their Live Communications Server and gives business users a great way to hook up and share presentations and whiteboards or simply chat online.
For more personal use there is the Yahoo Groups (which is the grand-daddy of the free groups), Google Groups and a host of other sites that provide free online groups. Groups are group email lists. Instead of having to have everyone in a group create AND maintain a complete address book of everyone in the group, the online service controls it for you. And there is a range of privacy controls from allowing you to make your group open to anyone to closed groups only for those you invite to join. In between you can have people request to join your group and you then either grant or deny their request. Many places also archive your emails for you so you can go back and find messages that were sent long ago. That feature is great for businesses and is the reason many bigger businesses are now bringing such groups and chats in-house so they can benefit from all the discussions as well. Imagine you learn of someone in a remote place like northern Alaska that has a key skill and you relay that information through a group. Two years later when such a skill is needed again, a quick search of the archive database reveals the contact information for that contact.
If you haven't yet explored groups or any of these methods of meeting online and would like assistance choosing the one best for your business needs, give us a call today at 720-275-4646.

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Google Earth
While it may seem like we are an ongoing Google advertisement, the truth of the matter is that Google keeps coming out with cutting edge products that knock our socks off so much we just have to tell you about them.
Google Earth is one of them. Though it should be called Google Fly. If you are like me and have your nose pressed to the window every time your plane takes off, you might want to use Google Earth just to get more of that feeling.
So what is Google Earth you may ask? It is a satellite imaging program. It is a mapping program. It is a local “What's in the neighborhood?” program. It is a bird's eye view of just about anywhere program. And it isn't far from being a “look at me I'm flying” program.
Visit earth.google.com to download the program. The download is about 11 MB. It installs quite quickly and we recommend accepting the default choices while installing. Upon running it the first time, you are greeting with a globe. Click on the globe and you can drag it around to get different views. Looking for Asia ? Just click and drag until you see the country you want. Then you can zoom in and, for the flyover effect, change the tilt. If you don't like the view with north to the top, click the rotate button until you've got the view you want.
It's mouse friendly as well. Use the left button to “move” the map – move from Colorado to California , for example. Use the right button to click and drag for zooming in and out. Use the scroll wheel to tilt or rotate the image.
For $20 you can get Google Earth Plus and start putting all kinds of information such as reading tracks and waypoints from your GPS. If you really like what you see and want even more, Google Earth Pro lets you use all kinds of different data for presentations. There are a variety of modules and each costs $200. Visit the web site to learn more.
But be careful – the program is so fascinating, you could find that hours have drifted by while you've been “playing” with it (see the article on TADS above to find out why this is not a good thing).

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What are you searching for?
How and what do you search for? Do you use Google like most of the rest of the world? What about Yahoo? MSN? AOL? Excite? There are still a TON of search engines available. Each will bring you different results because they use a different formula or algorithm for ranking the sites they've indexed.
But what do you search for? Think about your business. If someone wanted to find you, what words do you think they'd use? I recently had a client, let's say an auto dealer client that wanted to be ranked highly for “financing available”. I suggested they re-think that term as financing available could apply to mortgage lenders, LASIK surgeons, furniture stores and many other kinds of businesses that sell expensive goods or services. “Auto loan financing available” or “auto loan financing” would be far better terms to seek to be ranked for. Again, the key is to think like a customer. Would a car buyer type in “financing available” to find a car? Not likely. What about “auto loan financing available”? It seems more likely they'd leave the available off and just go for “auto loan financing”.
But we're not done yet. Would I, living in the Denver suburb of Wheat Ridge , be interested in a New York or California dealer? Probably not. I'd probably type something like “ Denver auto loan financing” or “ Denver area auto loan financing” or even “front range auto loan financing” if I were a car buyer that needed to make sure financing was available.
So as the business owner, I'd want to tailor the key words / phrases according to the needs of the customer. “ denver auto loan financing”, “buy car wheat ridge Colorado ”, “car dealerships west Denver ” are all phrases that I, as a customer would try so they are phrases that the dealer should attempt to be ranked high for.
Need help getting your site ranked? EduCyber offers an affordable package for search engine optimization and submission. Call us today (720 275-4646) to request more information.

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Blogging
Almost sounds like something dirty, doesn't it? Actually blogging, short for web logging, is a way for each of us to get our thoughts online for the whole world to see. Blogging has grown in popularity quite rapidly and has, fortunately or unfortunately, become a major source of news in today's world.
The good part is that, for the popular blogs, 1000's of sets of eyes can check over information to see if it seems accurate or not. The downside is that there are some way out there blogs that many people take as factual representation of events.
To find out more about blogs or to get started on your own visit one of these sites:
http://www.bloogz.com/
http://www.bloglines.com/
http://www.weblogs.com/
http://www.blog.com/

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© 2005 EduCyber, Inc. This newsletter is brought to you by EduCyber, Inc. EduNotes can be viewed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week online at http://www.educyber.com/edunotes/ (Subscription form can be found there as well). Visit us on the web at http://www.educyber.com or call us at (720) 275-4646. Permission is hereby granted to redistribute all or part of this newsletter as long as this entire copyright message is included.
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