As promised we have converted the news clip that features the Backpacking Queensland website. Once again thanks to everyone for the support and the great week last week - I hope to see you all in February.

In yesterdays’ post I introduced some of the new functionality in the new Backpacking Queensland website (you can see that post here). In this part two I introduce some more.

Reviews and ratings: As I discussed yesterday the ability to review a product and have your say, and the ability to make purchase decisions based on other peoples’ input is an important part of Web 2.0. It was agreed very early on that this was a desired feature of the new Backpacking Queensland website. We added one “new” feature, if you like, to this; and that is the ability to add images to a review. If someone has something bad to say, such as the room was dirty, then they can back this up with an image. Hopefully, however, it will lead to users sharing good images as well - “had a great time, here’s me at the Calypso pool table soaking wet - don’t ask”. The greater the users interactivity the more successful the site will be.

Google translations: In a second part to Mr Geherts’ email that I have quoted in my two earlier posts on Backpacking Queensland he comments negatively on the use of the Google translator tool for different languages on the website. You will see in the top right hand corner of the Backpacking Queensland site flags for the different languages and then clicking on these a user is redirected to the Google server where the site is automatically translate. Of course, this is not ideal as inevitably the translation is not of a very high quality, however, it does provide a good intermediary solution to Backpacking Queensland. Anyone that knows anything about websites will know that translating a site can be both expensive and very time consuming. The intention here is for Backpacking Queensland to monitor the traffic and clicks over the next six months or so and should one or more languages prove very popular then they will consider the resources needed to do a proper translation. The Google tool, however, is not all that bad; one of its’ cool features is that it allows users to correct the translations that are not right through the “suggest a better translation tool” and also view the content back in English to assist with deciphering the content. Hopefully, travellers may even contribute to bettering the translations so that it becomes more useable for Backpacking Queensland over time.

On-site advertising: The Backpacking Queensland website uses the Swuzzlebucket onsite advertising network. This is a very new concept that offers an advertising network for the Australian and New Zealand backpacking industry only. It focuses on providing advertising only on adventure tourism and backpacking websites and only shows relevant ads. It means that the users are getting a better experience as they are getting appropriate ads and that advertisers are getting much better value for money as their ads are displayed to their target market. The Swuzzlebucket network works on a minimum charge per 1,000 times an ad is displayed and a cost per click meaning that advertisers only pay for when their ads are working for them.

Newsletters: The newsletter functionality is based on the Open Source solution PHP List. It is all managed on the Backpacking Queensland server and is using probably the most popular newsletter serving software in the world. Like my previous posts on why Xebidy chose the Silver Stripe framework for the Backpacking Queensland project (which you can read here), we chose PHP Lists because we do not see the point in reinventing the wheel. PHP List is awesome, it has great reports and monitoring ability to see who opens the newsletters, which are deleted and the links etc., that are most viewed. On the Backpacking Queensland site we have used the functionality to the fullest by collecting some demographic data as part of the sign up process. The users are asked when they are traveling to Australia, how long they will travel in Queensland for, some demographic information like age, sex and nationality and then there are options for their interests. Armed with this sort of data Backpacking Queensland can now run specific targeted newsletter campaigns; for example, they may want to send a newsletter to all females, from the UK, aged between 20 and 30 who are interested in diving, that are coming to Australia and Queensland in the next six month, offering some special diving products. There is enormous advertising revenue potential here.

So that’s the Backpacking Queensland new website in more than a nutshell. Its’ really a very large site and one that we at Xebidy have enjoyed working over the last four or five months. The girls at Gate 7 in Sydney, who are charged with maintaining the site, have been a wonder to work with and hopefully we can work with them again to extend the site. We already have lots of ideas about how to make it better and increase the reach. I am off to Cairns tomorrow for the launch of the site and look forward to hearing all the feedback first hand, positive and negative.

So continuing on from my earlier post about Backpacking Queensland (which you can read here) going live and “that’ email from Simon Gehert, I quote:

“Rarely have we seen something more obviously shoehorned into existing technology where it shouldn’t be. Take an open source CMS you didn’t develop complete with tag clouds, social network site links, unrelated blog headline feeds, google maps etc ,which was never intended for this purpose, add some crap interface design, a link to your site in the footer which says “Well made in New Zealand by Xebidy … and you have all the makings for a car crash of epic proportions.”

