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For those who have been following us, you must have noticed the big change in our site’s design.

The previous theme, from one of our favorite designers was great and it has worked well for us. But as part of our activities to try other themes and plugins for our clients, we are now experimenting with and , two WP themes by . As with previous themes, yes, we did some tweaking but not much. The Fervens theme may be viewed running at our affiliated site, .

Judging from inquiries we have been receiving lately, we will definitely be trying other themes if not for this site for our other sites. We have been requested to co-lead a series of workshops for a media group and we think there is an opportunity to use other designs for the participants prospective blogs.

Want to recommend other web designers? Leave us a message.

ACMA Australia recently released the first series of its report “Digital Economy” highlighting changing trends in the take-up and use of the internet by Australian consumers.

Some of the report findings are:

“Australians value the internet and see it as critical to their daily lives. Over 11 million Australians use the internet for a wide range of activities relating to communications, business and social activities. Twenty-seven per cent of Australian internet users trust the internet as a valued source of information and prefer it to traditional media, such as newspapers, radio and the television.

However, while Australians overwhelmingly see the internet as having affected their lives positively, they still have concerns about the potential for the internet to negatively affect their privacy and security.”

The full report is available at the .

Interesting developments since we wrote the article, SHOWCASEPAGE.net ranking moved up to an Alexa traffic ranking of 2,503,250 from its lowly 12+million ranking about 2 months ago.

How? We are still asking that question ourselves? Prior to this new ranking, . Yes, we know it is flawed. Unfortunately, Alexa still remains a site-popularity indicator in the eyes of advertisers. Until such time the industry comes up with an alternative solution, it would be prudent for us to live with Alexa without necessarily relying on it solely to measure site performances and popularity.

The first page of , one of the few we monitor, was written last November 11 and as one would expect, the first page was actually only an “About” page.

The only activity the site had so far was to play around with a few WordPress themes using a plugin called “Theme Test Drive” and experimented with WordPress plugins like Snazzy Archives and Syndication for prospective clients.

SHOWCASEpage.net activated the Syndication plugin to grab RSS feeds from other sites (including this site) which was later deactivated and also the resulting articles were “unpublished” from the site.

Today, we noted that this site has an Alexa ranking of 12,126,403 (see screenshot). Yes, only after 2 months and a few pages most of which were RSS feeds. Shouldn’t we be happy that this site achieved that ranking in only a short a time and with hardly any activity?

We don’t think so. We have other experimental sites which have not come close to this ranking. And some of the sites have been online for a while.

So what’s wrong with Alexa? Or, what’s wrong with the other sites we have been monitoring too?

We don’t know yet. We have read somewhere that the Alexa system is flawed. But without having a complete picture of how Alexa does its maths, we cannot comment on those statements.

But the situation we have at the SHOWCASEpage.net website certainly requires a closer look.

Is there really something in this site that is attracting traffic? We don’t know yet. We will install additional metrices in our pages and find out what’s causing this abnormality and see if the Alexa ratingsystem is giving us reliable measurement.

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In a joint media release today, Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, Senator Stephen Conroy, announced the first outcomes from the E-Security Review 2008.

“The Prime Minister’s National Security Statement recognised that e-security is one of the Government’s top national security priorities. New online threats are emerging and it’s imperative that we take steps to protect critical e-infrastructure,” Mr McClelland said.

The Review made a number of recommendations, including:

The development of closer relationships between the Commonwealth and the private sector in the area of e-security;

Improved engagement with Internet service providers (ISPs) to help create a “security culture” amongst Australian Internet users; and

Building international partnerships on e-security to promote awareness, marshal expertise, and eliminate safe havens for cyber criminals.

In response to the Review, the Australian Government Computer Emergency Readiness Team (GovCERT.au) will establish trusted information exchanges with the private sector.

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