A couple of days ago I talked about Microsoft’s new Silverlight player and streaming service.  So, I thought it only appropriate that I try it out.

So, today, I used a demonstration video for our ValuedClientSystem.com product to test the encoding software and streaming service.  The video is currently available as a Flash video on our main ValuedClientSystem.com website. Here’s what I did to create the Silverlight version:

1. I downloaded and installed the new (still in beta) Expression Media Encoder product and entered the 180 day trial key (available on the download page).
2. I created myself a streaming account by visiting the streaming site.
3. The video was originally created using Camtasia Studio (you can see the original demo video here in flash which is 6.8mb).  so, I went back into Camtasia and published the video as a straight AVI file without compression - this 5 minute 43 second video came out at 1.81GB and I would use this file as input to Microsoft’s new encoder.
4. After importing the AVI file in to the Expression Media Encoder I needed to choose the settings for output.  Now, the free streaming account has some file size and bandwidth limitations.  Essentially the maximum 700Kbps would support a video length of 4.3 minutes, or at 300Kbps that’s 10 minutes of video.  So, I experimented with the output profile to find a combination of bit rate, frame rate and height/width.  This took me a few encodings (it took about 5 minutes to encode my 5 minute 43 second video).  The final profile looked like the picture on the right.
   Note that I also selected a template in the media encoder output options which then causes the necessary Silverlight files to be produced.
   I found that that if you upload a Silverlight application that is above the supported streaming limits, it still displays, just with an annoying bar across the middle of your video displaying a count corresponding to the current play position in the video.
5. Then I followed the instructions on the silverlight development site to create a silverlight application.  basically, create a file called manifest.xml (simply copied from the instructions);  then zip this file along with the others described in the instructions in to a single zip file.
6. Upload the zip file as an application using my new streaming account (simply select the ‘Upload a Silverlight Application’ under Manage Applications).
7. Then I followed the 3 steps given straight after the upload process, which provide a snippet of HTML to include at the top of my web page, then insert the provided HTML on the page where I wanted the video file to appear and finally it provides a line of code to include in a new file that I create called CreateSilverlight.js.
8. You can see the final result of these efforts in this ValuedClientSystem.com demonstration video in Silverlight.

Apart from the ‘guess work’ required in choosing the encoding options (which I’m sure there is a sensible way to alleviate), the process is very straight forward.  Well, actually if you’re not used to working with HTML source code perhaps it would be pretty odd.  I’m sure that as tools for Silverlight come to market, these ‘code’ steps will be done automatically - just like the way Camtasia isolates you from it this kind of requirement with Flash or Windows Media videos today.

So, what about the result?  Well, I like the idea that my web hosting account doesn’t have to take the bandwidth hit for streaming video (there are other ways to avoid this like u-tube branded video or of one of the media streaming hosters).  But I’m not convinced about the quality of the output.  If you compare the Flash video produced by
Camtasia with the Windows Media Encoder output - the Flash quality is better and the media file is 2MB smaller.

I suspect this has something to do with the fact that the folks at TechSmith have made good choices for me about the Flash encoding.  And indeed, if I use Camtasia to produce a Windows Media file version of the same project, the file is much smaller (half the size of the Flash file) and much better quality.  Hmmm… I still plenty to learn about the Silverlight encoding process… I’ll let you if I make progress here (or, please feel free to add helpful comments to this post!)

-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

On 30th April Microsoft made a major announcement and update to a new product it calls Silverlight.

Silverlight is a web browser plug-in for playing rich media content, much like you would expect with Adobe’s Flash player.  Unusually for Microsoft, this is a cross platform and cross browser plug-in, tested on Windows in Internet Explorer and Firefox and on a Mac in Safari and Firefox and on Windows based mobile devices like PDA’s and Smartphones.

Of course, Adobe already provides coverage of these platforms, so there must be something different and special for Microsoft to make any kind of impact with this type of application.

In my Beyond the Browser piece last month I gave the example of the British Libraries ‘Turning The Pages‘ application as being beyond the browser… using the internet as a delivery mechanism, but not using HTML like a typical web page.  The problem with the Turning the Pages application is that it is designed to run only on Microsoft Windows - which if you run a Mac is frustrating.

Well, this new Silverlight product has the ability to run this style of ‘rich interactive application’ cross platform.  Well, yes, OK, just like Flash.

