It’s official, as of 18th July Google Analytics has discontinued their Version 1 interface for the new look and feel. While there are many many analytics programmes on the market none delivers the quality and depth of information as Google Analytics for the price - which by the way is free!

The new interface is slick and so easy to use. Take the world map for example, the graphical presentation of where your website visitors are coming from is extremely intuitive; clicking on a country generates a close-up view with breakdown of visitors by region and/or city. Or the site overlay tool, which provides a real view of your web page with all the links from that page and a graphical and textual view of the number of clicks and the percentage of clicks that link makes up of clicks from that page. The overlaying of information onto your web page makes understanding the web statistics almost child’s’ play.

But perhaps the most valuable feature is the ‘Goals & Funnels’. Goals allow you to set up certain pages such as a booking confirmation or an enquiry page as a goal for users of your website. Funnels track the specific click path a user takes to reach your defined website goals. Goals and funnels can have specific monetary values attached, meaning you can track your websites financial performance as well - and we all know I have continually harped on about the importance of real measurable objectives in your website strategy.

So, thanks to Google for another great indispensable tool - the new interface is fantastic, and the functionality unbeatable - even for that price!

I came across this website (Hostelmanagement.com) last week and found it thoroughly interesting. It is basically a community website for hostel owners and managers to share advice etc., It is an interesting concept and one that I had talked to Grant Currie at Plus Villages about a number of years ago.

Hostel Management also has a My Space site and it is interesting to see that they have more “friends” on their My Space site than hostel active or featured on the forums and directory. I guess self interested promotion is more important to most than getting the sense of community going - it will be interesting to see if Hostel Management can generate the community traction.

It’s a new community site and it is called Hostel Buddies. I first came across this site when it was in private beta back in March and was impressed with their agenda. But it is ironic that I should be introducing it to you today ( a few days after it went live) on the same day that I have posted information about Boo.com

David Mackenzie and I have hooked up a number of times since he first introduced Hostel Buddies from Vienna to me via Skype and I have to say he has done a great job getting it live. Hostel Buddies only claims to be in Beta Version 1.0 and it seems unfair, but unfortunately impossible not, to compare it to the likes of Boo, Tripwiser or OE.TV. These sites have a greater traction and therefore much greater depth in their user generated content and unfortunately for Hostel Buddies a much slicker interface. Somehow the Hostel Buddies interface seems clumsy and I really struggle to work out how to get around. It is also very buggy (I am using Firefox) and perhaps navigation will become clearer once some of these are ironed out.

Nonetheless, David has been great with me, sending me screenshots well in advance of everyone else and really accommodating my interest. I will watch with enthusiasm as the site grows and hopefully there will be lots of parallel marketing opportunities that I can recommend to everyone. Travel communities (and in particular backpacking/hostels) are a tough space and competition is intense!

I guess I missed the boat on this one - being in little old New Zealand; but better than late than never to announce the awesome new website from Web Reservations International - the guys behind HostelWorld - Boo.com

Love ‘em or hate ‘em the guys have done an amazing job with this one! It’s an all singing, all dancing real Web 2.0 travel site with wicked reviews and ratings, hotel bookings, flight meta-search and community. You can create your own profile and then review all the places your have travelled, stayed etc.

There is not much more I can say about it - the site is simply awesome - it looks great (very Web 2.0) and from my initial play seems to work well. It loads very slow - and that has always been a criticism myself and many others have of HostelWorld - but it is worth the wait. What’s more it already has a raft of user generated content after only 8 weeks or so online.

Don’t know about the name though. For those of you who can’t remember Boo.com was the famous fashion website that managed to burn through 100 million pounds in 18 months during the 90’s Internet boom - somehow I don’t think Ray Nolan, Tom Kennedy and crew will be following that fate with this great site!

I have said this many times before - but the ‘new’ social Internet has a real risk that a publicity nightmare could blow up in blogs, forums, or review sites without your knowledge of it. I have stressed that businesses should be monitoring the greater social Internet for all mentions of their business.

Of course the best method I promote is subscription to our Xefeed product, which scans the Internet in it’s entirety including many of the social media sites such as Flickr (for images) and You Tube (for videos) as well as the blogoshpere for mention of your business itself or it’s products or services. This information is then repackaged and sent automatically to you - it can be published automatically on your website - or bad news can be separately highlighted to management or marketing to be dealt with quickly and efficiently.

