For those who are looking to plan a wedding will know, most/all wedding planing is now carried out online. If you are looking a wedding venue, inviting guests with email or inviting them with facebook events etc you will know that without the Internet there would be a lot of leg work.

Marry Google!

People who know me, know I wish I could, but the guys at Google have put together a great wedding package to help you get married. Their services are the perfect partnership for the innovative cost cutting wedding couple looking to be up-to-date and have all their plans in an accessible place and not on a USB key they will loose in the washing machine. (Yes I have done it!)

Putting all their products and services under the umbrella of a wedding planner is a great way to show off their products and also for people who use these services for business to use them in a social setting.

• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• Google Chat
• Google Picasa – images
• Google Video – YouTube
• Google Maps
• Google Tasks

Link all of these services together and have each one communicating with each other and then you will see how planning a wedding and the frustration of organising it can be reduced letting you delegate the tasks to the various people involved. Create and share lists of table plans online, let your family and friends upload images and video to the site after the wedding. No matter what you want to do for the wedding Google have a solution . . .  You can’t even get lost going to the church because you will have with Google Maps!

Oh and remember this is all available on your phone !

www.google.com/weddings/

For more information on how Google can help plan your wedding, give me a call and I can help set this up and hand it over to you. Or if you want to know how the Internet can help reduce the cost of living for your life, Call Dave on 053 9430748

Talking to a business recently about tourism in rural Ireland and they were suggesting that they were thinking of getting a company to create a few 360 degree images for Tourism. Well I would suggest they think about just letting the biggest tech business doing it for them or asking them to come and visit their area. Google’s Street view have gone a step further and be prepared to see their Trike out and about when you are offroad in Ireland.

This means great news for areas that were not covered by the google cars traveling around Ireland mapping each road. Now there is an opportunity for visitors to Ireland to see great locations that the car didnt travel on. Have a look at the video below to give you a preview of whats coming down the road. Pun intended !

In April 2009 I wrote about Google in Gorey and how they had been driving around the area in their Black Google car with a large 360 dome camera on top mapping their way around Ireland. Well it’s been a while in the making but today they launched the results.

In April 2009 I wrote about what was happening.

http://blog.cadamedia.ie/2009/04/google-in-gorey/

Google Streetview Ireland.

So now you can go and see if you have been caught on camera, I left the office and drove around looking for them and when I did I waved at the camera! Click on the image to see a larger version of Mr Nerd waving at the Google Cam.

Anyway, whats the point of it all, well many actually. Google are now a Household brand name and they have expanded their services into many aspects of daily life, one of those aspects is Travel and Tourism. They have bought booking engine software companies in the past 18 months and now they are looking to get a commission on each sale of a ticket bought through their website, maybe you know it, its called www.Google.com !

When you do a Google search for a cinema listing for example, they return the listing and not the actual website of a cinema. Example : http://www.google.ie/movies People who Google Stock exchange prices will be used to this feature too.

Next Generation.

Now, move that on a step into a larger more lucrative industry like the travel & tourism sector, imagine if you could Google a flight to a destination and the website could also give you a perfect view of the apartment or hotel and also give you a precise map of how to get there, all using Google. It’s implications are vast and this will almost probably be available via their Google phones too.

Estate Agents.

Clever estate agents will jump on board this application too or so they should as it can help them describe exactly locations of properties they are selling or renting. This app can walk a person down the street and get perfect 360 views of the location. I wonder if Google will have a go at being an auctioneer and trying to match buyers and sellers together . . hmm they would need a large social network like facebook . . oh wait they are developing a social media site called Google Me. Stay tuned folks, they could do anything!

To have a look at your town or village in a 360 environment go to:

http://maps.google.com

Put in your town name and search, once you zoom into your town it might look blurred. This is because they do their mapping in 3 stages. Firstly they use a satellite image, then they use a photo from an airplane and then finally they use a 360 photo taken from their GoogleCam Car.

In Gorey in Co. Wexford they have left out the middle stage so we have a blurred image like this one.

Little Yellow Man !

See the little yellow icon of a person on the zoom tool, grab that and drop it on the location of where you would like to view. Then zoom in and it will bring you into the 360 mode of the application. (Your browser might ask you to install a flash player if you have an old version, if so stop reading, give up and go have a cup of tea and watch the tv!)