There appear to be three unique benefits Microsoft is leaning on:

1. Very high quality video - right up to 720p, High Definition and using standard encoding which means that millions of hours of video is already compatible with the player.  AND very low cost (staring FREE) video streaming (sign-up here).
2. Great tools support for building rich interactive applications
3. Integration with HTML and AJAX applications

Imagin having high definition video streamed to your web browser!  I still don’t have a HD compatible TV (I know, I’m lagging, I’ll get there), but I do have an HD compatible computer monitor

What’s just as exciting is that Microsoft are offering the ability to host your own video on their streaming servers so you and your customers can stream it - saving you having to spend money on the bandwidth (and no U-Tube type branding).

Now, this ‘free streaming’ has limits, but even after final release of the products, 1 million minutes of streaming at 700 Kbps will still be free.  For the details of bandwidth limits etc take a look at the What You Gettt section of the Silverlight streaming page.

Great tools can make a huge different to the speed of technology adoption.  If it’s easy and inexpensive to do something great, that’s a great start.

Microsoft is in the process of releasing its Expression product set for web designers, and it has extended these tools to support Silverlight.  Specifically Expression Media for encoding video, Expression Design for creating graphical elements and Expression Blend for combining graphics, video and user interaction.  Again you can read all about these products on Microsoft’s site.

The key for me, in a nutshell is that they provide a clean and straightforward ‘programming’ model.  I find the Adobe Action Script approach somewhat frustrating - though clearly there are some very proficient people out there that don’t have that problem.

Finally, the HTML and AJAX application support means that Silverlight applications can easily interact with the web pages that host them; this should result in a much better experience for the website user!

There’s plenty more to Silverlight than I’ve discussed here and you can read more here., but I hope you’ve got the flavour.  Rich interactive applications on the web take another leap forward.

-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

Just last week I was talking with a friend who works in the online adverting industry.

Of course, Google’s new pay-per-action extension of AdWords came up. And I learned something about CPA - cost-per-action, that I just hadn’t appreciated.

The CPA and so pay-per-action model was, in fact, around BEFORE CPC - cost-per-click, the model used in Google’s Pay-Per-Click AdWord’s product. I knew that about CPM - cost-per-impression, but not about CPA (not something I appreciate when I wrote my previous post on this subject.).

Well, blow me down.

So what’s all the fuss. Pay-per-click is in fact the more innovative product according to history; not this new pay-per-action.

Well, the real challenge is the combination of accurate tracking, pay-per-action AND, the real challenge, a bidding engine (so advertisers pay top dollar for top actions).

If Google can pull off these three things, then it seems they will have a unique advantage in this ‘old hat’ approach that could really change the online marketing industry … again!

-Mark

It’s perfectly normal to associate the internet with web browsing. After all, isn’t the internet the place we go to look at websites for fun, for research, for commerce…? Of course it is.

And to prove this connection there’s still a battle going on for the best web browser - is it Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla’s FireFox, Opera Software’s Opera or something entirely different?

In fact, the internet is a network. A network to which millions of computers around the planet can connect.

So what? I hear you say!

Well, networks allow computers to talk about anything.

Banks use networks to perform electronic funds transfer.

Telephones connect to each other through networks so we can speak to our neighbour or a relative on the other side of the world.

Businesses run their accounting systems, customer systems, HR systems and much more using their networks.

When you expand your view of the internet as a network with the ability to connect just about any computer in world to any other, does that expand what you might like to do with it?

In our business, like many others, we use a VOIP service. VOIP stands for Voice Over IP; IP stands for Internet Protocol; for Internet Protocol, just read Internet. So, VOIP is simply ‘telephone services over the Internet’.

We have telephone support for our ValuedClientSystem.com e-business software. The support professionals are based in the USA. And using our internet phone service someone in the United Kingdom can call a local telephone number and actually speak with support in the USA.

If you use Microsoft Windows you’ve probably used Windows Media player or something similar. If you put a music CD in to your computer, it will go an find the album cover graphics using the internet. It’s not a web browser, it’s using a service over the internet.

Perhaps you use an email reader like Microsoft Outlook. It’s using your email provider, e.g. Hotmail, AOL, GMail etc as a service over the internet.

You may have seen Google’s Google Earth application that runs as an application on Windows - not the web browser version, the application that runs on your Windows computer. Google also have a client application for their AdWords advertising product called the AdWords Editor.

Software like Keyword Elite and SEO Elite are common tools for internet marketing that use services available on the internet and are not web browsers.

