Thieves Rob Internet Cafe, Forget to Log Off Facebook

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Chris Chase

As reported through Spanish-language publication El Tiempo, two men visited an Internet cafe in Colombia and began using two computers like usual customers. When they’d finished, the men approached the cashier not to pay, but to rob him. They were armed and the cashier handed over the register money, afraid the thieves would get away with their crime. The men rode away on a stolen motorcycle, and it seemed all hope was lost. However, the sharp-eyed cafe administrator noticed that one of the computers the men had been using was still logged into Facebook! Colombian authorities were able to use this Facebook account to identify one of the men, and quickly arrested him at his home.

If this sounds surprising, know that this has happened before! In 2009, a young man named Jonathan Parker broke into a house in West Virginia to steal diamond rings from the owner’s jewelry collection. However, during the robbery, he stopped to use the owners computer and…you guessed it…checked his Facebook profile. He also forgot to log out, and local police apprehended him thanks to his mistake.

Here’s hoping that all thieves will start making similar mistakes so they can be more easily identified and caught!

Website Traffic Analytics – Using Urchin with Your Site

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Tom Sullivan

So, you’ve been able build your own website. Or you decided to have a professional web designer build your website.

And now you may be wondering…what next?

How about website traffic tracking and analytics?

All EarthLink web hosting & ecommerce hosting plans come with integrated Urchin web analytics.

Of course, if your site is brand new, don’t expect there to be much (or any) traffic to track, but it’s a good idea as soon as possible to take a look at your baseline numbers so you can measure your website traffic growth and monitor which marketing efforts are working and which ones aren’t.

To get started, simply log into your EarthLink Control Panel at cc.earthlink.net. Once you are logged in, click on the Manage Site tab, and then click the Urchin icon (shown on the left).

This takes you to the Urchin login screen, which lists your domain names (called profile names). Click on the domain link for the website you want to work on.

Your default view will be the Advertiser dashboard. You can switch to other dashboard views with the drop-down menu.

Urchin Web Traffic Analytics - Report Navigation

The Advertiser dashboard view gives you a Marketing Summary snapshot of your traffic (visits) from your Top 5 Sources (e.g., direct, other websites, search engines), Top 5 Keywords, and Top 5 Campaigns (Campaigns may be the same as Sources for you until you start running campaigns). Use the calendars at the lower left to compare visits over two time periods.

The Executive dashboard view shows you a Content Summary of the most popular entrance and exit points on your website and which content is most popular. Click Geo Map Overlay to see where, worldwide, your traffic is coming from.

On the Marketer dashboard view, pay close attention to the Entrance Bounce Rates. There you’ll see the pages on your website that people entered (it won’t always be your homepage) and what the bounce rates for those pages are. Bounce rate is the % of people who landed on one of your pages and then exited the site without doing anything else. A high bounce rate is often, though not always, a sign that the page isn’t offering the content your visitors want or expect. Of course, if you have a one-page website you’ll always have a 100% bounce rate, so you would disregard that.

Click on the Webmaster dashboard view to get stats on the kinds of web browsers your visitors are using, what platforms they are on, and what connection speeds they are using. This information may be helpful when making some content optimization decisions.

There are dozens of available website traffic reports (too many to detail here) organized into four main categories: Advertising Optimization, Marketing Optimization, Content Optimization, and IT Reports.

I’ll give a brief overview of the types of website reports offered in each area. But I encourage you to click through all of them yourself to see what would be helpful to know about your website. Tip: on any report you don’t fully understand, scroll to the bottom of the page and look for Help Information.

Advertising Optimization is where you can monitor results of Google Adwords campaigns (with either a campaign view or keyword view), compare CPC vs. organic keyword conversion, and monitor the conversion rates of website traffic coming from various sources (requires setting up conversion parameters).

Marketing Optimization should give you some good insights on your website traffic right away. Under Unique Visitor Tracking, click the Visits & Pageview Tracking link to see charts showing Visits by day, Pageviews, and Average Pageviews per visit over the date range you specify. Under Visitor Segment Performance, click Referring Source to get more details on which website, search engines, and other sources your visitors are coming from.

Content Optimization gives you a good overview of how people are using your site. Click Top Content to see the most popular pages on your website. Depth of Visit shows you a graph with the number of people who viewed 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc. pages on your website. Click Engagement Metrics for graphs showing the percentages of visitors who spend various amounts of time on your site, as well as time on your site broken down by date.

IT Reports may be a bit too geeky for some, but you can use this section to find reports on browsers & platforms, robots (to see which search engines have crawled your site), domains, top files and downloads. One important thing to check here is the Referral Errors link. You want to make sure if there are many 404 errors, you figure out what’s broken on your site or why people are looking for content in the wrong place on your site (maybe you misprinted a URL in some marketing?).

Leveraging the Cloud to Get a Competitive Edge

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Mark Winer

There are many benefits of cloud computing. And while they aren’t confined to any one type or size business, benefits can be especially transformative for today’s small to medium-sized businesses, who can effectively leverage cloud computing to compete with the IT resources and expertise of much larger businesses in their markets.