In my earlier post about the site I discussed the Silver Stripe content management system. One of things I said was that in the whole scheme of things Silver Stripe is not a very large Open Source project, which means that unfortunately at this stage a lot of the functionality such as tags, social bookmarks, RSS feeds, maps etc we have had to develop ourselves - plus there is not enough people using the Bootstrap interface yet. So I thought I would use this post to introduce you to some of this functionality and explain what it means and why we have chosen to use it in the Backpacking Queensland site:

Tags: I posted last month on the tags in Backpacking Queensland (read that post here) and my belief that in fact the tag system we have used in this site are more meaningful that many of the tags I have seen on other sites. The way they work is that users can add their own keywords to pages throughout the site as they travel the site to use to remind them of the pages. When an internal page is tagged this tag helps to build up the tag cloud which appears on the home page. The larger the font of the tags on the home page, then the more pages within the site that have been tagged with those tags. Tags, subsequently, provide an informal navigation structure created by the users. We added a little twist to the whole tagging concept by also then providing the user with links to You Tube for videos, Flickr for photos, Wikipedia for definitions, and del.icio.us for other pages across the Internet tagged the same. That means, if a user tags a page Cairns and then wants to see videos and images of Cairns from where they are on the Backpacking Queensland site the functionality is there.

Social network links: The social bookmarks facilitate users saving the Backpacking Queensland pages in popular bookmarking websites. Sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us are where users save their favourite web pages instead of saving them in their browsers. This is very pertinent for travellers who are never in the same Internet Cafe, or on the same computer, and so use these social bookmarking sites save pages they might want to go back to for booking or more information. By providing these links we think we are making it easier for the users, one less impediment to use, and therefore hopefully increasing users likelihood of returning to the Backpacking Queensland site. We included the ability to save a page to Facebook as well, because lets’ face it, everyone in this market uses Facebook.

Blog feeds: I have written and presented so many times before about the importance of user generated content. In the new Internet users are seeking information from their peers about the products they are consuming, whether they be travel products or otherwise. Reviews and ratings sites, forums, and blogs provide a user with a great deal of independent content to help them evaluate their options. In the same way as a traveller will talk to other travellers in the hostel common space so too do they use the Internet to research their travels. On the Backpacking Queensland website we have introduced links directly to blogs about the member products. Like the concept of linking the users to You Tube and Flickr for same tag images and videos, we believe that by providing this information on the Backpacking Queensland users will be able to get the independent feedback they require about the products without necessarily needing to go searching elsewhere. The travel stories are all received through our Xebidy Xefeed product where the feeds can be checked for relevancy and then fed back to the Backpacking Queensland website. It means that “unrelated” feeds do not appear. We have handed this completely over to the girls at Gate 7 to manage on a daily basis - although we do offer a complete Internet and social media monitoring service in house here, which you can find out more about here.

Google maps: I think the functionality is pretty intuitive here and don’t quite know what Mr Gehert is referring to when he says “… which was never intended for this purpose”. The maps show you where the member being shown on that page is, and an aggregating map shows where all the members in the area are. Rather than using stylised maps which are meaningless to a user who has not been to, say, Toowoomba, a Google map can be traversed and can show different views from street levels to satellite. On the Backpacking Queensland site we default to satellite maps for the aggregating views because they are fun and make the site look cool, and then use hybrid maps which combine the satellite map with streets for more purpose (unless the satellite view is not high enough density and we just use street view). The user can easily change these views. As many know mapping is something we take quite seriously at Xebidy and unfortunately it becomes a function of time and cost as to how much mapping functionality to include to a client. We are currently undertaking a very extensive development with another client that would see the maps being able to change the content on the page around them and also have a lot of information around the main focus of the map, for example, a hostel can show where supermarkets, ATM’s things to do etc are relative to them. Hopefully, we can extend Backpacking Queensland mapping in this direction at some point in the future.

There is lots more cool functionality in this site, and lots more to Mr Geherts’ email and I will introduce all this tomorrow - need to get on with some work now. As I am sure you can all see, loving the new Backpacking Queensland site though, well done guys.

It has been two weeks since I posted - but in all honest truth we have been so unbelievably busy. We have had a visit from Bruce Thurlow from Adventure Tours and Oz Experience for the past two weeks as we approach the final run in to the new Adventure Tours website as well as three websites going live - being Backpacking Queensland, Fletcher Living at Jacks Point and Waiata Lodge.

As most know the launch of Backpacking Queensland was drastically delayed by issues with hosting which are now thankfully resolved although Michael Gall had to do a last minute complete reprogramme of the Silver Stripe manifest builder to cop with the lower availability of memory on the host.

