We here at Xebidy spend a lot of time working in and around “open source”, but we often receive questions as to what, why and how. That is, what is “open source”, why does it exist, and who is responsible for it?

What is Open Source?

When people speak about “open source” most often it is in relation to “Open Source Software.” This is a type of software developed and released under certain licenses. This means that when you receive Open Source Software (OSS) you have a license to distribute and modify it, generally this is however you see fit as long as this is done with the same license to whomever receives it. This normally means that you pass your changes back to the main project who incorporates them and the piece of software improves with changes not from one company, but an entire community. There are heaps of software projects developed in this way a few of which are, our favourite Firefox, Apache, Linux, Wordpress and Silverstripe.

We generally take a slightly different outlook on what we mean when we speak about “open source.” We consider it to not only apply to software, but more the communities that developed first around the software projects but now are popping up around other things, normally websites. Let me deconstruct that with some examples, Wikipedia - open source encyclopedia, WikiTravel - open source travel guide, Metafilter - open source question and answer.  You get the idea.

One of the most important traits of “open source” is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can contribute and benefit from the work of the community at little or no cost.

Who and Why Open Source?

There are a variety of reasons people develop and contribute to “open source” projects. To some extent it is like asking people why they pick up litter they see blowing on the street, for individuals it might be the sense of belonging to the community or the sense of achieving something for the greater good. An expert in open heart surgery may drop in to the wikipedia article  (which I’ve heard on good authority is very accurate and informative) and correct any problems with it and perhaps add a photo to the article for no other reason than letting other people be as equally informed as themselves.

On a corporate/company level the reasons are more clear - the benefits they gain from open source outweigh the cost of being involved. In our case here, we use a variety of OSS, Silverstripe, Wordpress, MediaWiki and other smaller projects such as Prototype Javascript Library and Control.Modal.

There are a variety of ownership styles involved with these projects - some companies bootstrap their business on the software they contribute to, while other projects have no clear ownership ties. A perfect example of this is Wordpress. Automattic is the biggest contributor to the Wordpress blogging software, but also own and operate the Wordpress.com blogging host. As far as I’m aware most of the code used when you type into a wordpress.com blog is available to download from wordpress.org. They make money by providing services to this software rather than selling it. Services such as Akismet (for businesses), custom CSS and custom domain names.

Most website administrators create a site map, but do they actually know why they do this?  There are two main reason for creating a site map and both of them entail completely different forms.

Firstly, there is the site map for the customer, that helps them navigate around your website.  This usually takes the form of hyperlinks and sometimes even a short excerpt about each page.  The link to this site map usually appear somewhere around the website footer.

The second type is the one that we generate to tell search engines about our site.  These contain elements that can significantly assist search engines in cataloging your website and therefore your sites performance in search engines rankings.

Site maps should firstly be generated in XML.  These can at a later date be changed to an RSS or Atom feed which will tell search engines when URLs are added without having to go back and resubmit your site map all the time, but initially you want Google to know of all your pages and a feed will only give the recent URLs.  The alternative options is a straight text file (.txt) but I am not a huge fan of this as it allows only one URL per line and misses all the frequency and priority information.

An example XML site map would look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-9″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www,sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://xebidy.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2008-04-22</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.9</priority>
</url>
</urlset>

The two most interesting tags are the frequency and priority tags.  The frequency tells a search engine how often the content of the pages is likely (not necessarily exactly) to change.  The different options are:

• Always
• Hourly
• Daily
• Weekly
• Monthly
• Yearly
• Never

An important point is that although you are only indicating the likely frequency of your page updates you should be as accurate as possible.  If you state that your content is updated weekly and search engines consider this information when setting their index stats for your site and it is not the case then the search engines may not return to those pages even monthly, meaning you could go for some time without getting your fresh content indexed.

The priority tag allows you to set a relative value of between 0.0 and 1.0 for each page.  Unfortunately it is unlikely that the priority you assign to a page will effect the order in which your pages appear in the search engines (as we know there are many other factors that influence that) however it does tell search engines the order of importance of your pages as you deem them.  It will help search engines to determine which pages in your site to index first and it will increase the likelihood of your most important pages appearing in the search databases.  Finally an important point is that you will not gain anything by setting all your pages priorities high as the priority is relative to the other pages on your site so your important pages wont be considered over the others.

Once you have created your site map the next step is to advise search engines of its existence.  In Google this is easy, you simply submit the site map through the webmasters interface - this is certainly the best way.  Alternatively, you can specify the location of the site map into the robots.txt file - this is a good method for when using an RSS for your site map.  Ideally you should do both.

For more information on site maps check out sitemaps.org

It may have taken some time coming and many feel like they have been waiting too long - but SwuzzleBucket was launched in its’ entirety on Friday.  Xebidy has been lucky enough to be involved in this project since the beginning.