Top 5 Benefits of Cloud Computing

Lowering the Cost Structure of Computing Resources: To compete effectively today, your business can’t afford to waste money. Optimizing resources of all kinds is especially important to smaller businesses. Virtualization enabled by cloud services can help you pool and optimize your company’s computing resources. Users get access to IT resources as an on-demand service and you don’t end up paying for unneeded, idle computing resources. You can also save quite a bit by outsourcing the expertise necessary to run IT in-house.
Capital-Free Computing: With cloud computing services, your computer resources are no longer capital expenses. When IT becomes a service provided by a cloud hosting vendor, hardware expenses go off your books. There are no servers to buy, no firewalls, routers or other hardware, so your business can take advantage of a less restricted cash flow.
Speed to Finish Projects & Launch Products Faster: You know the drill: you want to start a project, so you need to put in a procurement request for hardware (and justify the expense), then wait for sign-off, wait for shipment, wait for server installation and setup, wait for testing. With EarthLink’s cloud hosting services, for example, it takes just minutes for us to turn up capacity for you to deploy or develop an application. Or you can do it yourself anytime from your Cloud Hosting Control Panel. Again, in minutes. Not weeks or months. This speed can be a major competitive advantage for a small to medium-sized business up against big competitors and their larger IT resources.
Frictionless Growth: Fast growth in a company with a traditional IT infrastructure can be challenging. On the one hand, you have to overspend and underutilize IT resources if you want to make sure you have the resources available when you grow. On the other hand, you can slow your company’s growth rate if you have to wait for your IT resources to scale up every time your company wants to expand. The speed and flexibility of the cloud means you always have the right resources for your company’s needs, no matter how fast you are growing. And you only pay for what you actually need.
Maintenance-Free IT: The virtual IT services offered by the cloud means lower operating costs for your business. Cloud providers maintain your IT as a service, so you don’t have to pay for expensive, in-house IT expertise and ongoing IT maintenance.

With all the very real benefits of cloud computing, why aren’t all businesses leveraging those advantages today?

If it’s due to a concern for security and data integrity, chances are they are thinking about public cloud computing.

A public cloud service is a large, shared computing environment; there may be thousands of servers connected the cloud provider and businesses pay to use these servers, almost like they would to a utility. This extremely flexible, powerful, pay-for-use system requires no commitment and works very well in many circumstances. But it doesn’t work for businesses that are uncomfortable having their IT resources being pooled with others and not having visibility into the location of their data. For some businesses, compliance issues make public cloud computing a non-starter.

However, private cloud services, such as those offered by EarthLink, can provide businesses a significantly higher level of security and data integrity than public cloud offerings. Cloud customers can use dedicated cloud servers that are set up to their specifications and give them direct access to their data. Private cloud vendors are able to offer data integrity, security, disaster recovery, and other benefits that make cloud computing a compelling choice for most businesses. The Cloud Provider could also include (as EarthLink’s cloud service does) automatic backup in multiple data centers and data recovery services with all cloud hosting services.

When choosing a private cloud service, look for a provider using familiar industry-leading software such as the VMware virtualization software used by EarthLink. Also, make sure your provider offers multiple, state-of-the-art, audited data centers to insure the integrity of your data. And lastly, make sure they can offer you industry-leading expertise to help you make a seamless transition to the cloud and then intelligently leverage the cloud as you grow.

If you’re wondering how you can leverage cloud technology more within your business – to become more agile or better control costs – contact us at EarthLink and one of our IT experts can help size your application or custom design a solution specifically for your business.

Thieves Using Craigslist, Facebook & Other Websites

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Tom Sullivan

We believe that Internet access is an indispensible aspect of our modern lives because of how it connects us better to the people and information we care about.

For people with special interests, online communities of friends and others who share your passions can be especially valuable.

But a story in the Los Angeles Times a couple of days ago is another reminder that you have to be careful what you share online and how you share it.

The Times reported that several people were arrested as part of a bicycle theft group that over the past two years stole almost 200 high-end bicycles worth approximately $250,000.

The arrest was a cautionary tale to Internet and social network users because the thieves evidently targeted victims and planned crimes using Craigslist, Facebook, and other websites for bike enthusiasts.

One victim who was selling an expensive bike on Craigslist set up a time for a potential buyer to come to his house. They buyer never came, but a couple of weeks later the bike was stolen from his home.

When thieves got names of potential victims from encounters on other websites they often then logged into Facebook to find more information and search for additional targets.

We encourage you to keep using the Internet to enhance your life in all the ways you do already, including being active in social networks like Facebook. In fact, we’d love it if you would click over to our EarthLink Facbook page and Like us to stay connected.

We just want to be aware that some kinds of online posts may invite the wrong kind of attention. And when you’re selling something expensive, think twice before you give out your home address or other personal information.

Be safe.