Anyway, today I want to address an email I received from Simon Gehert regarding Backpacking Queenslands’ new site and use it as an ideal opportunity to introduce you to some of the things we have done for the site. I quote

“Rarely have we seen something more obviously shoehorned into existing technology where it shouldn’t be. Take an open source CMS you didn’t develop complete with tag clouds, social network site links, unrelated blog headline feeds, google maps etc ,which was never intended for this purpose, add some crap interface design, a link to your site in the footer which says “Well made in New Zealand by Xebidy … and you have all the makings for a car crash of epic proportions.”

So ripping into it, for those that don’t know, the content management server that we develop on is based on the Silver Stripe platform. We didn’t develop Silver Stripe we just use it; and have greatly extended it. We chose to use Silver Stripe on this project (and most projects we do) because it is Open Source and we firmly believe in an Open Source philosophy. From a client’s point of view they get the code, the get a system that anyone can develop, and when the have moved on from Xebidy they can theoretically go out to any web developer and continued to get the system supported and extended.

Using a proprietary in house system restricts the website owner to that development company; if the company no longer drives the CMS development the client is inevitably left high and dry with a system they have outgrown and no one to support them. The Internet is moving so fast at the moment that you need a system that keeps pace with these changes, in-house systems inevitably are developed using clients’ money - if a client wants a feature then they pay for that to be developed in the CMS. In an Open Source environment many developers from all over the world are continually developing the system and trying to make it better for themselves and then sharing those advances back to the users. The system evolves faster and inevitably better. Take the example of the manifest builder in Silver Stripe; one of its’ weaknesses has always been the way it compiles all the PHP code when the site is first called - it uses a larger amount of memory than most hosting companies are happy to make available. When Michael Gall redeveloped the way the manifest builder worked to be used on the Backpacking Queensland host the first thing he did was put it back out to the development community, apart from being met with enormous cheers, he suddenly found himself with a huge amount of debugging help as everyone looks to incorporate it into their projects and into the main (trunk) system.

Silver Stripe is not the only Open Source content management system in the market, and is in fact in the whole scheme of things, a very small system; but there were a number of other factors in our decision making process. Firstly, it is developed in PHP5 which is quite a step up from PHP4, it is more structured, which suits a lot of the Java contractors we have had on board, and in our opinion is future proofing the development for some time to come. Secondly, at the time of choosing Silver Stripe it had recently been accepted for the Google Summer of Code which means Google sponsors a handful of projects across the world to have their projects developed under Google supervision - we thought this was a great tick of acceptance for the system. Thirdly, Silver Stripe actually provided a good framework for the guys to develop a lot of the other stuff we do beyond just the websites; such as our travel planner which is developed completely inside the framework. Finally, we choose Silver Stripe because it was developed in New Zealand and we thought that being a New Zealand company ourselves and promoting Open Source technologies to so many international clients is made sense to support local home grown that is well run and has a similar ethos.

It looks like this is going to be a long post, so I will break it into a few posts over the next few days and deal with some of the functionality then. But just to close there is one important point to reintroduce about the Silver Stripe content management server. Earlier on this year we undertook a huge interface change to the basic CMS. Having used lots of CMS’s over the years I wanted something in which the user interface and ability to build new pages was really easy and that the client did not have to keep coming back to get more pages developed etc. Xebidy developed the now popular Bootstrap interface which allows a user to drag components (which anyone can easily have developed by any web company knowing PHP) onto a page layout and thus build or redesign pages easily on the fly. This means a site can be easily extended or even redesigned at any point in the future without the massive effort that took place in the last few months with Backpacking Queensland in re-entering all their data. We think Bootstrap on the Silver Stripe platform is something very special and certainly the feedback we are getting from our many clients and the Open Source community says so also. For those interested in finding out more about Bootstrap here is a video of Davis Hammon presenting an earlier version and a demo is also available here.

We have had an absolute comedy of errors getting Backpacking Queensland live over the last month - all that could have been avoided by a semblance of a helpful hosting company - unfortunately BQ used Web Central in Australia.

Firstly, it started well over a month ago when we contacted them regarding setting up the new site. We had all the FTP details and simply wanted to engage them in conversation regarding the hosting platform. When we enquired about Backpacking Queensland we were told that Web Central no longer hosted them and that they had moved away 2 years ago.

After nearly two weeks going back and forward with BQ, Tourism Queensland, Web Central and the previous developers it was found out that yes they do host the site and that the hosting contract actually is under the name Queensland Backpacking. Obviously really, seeing as they have a number of other domains names also registered there.

Once in and what should have been rolling we required an upgrade of the PHP version from 4.1 to 5.2. We communicate this with Web Central and are told that this is not a problem all the 2006 servers have PHP 5.2 and it would just be a case of moving this over, no cost. At the same time we also bring to light some of the other requirements, memory requirements, access to the cpanel and mod-rewrites. We wait a week - nothing happens. On chasing up WEb Central we discover that as their web developers we are not allowed to authorise this upgrade.

