Wrote this article for a column in August edition of M2 Magazine – thought you might like it.

Firstly, to all those that attended the seminar that Eric Billoud and I conducted yesterday thank you very much for your attendance.  I hope you go something out of it – I know I certainly enjoyed giving it, even if I did rattle on for too long.  I find that once I get going I [...]

It has been a very long since there has been any sort of backpacking industry conference in New Zealand. In fact, for the New Zealand backpacking tourism sector most of the leaders have chosen to attend the Australian conferences. This year however things are set to change with the introduction of the NZ Backpacking Industry Conference over the 17th and 18th September.

From a few tweets last night about “the big earthquake” – I was suddenly transposed to being a citizen journalist, reporting over Skype live on Breakfast Televison in Toronto, Canada. This is a good story.

Air New Zealand has chosen to migrate their main website to the Silver Stripe content management system. This is pretty massive news for Xebidy, as in manys ways for me it vindicates our decision to use the Silver Stripe content management server for all our development.

The need to generate traffic to a travel website means that list style articles are replacing high quality destination focused content. Articles such as “5 top nude beaches in the world” attract more traffic than well researched articles about travelling to destinations such as Cairns or Jamica. The overall impact is a dumbing down of travel journalism.

On Thursday last week we launched a new website for AJ Hackett Bungy New Zealand customers. The website (currently only available for customers at the Nevis site in Queenstown) is called Ididit and is for the sharing of customers photos and videos. The strategy behind this website is in my opinion simply fantastic.