SwuzzleBucket is an online advertising network aimed exclusively at the New Zealand and Australian ‘backpacker’/adventure/budget travel market.  SwuzzleBucket has signed up a network of high profile websites and Internet Cafes to display SwuzzleBucket advertisements.  The first sites to be launched are the BASE Backpackers Global Gossip Internet cafes and the Backpackers World Travel Global Gossip Internet Cafes.  Together these alone account for over 500,000 unique customers annually across 275 computers.  The next site expected to be displaying ads online is the new Oz Experience website that is currently nearing completion in the Xebidy studio.

SwuzzleBucket has immediately started serving over 1 million ad impressions per month and has some great advertisers on-board committing to 3 and 6 month campaigns.  By advertising with the SwuzzleBucket network an operator, accommodation supplier etc can increase their exposure directly to their target market at a fraction of the cost of alternative advertising media.

Xebidy developed both the new website and the ad serving software based on the Open X Open Source solution.  The branding and launch design was completed by Fluid Designs also in Queenstown.

Last week we released a new look and feel of the Base Backpackers website and it looks cool.

The site was given an upgrade in February but was in beta and we added more functionality last week. Some of the things we have introduced are:

• A cool accordion menu that Mat developed in Javascript himself
• Latest photos feed from Flickr
• Magnetic Island Full moon Party booking engine
• A new map
• New comments section that allows us to pull comments from a variety of sources including Hostel World, but also other sites and blogs. We run the blogs through our XEFEED product which can filter the comments for relevancy
• A news section to track all the news media for each of the hostels
• And, some updated content

The site is still in development and Xebidy is contracted to continue development through to late in 2009 so expect lots more things to be released soon - in fact, we have some cool You Tube video scanning and destination wiki stuff coming in the next month that we will announce soon.

On a serious note, however, the Xebidy SEO and Internet Marketing team has just grown by two more.  Joaquin joins the crew after recently graduated with a “Credit of Honour” in a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  He focuses on a lot of the technical side of Internet Marketing, data-mining, analytics, CSS and HTML; plus a very thorough marketing background.

Emer on the other hand is a bit of an old hand with a B.A. (Hons) Degree in Communications Studies from Dublin City University and a Masters Degree in Public Relations & Marketing with Advertising and Event Management from Fitzwilliam Institute in Blackrock.  Emer has previously worked with two leading new media companies, Athena Media and Digital Audio Productions, both in Dublin.  Here she was involved in a host of media production suchas weekly radio shows and podcasts and online marketing such as e-Zines.  Emer researched and produced a National PPI Award winning six-part series on Computers and Internet for RTL, the Irish State Broadcaster.  Emer has been in Queenstown for a year now working with the cast of the new Wolverine movie.  (And even better her partner is the manager at our favourite bar!)

We are really happy to have these guys on board and have searched for ages to get people of this caliber into this team at Xebidy.  I am a bit late in getting this post out as both have pretty much settled in now and are running rings around me (more time to blog though)!  Please feel free to ring either Joaquin or Emer for a chat at anytime they have some pretty interesting ideas on the whole marketing area and are already building up new strategies for existing clients that I am really excited about.

What a great day it is!

Silver Stripe has been working for some time on their release of version 2.2 and today Gally completed the integration of our Bootstrap drag and drop platform to that version. Currently we have upgraded only a couple of sites - all which are in development as opposed to live, but we expect to roll out the full version over the next few weeks.

• Some of the upgrades that the new system handles are:
• Much better drag and drop of the site tree menu
• Much nicer looking interface
• Way better handling of uploading and managing images
• A to do list on every page and then a report to identify what needs to be done
• Advanced security settings such that user access can be restricted to certain pages
• Page version history to see what changes have been made with version rollback
• Integrated basic analytics
• Search functionality
• Batch actions to delete or publish multiple pages
• The ability to save and publish a page at the same time

As you can see I am pretty excited. I spend a lot of time working in Bootstrap alongside our clients and just the look and feel upgrade has given me warm fuzzies.

We had to do a bit of development work to bring the Silver Stripe version 2.2 alongside our Bootstrap module, especially as we are using Prototype version 1.5 and Silver Stripe still uses 1.4 - but it seems we have got rid of any bugs as we don’t seem to be getting any Javascript errors etc.

The one bit of development work that we were hoping for from Silver Stripe was the language translation tools. This is pretty major but was broken in the Silver Stripe release. It is an important element for many of our clients so we will look to fixing this in the next few weeks ourselves and will release it back to the community.

For now though Bootstrap version 2.2 is out. We have not upgraded the demo on this site yet, but will do soon. In the meantime test the old demo here and feel free to contact us if you have any queries about Bootstrap and want to have a proper look and play with it.