You should now be able to navigate the street view. Notice that car tax discs have been obscured and well as people faces. This is a security feature of the site.

See can you spot someone you know!

If you want to know how Google can help your business then call Dave Jordan of Cada Media Ltd and I will try not to bore the pants of you with techy talk !

Tel: 053 9430748

Google have been contacting the people to who use their email alert service to tell them that due to the fact that not many people actually using the service they provide, they will be altering the way in works in the future. Interesting to see that people are not using it as we know that it can be an important tool when doing search engine optimisation and general web marketing for companies.

Google Alerts

Basically the way they work is to email you once someone puts in a search for a term or phrase that you have requested to be notified by email. It is useful if you would like to know for instance if a phrase is one that really is used by people to search for a product or service. Often when talking to customers and potential clients they will have a predefined concept into the words that people use. Most times it is actually not the phrase that would necessarily the one that would bring them the most amount of hits.

Google Adwords

This would be the next step up in looking to see which word you might pay Google if someone searched for it and to display your name first. There is a google adwords keyword tool that allows you too see which words are most popular and then actually put in a real time bid to get your name listed top of the listings.

To start working with Google Alerts or Google Adwords just log in into your Google account and start researching how it all works.

To start getting results straight away let Cada Media set it up for you and let you get back to what Your Good at. Tel : 053 9430748

See Below

*****

We're contacting you because you have an alert of type Web. We've decided to retire Web alerts because
(1) they are used by very few people and
(2) an alert of type Everything will find the same results.

This week we'll be changing all alerts of type Web into alerts of type Everything.
Your alert will continue to include results from all kinds of web sites.

You may receive more results after this change. If you find that you are getting too many results,
you can change the "How often" setting to "once a day" or "once a week." You can also change your search query.
You can do this on the alerts management page (www.google.com/alerts/manage),
or by removing the alert using the link at the bottom of each alert email and creating it again with different settings.

We hope that you'll continue to find your alert useful.

******

A question arose today where a caller to the office was wondering if Truvo / Golden Pages had done a deal with Google. The answer is Yes, but so has everyone who has a Google Account !

Looking further it looks like they are just selling Google Adword.

What are Google Adwords?

This is a method by which you pay Google to display an advert for a search word or phrase someones looks up. These types of Adverts can me made by yourself or you can pay a company such as Golden Pages to make them for you.

But the thing that caught my attention was that this caller is the owner of a major business in Dublin and he really thought that they has “stricken a deal” with Google, he then emailed me a copy of their email to him and all it actually was, was a proposal for Truvo to make these adverts for him and “they” would display them on Google for him.

We too at Cada Media Ltd have this “special Deal” with Google and we too can make you number One in Google for the right price. We do this by setting you up with a Google Account and inserting the terms and phrases that you would like to appear under. The price of these adverts are governed by you!

You pay what you wish to pay and if its enough the advert will be displayed higher and higher in their search results. The cute whores took a leaf out of the auctioneers books years ago and you put in a blind bid to get your advert displayed. These bids gan be as little 11 cent but could also be $20 per advert if you really needed it to be.

Pay Per Click Adverts

Yes as it says, you pay Google every time someone clicks on your advert, each time someone searches for a phrase like “hotels in Wexford” Google will display adverts at the very top in a light yellow colour with the word “sponsored” on the top right hand side. These are Adverts from Hotels in the south each wish to grab you attention. The adverts costs them nothing until you click on it and then it will bring you to their website and also deduct a fee from the hotels google account.

This is how Google earn their money, many people under estimate how much they earn from this type of system, but imagine getting a euro from everyone in Ireland each day, I’d enjoy that so does Google!

So if you wish to do a “deal with Google” and get you company to the top of search engines call Cada Media Ltd today and let starts start getting more business on-line

Tel: 053 9430748

Yes,  the age old question that every web designer looses sleep over,

Does Size Matter?

Does Size Matter?

Deos Size Matter?

The answer is yes, for over 10 years now we have been creating websites that abide to Google Webmaster rule and keep website page small in order to help keep the Size of the page small. One of the methods of keeping the size of a page small is to make sure the images have been reduced in MB size to KB size.

