Nextwave Media - Creative Internet Solutions

Tourism Australia and Cricket Australia have started an advertising campaign targeting UK cricket fans based on the successful “where the bloody hell are you” campaign, but linked to a web site. What’s interesting however is that this is not a high budget flashy web site, but a (free) MySpace website. The web site www.tuffersinoz.com will follow former England spinner Phil Tufnell’s travels in Australia for the Ashes series, including travel plans to help UK travel agents. You’ll note that the URL redirects to http://www.myspace.com/tuffersinoz.

Why use MySpace? Well, it is a community site with millions of users. It’s very cool and trendy to be seen developing in this space. As to its effectiveness, well hard to say at this point, but certainly MySpace is an online marketing phenomenon that has captured the attention of millions of young web users, and the not so young.

The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests.

Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

Link to the full article

Here is an interesting insight into what Google’s plans are for Australia.

http://www.abc.net.au/insidebusiness/content/2006/s1797620.htm

It’s also interesting that business analysts may not see Google in the same way that Google sees itself.

Have you ever lost all of your browser favourites?

Or for those who arn’t already nodding, have you ever had trouble finding that site you bookmarked in that giant list on the favourites menu?

Sure, if you know what your looking for or the words you used to search for previously, then a quick google can get you back to where you were before. But what about those times where you found a gem site and can’t remember how you found it.

The answer is of course to favourite that site for later and tag (categorize by tag words) it.

Soon enough you have a huge list of favourites that you can’t sort through, and then if you’re like many other people, you forget to back up your favourites, only to loose them during the dreaded bi-annual windows re-format and re-install dance.

Say goodbye to all of those problems.

A research note by CitiGroup analyst suggests that Google will become the highest-trafficked site on the planet a year from now. Mark Mahaney based his advice to the investors on September 2006 data from ComScore showing Yahoo! receiving 129,724,000 million unique visitors over that month and Google ranking 4th with 107,365,000 unique visitors. So “Mahaney notes its unique visitors are up 22% from last year, by far the biggest gainer among the Web sites. Using the present growth rates of the top 20 Web properties as a guide, Mahaney says Google will become the top Internet destination in late 2007.” For the record, on the European continent Google sites are already ranked at #1, ahead of Microsoft/MSN, Yahoo! and eBay.

It looks like Google and Yahoo! have gotten together to encourage an open standard for sitemap descriptor files for use by Webmasters to notify Search Engines of changes to their website.

A video interview on WebProNews.com explains in detail:
http://videos.webpronews.com/index.php/2006/11/16/yahoo-and-google-collaborate-on-search/
The site: sitemaps.org, explains some of the frequently asked questions as well as a detailed description of the format.

There are tools already that allow users to create these sitemaps for Googles Sitemap system, unless there are any major changes to the open format it would be safe to assume these tools will work for future submissions.

If you have a new site, or a site that you update frequently with dynamic urls, these sitemaps can be a great tool to tell the Search Engines exactly which pages they should be looking at.

All in all, its nothing too big, but certainly a great step forwards in regards to co-operation between the Search Engine giants.

Nextwave worked closely with Emarine Australia over the last few weeks to develop their first website. The site launched today and showcases their range of stunning bosts available for sale. The site informs potential customers of the range of boats, and provides supprting information including boat specs, brochures, reviews and streaming video.

The site utilises advanced drop down menus and updateable image galleries.

Visit Emarine Australia | View more examples of recent projects

This may be old new for some but as I signed up for, yet another, adwords account I was greeted with new welcome page. Looks like Google is heading into the world of the dashboard.

Adwords will be adding alerts & announcements - nothing too new here BUT I hope the space will be used to give quicker action to high level problems, less a space for more marketing messaging. Right the preferences are the same as they have always been - no changes. Would be interesting if they started giving alerts for ‘abnormal’ traffic patterns and/or having alerts sent to your cell phone…

They also have added a block (bottom right) for what I assume with be ajax graphing. Pretty cute.

Go ahead and try it out - it apparently works on any account (tried on my all my others) at ‘adwords.google.com/select/snapshot’

There are now over 100 million web sites, according to Netcraft. The growth is pretty amazing, considering there were only 18 thousand sites back in 1995.

Needless to say gone are the days of “Build it and they will come”. To succeed online you need to have a concerted Internet strategy, Talk to us today how best to ensure your website is not lost in the crowd.

Welll we’ve finally found the time to start a weblog (or blog for short) We will use this blog to keep you up to date on happenings at Nextwave as well as posting useful articles, discussions and ideas. Between us here at Nextwave we spend about 500 hours a week on the Internet and during that time we come across lots of interesting information about how better to utilise the Internet and technology in general. Please visit our blog again in the future as we anticipate it growing into a useful resource for clients, and other interested people.

Kym Gilham

Head Honcho
Nextwave Media