Google Analytics has launched an interesting new section called Benchmarking and I have been playing with it our some of our clients sites today. Benchmarking compares how one website’s statistics compare against aggregate data from sites of similar sizes within an industry Industry category. The statistics compared are the number of visits, Page Views, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rates, Average Time on Site and New Visits data - it’s all pretty cool.

Nit picking you would say that the negative points would be that the comparative statistics are only against other websites that have chosen to enable data sharing in Google Analytics for this purpose - so those sites that don’t regularly check their analytics or are not proactive, or use other systems, will not be shown. The other potential problem being which industry category your site is compared to. Although you can chose your industry category from a pretty extensive list the categories are still quite broad for our clients, for example, two of the sites I looked at were both hostel sites and they fit into the “hotels and accommodations” category, which seems a bit broad.

One of the nice uses I see however will be to provide a sanctity check when you think things might be really good or vice versa. For example, if you have a month where you are experiencing much less visits you can at least draw some comparisons from the rest of the broader industry according to the Google Benchmarking tool to see how the rest of the industry is fairing.

Below is a screen shot of how the Benchmarking tool looks:

Isn’t Google great? There is a whole industry of hacks like me built up around trying to “beat” Google and get better search engine rankings. It’s clever how if you want to do anything to improve the way Google considers the mountain of data it holds, or the way it receives that data then there are APIs for everything from maps to search algorithms to visualization techniques and so on. But if you want to find a way to cheat the system, take a short-cut to higher rankings, then Google significantly vague. Better still through you will find a mountain of debate, myth and general confession across the so called experts about whatever the subject may be.

In this regard I am talking today about the Google link: operator. I am regularly asked why if you type link:www.domain.com into Google you get a different list and numbers of links than if you look at the same domain in Google Webmaster; and moreover is there any value in the list of links provided by the link :operator, after all it seems to list a bunch of crap pages with ranks even of zero.

In my opinion the facts are:

• In the old days (pre 2002) the link: operator displayed all the links to a site – but this was changed for two reasons: firstly, it provided an opportunity to cheat the system, you could in effect identify a competing site’s links and set out to poach them; secondly, the shear weight of the data Google is holding and the ongoing processing power required to continually answer such queries became a burden for Google.

• The second point above is case in point by the fact that Google does not publicly update it’s page rank tool nor the numbers of links shown in the Webmaster section regularly. Some say it is as infrequently as three monthly - but I see my link numbers growing month on month in Webmaster tools – so it seems just fair to say frequently but not in real time.

• Which means that the number of links and in fact the physical links themselves in your Webmaster tools are unlikely to ever be exactly accurate.

• If you want to “spy” on a competitors links then it appears Yahoo is the best most transparent source. You can be rest assured if Yahoo, MSN or anyone else knows about that links, so does Google. The important point in fact is how much weight Google gives to those links. Recall, Google looks at the content of the page generating the links, the text that makes up the link (the anchor text), the considered importance of the link generating page (it’s Page Rank) and the content of the page receiving the link. Quite simply if your page is about Queensland and the linking page is about Queensland and anchor text says something like “more information about travel in Queensland” then that link is going to be of more value than same reciprocal link buried in a links page linking to your generic home page. Matt Cutts on his blog even makes it more clear than this - he says “do not assume just because you see a back link that it’s carrying any weight”.
  

So is there any value in the list of links generated by the link: operator. After all Google includes it as a tool from Webmasters. Firstly, the list is not as random as some would suggest – evidenced by the fact you get the same result over and over, and because of the point that Google doesn’t want to be bombarded by erroneous queries when its primary purpose is better quality search results matched to pertinent advertising. Unfortunately, I can’t see the value of the link: operator. The list is clearly a subset of all the links to a site but there does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to the list; they don’t seem to be the most recent links, not the highest value links or any other obvious reason, and they certainly are not going to be of any use in a competitor analysis.

So in summary the answer to the continual question is why does the results on the link: operator vary so radically from the links shown in Google Webmasters is to avoid link poaching and to reduce the effort on the Google database.  Secondly, the links shown in Webmasters more accurately reflects the number of links to your site - but in no way indicates the value of those links.  Finally, use Yahoo! or MSN to get an indication of your competitors links.

You think there has been a lack of blog posts recently, and first reaction would be they must be busy or on holiday.  Truth is I have been looking after my health.  I was passed an article today from the New York Times about people who write blogs for a living literally working themselves to death.

The article comes in the wake of the recent death of two popular Bloggers from heart related diseases and the heart attack of well know tech blogger Om Malik.  It seems that professional bloggers are setting up offices in their bedrooms, avoiding sleep and in some cases neglecting food in order to be at the forefront of timely blog posts.

These professional bloggers are paid usually by the number of blog posts they can create and by their readership  numbers.  Being the first to report a story, news item, new product and so on makes your blog all the more valuable.

Well I don’t think there is any risk of myself and Gally skipping meals, sleep or blogging to death.