Often these days we find that companies using Content Management Software (CMS) will have the ability to update a website themselves, Great until they update the website with out decreasing the images in megabyte size to a smaller size that will help download the website faster. We see people reducing the image size by grabbing a conor and dragging the image to “appear” smaller but in fact its still 5mb in size.

Remember is the epidose of Father Ted, when Father Ted was explaining to Dougle the difference in size of object in showing hime something “near” and something “far away”, well its the exact same in theis case. Just because the image appears to be smaller, doesnt actually mean that it has changed in volumn in terms of megabyte size.

Anyway, Google is telling us again to stick to these rules so if you have a website and are interested in keeping the Gods happy we would suggest abiding by their rules.

Google Website Speed tips

Yes, is the answer.

The latest changes to the number one search engine in Ireland has finally come online. These latest updates to it’s functionality are pushing the ability of local search right down to the county level.

Before we were able to choose by the world or pages from Ireland. Now we can step even further into a search and breakdown our definition of what we hope to get as results by specifing our current localtion.

Google will then look for local information for your search term. Didn’t they always do this you say . . . I thought so too but apparently not.

Look at the new left hand column of a search to see the changes to the layout and options available. Then look at the results and see if they are more local local !

Great news for getting more precise results now all we have to do is tell google that some counties names are also towns in that county. So when someone googles “something in Wexford” do the mean the county or the town!

For more information on how we can help google find your business call Dave Jordan of Cada Media Ltd today, tel 053 9430748.

News today that Facebook have overtaken Google as the number 1 website in terms of visits according to “Hitwise”.

This is something I was only giving a talk about today to a group of business people here in the south east. I was explaining that social media needs to be managed correctly by staff of businesses if they are going to use this tool to attract traffic to their business using Facebook.

I had mentioned that facebook had over taken Yahoo and Microsoft already and this news today that this has happened this week has huge implications for the search world in general.

Companies will now be wondering if they should get a website and Facebook should now be exploiting this fact with their advertising costs and web designers/ programmers guru’s should be writting Apps for facebook.

The Whole World’s In A State O Chassis !

If you remember the quote from,  Juno And The Paycock then you will know what I mean. If we look at this in other terms, lets say 10 years ago we needed to find a telephone number where did we look ? Yes in a big yellow book in the office, now that big yellow book has been demoted to “Computer stand for your Monitor”

The whole world is changing, now we look for information online usually Goolge. But if Google have been toppled off the number 1 position in just 3 short years, what is next?

Food for thougt, chewing gum for the brain.

Enjoy the St Patrick’s Day where ever you are

Hearing interesting things about the new social media offering from Google called Google Buzz, it looks like their privacy policy and the fact that you can edit a on going conversation to alter the meaning means that this would be used by someone from the Dark side!!!

Gonna play around with it over the weekend and see what my friends in the Sunday papers make of it as I see they have been busy little beavers all week playing around and trying to see what friends are out there and I watch and didn’t reply!

Oh the fun, if you have any news on google buzz then let me know.

Have a nice Valentines Weekend everyone.

So there I was today having lunch with a Internet Marketing guy I know in the Amber Springs hotel in Gorey and the two of us going on about how to manage adword campaings successfully and then we discussed the different methods of managing them, different keywords to use, different settings. . . localisation and so on and then we talked about pricing for such a service . . . We both agreed and found the most business didnt the the “best bang for their buck”.

Why pay an Internet “expert”?

Exactly, why would you pay someone to manage a google adwords advertising campaign that you can manage yourself? just log into google yourself and set up an account and put the price you are happy to pay for someone to pay to get yo your website and then input your vredit cards details.

Easy? Yes it is, and it’s even easier to get it wrong and not understand the different settings and variations that will display your adword on search results and in-line content. The words you choose could be expensive to bid on and there could be other words that you should be using.  Is your advert being clicked on by a night security guard on a laptop at 3am in Manchester, when you are advertising your painting and decorating service in Wexford!

Wasting money?

Yes, very often we come across people throwing away their money in Google adwords campaigns.

If you are trying to manage a pay per click yourself and running your business and want to spend your money correctly there are a number of things you need to have in place. At Cada Media Ltd we can help you spend your money better. Yes, we will charge you but yes you will gain the right traffic from the right people in the right location. We can either manage a campaign for you on a monthly basis or configure and fine tune it for you.

Then you manage it.

Cada Media, helping companies use the internet better since 1999 in Wexford.