We have delivered 2 new sites in the last month and I have not even told you about them – just too busy. Check them out, they rock I think.

When Google and Bing announced that Tweets may appear in their search results my first reaction was – this opens a whole new field for experts to sell services on how to optimise your site for Twitter or more relevantly your Twitter account for search engines. I wondered what people would say if they were told they need to pay an “expert” to optimise their Twitter account.

The recent launch of Google Sidewiki is destined to be one of the most controversial products ever to be seen on the Internet. The blogosphere and Twitter stream is simply alive with complaints about the implications of the Sidewiki.

I have just returned from a week in Manchester at the World Youth Student Tourism Conference where I was the official blogger. It was great event overall. The one thing for me, however, was the lesson in blogging that I received.

I enjoyed a fascinating presentation today at the WYSTC conference in Manchester by Technology Futurist Lee Crockett (committedsardines.com) on just how the “digital generation” think. According to Lee there is a whole type of human beings (primarily those under 25 but not necessarily) whose brains are wired differently to ours. These people he refers to as “digital natives” – digital is their first language (as opposed to everyone else where digital is their second language).

Today is the start of the World Youth Student Tourism Conference (WYSTC) in Manchester and this years theme is “innovation”. The first major session started with a panel discussion on the broad term of innovation – which unsurprisingly quickly took on a theme of social media. Interestingly for most of the panel facebook was the tool of the day and Twitter was lambasted as a waste of time. I disagree!

Here are my notes from this weeks NZ Backpacker Conference presentation. I hope they make sense happy to answer any questions.