For those not ready to take the leap into a full monthly subscription then at the very minimum you should have Google alerts coming into your email box at least weekly if not daily. Firstly, if you don’t have one already set up, then set up a Google account. From your account page select “Alerts” - in the right hand “My Services” menu. From there you can create an alert based on search terms (your company name, your own name, or even the most searched term for your business); you can select to receive the emails alerts for any amount of time from as they come up (i.e. as Google finds the term on a particular page) to daily, weekly or monthly. Google will send you an email notifying you of all the ‘new’ appearances of your search terms or activity in your search terms both on web pages and within blogs.

It is not completely accurate and you will find that you receive a lot of notifications that don’t relate to you in anyway (I get notified every time Julia Roberts gets mentioned somewhere on the web) but it is a great start and for anyone serious about business and the social Internet it is an essential tool. That is, if you are not all signed up for our wicked Xefeed product!

It was about a week ago that I met up with an old friend, Newell Hodgson to hear of his new business - Cash Fix. Cash Fix is targeting a massively growing niche market that has taken off globally (in fact, it is the fastest growing business sector in the US for the last few years) offering short terms cash loans against your incoming pay cheques (pay day lending I think it is called in the US).

Basically, you can apply for a short term loan of between $200 and $500 to be repaid on your payday. There are relatively few hurdles to jump through - no credit checks etc - and the whole process is usually completed in an hour. The whole business is Internet driven.

The interesting thing about our chat was how you can engage the customer to provide a more valuable experience through the website. Realistic budgeting tips and advice from other other people in similar short term cash crisis made the most obvious choice of content - but we sort of scratch our head about what more could be done. Very interesting area of work! Good luck with the business Newell and Simon!

All Xebidy developed websites are built on our Bootstrap CMS (which is developed on the very popular Silver Stripe open source framework - more coming soon) which means you maintaining your own images, constantly reworking them, cutting them and resizing them to fit into your constantly fresh content. Which for most means working on Photoshop - and that means firstly, a significant software cost and secondly, it is very much overkill for such simple tasks (yet, despite what some may have you believe nothing compares to Photoshop).

But, fear not a solution will soon be available. It’s called Skitch and has been developed by the disaggregated international guys (led by Cris Pearson and Keith Lang in Melbourne Australia) at Plasq. Unfortunately, it is in private beta at the moment- which means only those invited can try it - and therefore I have not had a proper play, but all I have read sounds really cool. It is designed for people writing blogs etc and needing to do regular screen shots and picture editing without the weight of Photoshop. Center Networks describes it as “MS Paint on drugs”, which sounds like a really cool description.

I have applied for an invite to the beta testing so hopefully that won’t take too long and I can report back on how cool it really is. Hopefully, they even eventually release an API for it that we can develop into the Bootstrap CMS - now, that would make content management much easier; what a cool product!

I used to buy lots of domains, and still have lots that I am gradually letting slide as they come up for expiry - too much hassle for me when I have enough on my plate here. In the past you would buy domains on the chance that they would become valuable either for your own business or for someone else’s. But the advertising revenue model has completely changed that!

Domains are once again valuable and the resale market is ripe. www.freecreditcheck.com & www.creditcheck.com sold last month together for US$3 million and www.seniors.com sold for US$1.8 million and www.blogging.com raised US$135,000. Apart from Seniors which even after three weeks still has notification of the auction, these are all legitimate sites, and I recently read a very interesting article on Sitepoint on How to buy a operational website, do it up and resell it. In Queenstown someone is selling Driftnet.co.nz - a supposedly last minute booking service for NZD$5,000 that is not even fully operational.

But it is the advertising revenue model that is most interesting. Domains are being snapped up for both their names and their past trading history (in particular, how many links they have) to build Google Cost per click ad sites. Trust me, I know of one such entrepreneur making a pretty penny per month from a handful of pretty ordinary sites.

It is a fascinating model - not to mention the implications for SEO of buying strong page ranked domains with lots of links. Definitely something to look into!

After I had previously praised the music streaming site Pandora (see blog post here) I rather dejectedly advised you recently of the disappearance of Pandora for everyone outside of the US (see post here). While Finetune remains my favourite music streaming site I have found an alternative: Soundpedia.

Unfortunately, I am not too keen on the interface (it is a bit full on and candy cane for me for a music streaming site), however, it is easy to use and for those of you missing Pandora this is a viable alternative as a way to learn new music.