So, the word ‘Internet’ might lead us quickly to think about Web Browsers and Web Browsers have been about HTML. But we all use services on the internet that are beyond the browser. And I think this trend is going to continue.

What’s my Point: the next generation of applications follows these example beyond the capabilities of today’s web browsers using the internet as a network to deliver user experiences and capabilities beyond the browser.

I’ve listed several of beyond the browser examples above. And there is a trend to extend the browser to host applications that have nothing to do with HTML.

In fact Adobe’s Flash is a very common example of something we often see via a browser, but in fact doesn’t use HTML - the raw language of a web browser.

Microsoft recently released a technology called ‘Windows Presentation Foundation’. Not quite as nifty a name as ‘Flash’ but certainly clever technology. If you have broadband and are running Windows Vista (or Windows XP with Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0 installed) then feast your eyes on the British Libraries ‘Turning The Pages‘ application for a sample of the technology.

It uses beyond the browser technology (Windows Presentation Foundation) to make precious texts like Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, that you could previously only be see by physically visiting the British Library available to a much wider audience… enjoy.

-Mark

The original web based advertising model was based on a cost-per-impression model or CPM.  The simplest description of CPM is that advertiser pays for the number of times their advert is displayed.  Say, $50 per 1000 impressions or 5c an impression.

This model is still alive and well.  Even Google, who through their revenue have proved to be the masters at cost-per-click, or pay-per-click as their feature is called, now provide a cost-per-impression model in their popular AdWords product.

I'm sure you're familiar with the idea of cost-per-click or pay-per-click advertising, even if you've only heard about it.  You bid for the the position of your advert and you only pay Google if an end-user actually clicks your ad.

The magic of Google's model comes in the way that adverts are chosen for display.  Picking them based on the relevance to the website displaying the ad or using the search terms the user types into the search engine.  In either case, it's automatically targeted advertising - brilliant.  Surely an advertisers dream?

But, pay-per-click is not without its challenges.  The biggest of which is click fraud; where ads are clicked by malicious competitors to cost the advertiser money or to make money for the website displaying the advert.

Google appear to be proactive in dealing with click fraud.  But there is another advertising approach which goes some way towards dealing with the problem.  And, so may replace pay-per-click as the preferred advertising model in the near future.  It's called cost-per-action advertising or CPA.

I came across cost-per-action through service provided at ModernClick.com. It's pretty straight forward to understand the idea.  Rather than paying for a click, you pay only if your website visitor performs a specific action, like buying a product or opting-in to your newsletter.

Well, on 20th March 2007, Google announced the beta of their pay-per-action extension to AdWords, implementing cost-per-action advertising. 

It seems like a very sensible approach giving the advertiser an even clearer connection between advertising cost and results.  You may decide that its worth paying $1 for every new newsletter sign-up and $10 for every product sale.

Although creating your adverts and setting your action price isn't the end of the story.  Website owners in Google's site network (Google AdSense account holders signed up to this feature) need to choose your adverts. That could mean that a competing product advertiser willing to pay $15 or $20 per sale of a similar product may get picked over yours.

In the long run, the sites that have the best sale conversion to CPA commission rates will be the winners.  After all, there's no point displaying adverts for a product that pays you $100 per sale if the conversion rate gives you only one sale a week, against a competing product resulting in $10 per sale but converting 5 a day for an overall $250 commission.

To the advertiser it sounds similar to an affiliate model.  Here you typically pay a commission, say 20% of the product sale price, per sale to an affiliate.  With CPA you have the same opportunity to pay a 'commission' for a product sale.

Of course, it's slightly different for the website displaying the adverts. They will only receive their commission after Google has taken its profitable slice.  But, something tells me that this won't stop it becoming a success.

The beta for Google's pay-per-action feature is available to those with AdWords accounts in the U.S..  Being based in the UK we don't have one of those; but if you do, it may well be worth signing up before the hordes move in, increasing the amount you have to bid to make your 'actions' attractive.

-Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

What do you think it is?

I haven’t done a survey, but I have been around for a few years it seems to me that there is one topic that just keeps coming back.  Like safety in motor racing or brain damage in boxing this one doesn’t go away.

There are certainly fads and trends that take us away from the topic in its raw form.  But, at the end of the day an internet site is nothing without it.

I’m sure you’ve guessed by now.

