So, on my way back from a great time at the Adventure and Backpacking Industry Conference in Sydney. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I gave my best presentation ever - probably aimed the content a bit too technical and never got a grip on everything. Plus my leg was exhausted but that stage and my good leg would not stop shaking with the weight.

You can download the presentation, plus the extra bits here, which hopefully will make sense more.

One thing to make a comment on - in my speech I gave the throw away comment that Chris from Hostel Book had worked for me in Europe - since discovered same name, same relative age, both in Poland - but different people!! Sorry about that.

The actual conference day was great and really good speaking line up. Claire Hatton from Google followed me up and I asked her about duplicate content as per my earlier post this week. She confirmed that she would expect that sites could get devalued if it was perceived that their content was duplicate and that larger more established sites (e.g. Hostel World, STA etc) could be perceived by the Google algorithm and being the originator based on their age, size, ranking algorithm etc. It is essential that travel companies rewrite their content when they are syndicating across numerous travel sites.

Well, it was a great conference - in a great place. I stayed in Salt, near Kingscliffe and it was hard to convince me that work was more important than the fabulous pool and beach!

The Backpacker Day was excellent especially the “real” backpackers panel. We all loved the pretty Swedish girl who exclaimed that she came to Australia for a 5 week holiday with about $20,000 to spend - as it transpires she has stayed on for three months already!! One of the things I wondered about the backpackers themselves were their ultimate relevancy. All were selected from the Arts Factory Village Backpackers (which I have to say is a fantastic environment) and by their nature were perhaps a little more alternative than many of the travellers some of these commercial operators would be targetting. The lovely Canadian girl explained to us that “75% of backpackers were hippies”. I wonder if the backpacker panel had been chosen from the likes of Wake Up in Sydney or one of the base or Nomads hostels we might have heard significantly different results.

I was pleased that following my presentation they all proclaimed to be keeping blogs or social site - one in fact was managing three such sites (MySpace, MSN Spaces and Facebook).

I heard lots of interesting stuff over the subsequent days and look forward to seeing things come to fruition over the next months. Congratulations to the imminent addition to Meg from Nomads family, and their new coming Sydney hostel as well. Rick Schindler also let me know how well his Pub Tours and Booze Cruises are doing in Sydney - amazing!

Thanks to Belinda and her team for the support, and Mike at the Word for his most amusing MC role for the day.

I am today flying to Gold Coast and Tweed Heads for the ATEC conference. ATEC is Australia’s main tourism promotion body and the annual symposium attracts over 500 delegates.

As part of this year there will be a breakout day for the backpacker industry, which is being held in Byron Bay. I am speaking on Internet Marketing and Web 2.0 along with presentations by Martin Kelly of Travel.biz and Paul Fisher of Total Travel.

Looking forward to catching up with old friends also, I will post any exciting happenings I discover during the rest of the wekk.

You can download the notes (with the extra freebie bit) and powerpoint presentation here.