At the moment only agents can book online using the recently launch Tourdesk product from Respax. It is expected that we will integrate a customer booking interface with Respax next week and hopefully then in the next few months Xebidy will redevelop the booking interface using webservices.

In it’s first incarnation the site is pretty much a replica of the brochure but over the next few months new content will be written for an Internet selling perspective and also new functionality. The target market is a slightly older market so we have not gone for the more Web 2.0 functionality that you see on sites like Base, Backpacking Queensland and the new Oz Experience site (coming next week).

A big thanks to the crew in the office here at Xebidy who have pulled some really long hours getting all the content into the site. It was a really hard site to work out navigation, content and design as there is a huge amount of information and each product is so vastly different. I think they have done a great job.

Click here to check out Australian Adventures website.

Unfortunately for Backpacking Queensland Xebidy had no ongoing relationship with them and so we were not holding any backups either, however, we do have the last beta version before the site went live and we were able to resurrect this on our own hosting solution. We will do our best to assist them in rebuilding their site as fast as possible.

Mat has also been able to build a script which retrieved all the page which Google had indexed and from there we are also hoping that we will be able to rebuild many of the pages this week.

Regardless the important point of this post is to ensure that either your IT staff or you hosting company are doing a backup properly. It is a very wise measure to test these backups regularly also. It is only when something has gone wrong do people actually go to their backup an find that this was not set properly or that something else was wrong with it.

We are Xebidy have certainly taken this opportunity to do a review of our own internal processes for out code and are setting up new measures. Make sure you are not the next to be caught out!

Last week Google updated the page rank as displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser.  While most of our clients went up a notch or two the interesting result for us was the jump of our own site here from a page rank of 4 to a page rank of 6.  As Andrew rightly commented on one of our earlier posts, despite the fact that we proport to be experts in search engine optimistation and Internet Marketing we are in fact shite at the whole SEO thing on this particular site - evidenced no less by the selection of page title.

The important point I made at the time of this debate is that we don’t really aim this site to do well in search engines, in fact I have no idea which terms lead to our most traffic etc. (far too busy worrying about out clients sites).  The blog is aimed at a pretty specific readership of clients, prospective clients and people who are interested.  It is pretty amazing the number of readers we do have and the number of comments (many of them made via email) that we receive from so many different people.  I find it rewarding when we receive feedback from the so-called CEOs and Managing Directors of some of the big tourism companies in Australia and New Zealand.

However, to achieve a page rank of 6 in just 12 months seems pretty good to me with no effort in actually marketing site.  But in reality all it does is reaffirm the argument we constantly put forward on this blog that by providing good strong fresh content that is valuable to people then your site will generate a high number of links and will be recognised as a valuable resource by search engines (particularly Google in this case).

We try and write something relevant to our audience every few days, and I think the important point here is relevant. I think the Xebidy blog readership is maintained because the content on the site is interesting and relevant to our target market.  Clearly, and this is not new to anyone, if you want to do well in search engines you need to be producing fresh relevant content regularly that is of interest to your target market.  This will lead to people naturally linking to your site without the need to go out and generate false links and put so much effort into actually chasing those links.  And, obviously a blog is one of the easiest ways to do this (but certainly not the only way).

Firstly, Dragonfly is in a separate window and I could not work out how to integrate the window of my site and Dragonfly debugger.  The layout of Dragonfly and the whole feel of it is probably quite cool and it has some nice features like showing the code in a site tree style layout but without the two windows being integrated I couldn’t see the point.

Secondly, I could not seem to edit anything in the HTML or CSS in the debugger.  This for me is one of the greatest joys of Firebug, I can change the colour of a font, or the typeset or the size of a heading and see exactly what it looks like for the whole site.  It’s great for those last few yards when you want to make sure everything lines up nicely or just try a few little tweaks.  The only thing I have ever wanted more of Firebug is if it linked to FTP and SVN so that changes you made in the browser could be committed to the site development for real.

As I said perhaps I am missing something, as Firebug is so intuitive that it is not something that you read the manual for.  In fact, in some cases we have even shown our clients how to use Firebug so that if they have an error while entering content and building up a new site they can go to the console copy the error and send it through to us.  Makes debugging the exact problem 100 times faster.

It is expected that when Internet Explorer 8 comes out sooner than later it also will include a developer tool such as Firebug and Dragonfly.  I hope for their sake it is at least integrated into the browser and has the ability to edit the code on the fly.

In order to do this we created a very open thread stating very clearly that this posting was by Bruce Thurlow, online marketing manager for Oz Experience, and that he was there to answer any questions people might have regarding Oz Experience especially since Oz Experience had been purchased only a few years ago by the Adventure Tours Australia Group and much of it’s bad press seemed to relate to it’s past.

Anyways, the forum thread has been in existence now for some four months and has generated some very reasonable discussions, not to mention making it’s way up the search engine results. In my view it provided a viable alternative to the marketing hype that we at Xebidy are actively involving in spewing out on their corporate website. In effect, it is face to face marketing where the message has to be real or you will be caught out.

Unfortunately, after 4 months one small minded poster questioned whether Travelblog had sold out by allowing Oz Experience to start a thread such as this. One person managed to engage two moderators by saying that Oz Experience by answering questions fairly in an open arena was gaining marketing exposure. Fortunately and bravely, the mods initially rebelled against this ridiculous argument pointing out the the thread was not creating problem, it was not outrightly ramming Oz Experience down anyones throats and that if other users want to post their thoughts on the questions and answers they were in no way being stopped (in fact Ali said “We’ll leave this thread “).

But, after a second round of inane badgering they crumbled and the moderators moved the sensible Oz Experience thread to a section on Travel websites (hic). Despite all their good work initially Travelblog has displayed a a lack of courage in allowing the views of one person to distract from what was a perfectly good thread being enjoyed by many.