When you look for a location to build or buy commercial property as a retail outlet or other business that requires your clientele to visit you.  A big consideration is the number of people that walk or drive past your property.

It’s the same with a web site.  You may as well not have bothered creating a site if people never see it.  The buzz word then is… traffic.

And if you want to be more specific, it’s targeted traffic!  That is people visiting your site that are interested in what your site is offering.

We’re just building a web site for a dancer and model.  The aim of the site is to provide agencies and other people interested in hiring a dancer or model enough information to want to contact him for audition.

It’s nice if I visit his site.  But given that right now I have no need for a model or dancer, I wouldn’t be targeted traffic.

In fact, given that ‘bandwidth’ is one of the commodities we pay for on the internet you might argue that I’m bad traffic.

So, how do you get targeted traffic?

The reason that this topic just keeps coming back is that 1) there is no single answer, 2) people invent new ways all the time and 3) there are always new sites cropping up that want targeted traffic!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is one of the areas that addresses targeted traffic – and it’s an alluring one.  After all, if a search engine delivers you traffic it’s typically both targeted (people were searching for something relevant to your site) and free.

Because of this allure SEO gets a lot of bandwidth!  My only advice when looking for an SEO solution is that if the promise looks unbelievable (we guarantee number 1 on Google) then it probably shouldn’t be believed.

I’m sure there are exceptions but as a rule of thumb there is probably plenty of small print behind a statement like that.

You can find some of my own thoughts about traffic using SEO on one of our experimental sites: SEO Articles at OnlineMarketersChoice

One of my favourite techniques (and importantly some steps on how to do it) is covered in this $7, 14 page article by Gordon Bryan.

Finally, here’s a list of 10 traffic generation ideas, many of which I’m sure I’ll expand on in the future and all of which have been expanded on by somebody!!

1. Write and publish articles
2. Use pay-per-click advertising
3. Traditional marketing – how many of Jay Conrad Levinson’s 100 Guerilla Marketing Wepons are you using?
4. PR, do something interesting enough for journalists to write about it
5. Contribute to community sites (bulletin boards, newsgroups, blogs)
6. Use search engine optimization techniques
7. Create a great affiliate program
   Find and work with other businesses through joint ventures
8. Use Email Permission Marketing
9. Make it easy and compelling for current customers or visitors to tell others about your services through viral marketing
10. Oh yes, and, write a blog!

Take care,
Mark

Mark Quirk is a director at Know It Use It Ltd
http://www.ValuedClientSystem.com - From Prospects to Customers to Valued Clients
http://www.VCSHosts.co.uk – Create Your Online Business In A Box

I know, I’m a bit late commenting on Web 2.0, but I thought it was about time.  The term came from O’Reilly publishing and the classic description comes from Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0.

I guess given that they invented the term, it’s not really for anyone else to re-interpret or describe it.  So, like many before me, that’s just what I’ll do

Here’s the essence in my view:

• People Power: both individual voice and community.  The very successful Wikipedia is a good example of community.  A large number of people contributing a small amount of knowledge to deliver an awesome resource for everyone to use and benefit.

  And of course blogs are a great example of personal power.  Without having to know web technology like HTML people can make their views and comments public for the world to see.
   

• Technology: over the years web technology has expanded and a critical element for Web 2.0 is technology like AJAX (yes, I know, another description required).  The key benefit is improved usability of web pages and sites, when its well applied.
   
• Maturity: is it possible to invent something new?  Aren’t all new things based in some part on a concept, idea or implementation of something that has gone before it?

  So invention is also evolution and it’s this evolution that contributes to the last part of Web 2.0 in my view.  Take a written log or diary, the ability to edit a web page using a web page based editor, the idea of conversation threads in web forums (or bulletin boards) and a desire and out pop’s a Web Log (see Wikipedia for more background!).

So, lets give it a clearer name: Mature People Web Technology.  Yes, perfect - the web for old people - doh!  Oh well, congratulations go to O’Reilly for their brilliant naming.

Enjoy,
Mark

Here at VCSHosts the ability to use AJAX, have a blog, a wiki or forum software and other ‘Web 2.0′ features are of course fully catered for.  We can design sites that include them or leave it entirely up you.

We do business online and we help other people and companies do business online. And so this blog is about life… oh yes and doing business online.

Feel free to join in with comments and your own postive thoughts and helpful tips!

May your targetted traffic blossom,
Mark Quirk & Paul Quirk