In my opinion Travelblog has lost an opportunity to set themselves apart from the likes of Boots n All and Lonely Planet who blatantly delete any posts that are by a company representative. Rather than letting the conversation flow and telling that member (who could well have been a competitor stirring trouble) to take their opinions into another forum moving the Oz Experience post amounts to running away. Instead of moving the Oz Experience post would it not have shown more courage to move the post titled “Has Travelblog sold out..” and allowed the debate to continue there? Now it sits in the Oceania section of the site instead of a general discussion area - yet it offers no travel advice to anyone and is of no value at all to those travelling in Oceania. Has Travelblog not now penalised the greater number of members who were asking questions on this thread by hiding it in the most obscure forum area possible?

I applaud you for your initial stance but am disgusted at your about turn in the face of one person’s opinion!

1. Don’t specialise
2. Before giving birth to anything physical, ask yourself if you have created an original idea, an original concept, if there is any real value in what you have disseminated.
3. Know everything about your profession and then forget it all when you design something new
4. Never say “I could have done that” because you didn’t
5. Consume experiences, not things
6. Normal is not good
7. There are three types of beings - those who create culture, those who buy culture and those who don’t give a shit about culture. Move between the first two.
8. Think extensively, not intensively
9. Experience is the most important part of living, and the exchange of ideas and human contact is all life really is. Space and objects can encourage increased experiences or distract from our experiences
10. Here and now is all we got

Much of the discussion put forward by Pink mirrors a lot of the ideas we hold today about the ‘new’ Internet. Firstly, Pink says that society has transformed through stages of agriculture (farmers), industrial (factory workers), information (knowledge workers) to the conceptual age (creators and empathisers) - which is the period we are embarking on now. The movement from information to conceptual on the Internet is certainly the case.

The ‘new’ Internet - Web 2.0 - is a distinct shift from the simple publishing of one-dimensional information to a dynamic environment of creation, editing, contributing, recreation and definitely empathy for each others opinions, creations and contributions. Within each person’s Facebook profile we find a healthy dose of right brain conceptualisation.

Pink argues that the growth in influence of right-brain thinkers in this modern age is the result of a number of factors shaping our everyday society. Inter alia the growth of low cost knowledge economies in Asia and India has led to the outsourcing of so much work such as software development, accounting, and even medical by Western countries that it is making these left brain skills in the developed countries largely redundant. In their place is the demand for more designers, inventors, entrepreneurial types who can see the big picture - bring all the pieces together and so on. Similarly, improvements in technology that master many of the knowledge workers functions including the creation of software code, linear decision-making for medical diagnosis, number crunching for accounting and the bringing together of skills from every corner of the globe further exasperates the redundancies on these left brain services. It is easier today, according to Pink, for right brain dreamers to get their ideas realised with cheaper access to analytical and knowledge services.

This definitely is the case in the new Internet where we see a massive growth in start-up businesses that tap into both our creative and empathetic values; sites where we promote ourselves through building up our profiles for others to admire through friend networks and inter-link relationships, such as Facebook, Twitter, Friend Feed, and even the common blog. The growth in ‘platforms’ such as Ning or Yahoo Pipes further allow us to produce our own creations almost on the fly.

Obviously a society of purely right brained designers and creators doesn’t sound like an economic mecca and Pink spends the second half of his excellent book discussing ‘a whole new mind’, one that takes advantage of both the left and right minds. However, so far this book has been a great read and it is interesting for me to see the reality of psychology in things we do everyday in our business.

For example, those that follow this blog will know that one of our team, Mat, owns and operates Experience Queenstown.  Mat regularly acquires strong Queenstown based domain names that are no longer used by their owners (that is, they have been left to expire).  For example, he owns a lot of good taxi URLs.  Mat does not try and develop a whole new site for each domain (or set of domains) he purchases rather he redirects all the URLs to their relevant pages within his Experience Queenstown website - thereby building up the overall number of links to his site and therefore the sites authority.  The perceived authority value of Queenstown taxis does not just go up, but also the overall value of his site in all things Queenstown related (somewhat illustrated by the infamous Google page rank algorithm).

This is however an SEO strategy and in most cases the stuff I come across involves businesses that are running 5 or 6 domains each with only a handful of pages for each of their products and companies all linking together, just for the mere purpose of feeling like they have more stuff out there on the web.  For example, I saw one such site that has it’s sort of corporate home page, then it’s got it’s coaching products which sits on a completely separate URL called something like Bobscoaching.com, then it has it’s corporate solutions which sit on a URL something like Bobscorporate.com and so on.  Each URL home page has page ranks of about 20 or 3.

I don’t agree with this sort of strategy.  I believe that in this case all sites would be better off being combined into one corporate site and the other URLs permanently redirected (see post on 301 redirects) to this one domain.  I believe that this could raise the Google page rank to 3 or 4 and would give the site much more overall authority in all areas.  The overall site would now have more incoming links, it would be easier to maintain, introducing fresh content to one area will have a positive impact on all areas of the business and so on.

It is common practice in the travel industry to start a new website to try and sell the same thing differently - but at the end of the day, you are doing no one any favors.  The money you invest in building the new site would be better suited to developing the message and the marketing programme of the existing site and increasing its’ overall position in the search engines.  It is interesting to see the likes of HostelWorld have recently let some of their regional domain names expire in the interest of pursuing their primary domain only.

Finally, I think it is important to think about this when buying domains.  I see a lot of people buying domains because of the name of the domain thinking this will be the most important thing - sure it helps in part in the mystical search engine algorithm, but at the end of the day the real value is in the perceived authority of the website content itself and therefore it’s inbound links.

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.

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

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.

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.