No problem, the guys at Gate 7 - the marketing company for Backpacking Queensland (and incidentally the place where the Web Central invoices are sent) authorises the upgrade and we wait a week. Nothing happens so we chase up Web Central again and are told that Gate 7 are not allowed to authorise the upgrade, only Tourism Queensland are allowed to authorise.

Finally, authorisation is organised and supposedly the upgrade is queued for 24 hours. Well over a week later and numerous phone calls and broken promises (such as - it will be done in an hour) an upgrade takes place - to PHP 5.0!

Back to the drawing board - fortunately, we have everything in emails saying that 5.2 is standard, no problem, blah blah blah.

Finally, the upgrade happens and when we log into the ftp site with the details given we get a Karate site sharing the same hosting. “We can see this is happening, but we don’t know why”. Get that sorted and their servers continually (read once every hour) lock us out of the FTP access. Only way around this is to lodge a ticket (the help service actually went down at one stage) and wait for it to be fixed. This must have happened at least three or four times - and all the time Alison at Gate 7 is continually on the phone to them trying to get resolution. The guys at Gate 7 have been amazing.

So, at about lunch time it looked like everything is sorted. We go to do a DB Build and there is no mod-rewrites enabled on the server and there can’t be because they are using IIS6. What a drama! It is not over yet - but this has been the worst and most unhelpful hosting experience of mine and the crews life and collectively we must have completed over 100 deployments.

We are now in the hunt for a better solution - fast!

Next week a new website for Backpacking Queensland is due to go live and I think it is perhaps the most forward thinking “backpacking” website to come out in New Zealand and Australia (if not globally) with its’ reviews and ratings, inbounds RSS feed aggregation and tags. I have been honoured to be involved in this process from go to woe. Unfortunately, it only scrapes the surface of what is possible - but it is awesome nonetheless.

One of the key features of the new Backpacking Queensland site is the ability of users to tag the web pages as they go - and it is the reason for this post. That is, to explain some of the principals of tagging that are being applied to this project and to also layout further developments that should be undertaken in the future or applied to other projects that show the same willingness.

One of the most interesting posts I have ever seen on tagging was a comparison of Amazon and LibraryThing tags system by Tim Spalding
LibraryThing began on August 30, 2005 and instantly offered tagging. Three months later, Amazon introduced tags with much hype by Web 2.0 proponents. While tagging was becoming mainstream with sites like Del.icio.us, Amazon was huge and to many signalled the beginning of corporate sites adding tag functionality. But it never happened! In fact, currently LibraryThing has 10 times the tags as Amazon.

I have drawn a discussion list of what I think makes tags work:

1. Importance of critical mass

To do anything with tags you need lots of tags. In my article about What is Web 2.0 I introduce the concept of the Wisdom of Crowds. At it’s core is the recognition that the collective intelligence of the masses is captured for all to use, so classifications and therefore searches become richer, clearer and more satisfying.

Without a critical mass the effectiveness of tags are skewed by “opinion tags” - i.e. those like “good hostel” - there is even a risk that those items being tagged (in Backpacking Queenslands’ case the travel suppliers) corrupting the tags. There is obviously more questions than answers here (and it is unfortunate that I should have this as my first principle) such as how do we know when a page has aggregated sufficient tags to be tagged authoritatively? Or alternatively, what is the critical number of taggers a content item has to be exposed to, for meaningful tagging patterns to emerge

2. Tags are facilitating feature not simply just an add ons

Tagging should be easy and most importantly should be there for a purpose. In Backpacking Queensland a user can search important social media sites such as Flickr, You Tube, De.licio.us and Wikipedia for similar content with these tags. This is especially effective when we consider that travel decisions have one of the best fits for user generated content and peer reviews. Say, a user tags a page Brisbane and wants to see other traveller photos or videos of Brisbane to help make their travel plans they can easily retrieve these through the tagging of the pages on the Backpacking Queensland site.

Amazon has given little prominence to tags. Backpacking Queensland in contrast have put tags in the top right hand corner - one of the key positions for content. It is inevitable that there will always be conflict between commercial and basically “social” interests in most websites. On a retail site the most valuable space, where the reader’s eyes are first drawn, is most usually reserved for content that will generate the most revenue. Fortunately, Backpacking Queensland does not have a purely commercial interest, rather it is an information site driven by its’ members and therefore the tagging elements have been given pride of place which will hopefully gain wide usage and understanding.

Moreover, tagging is often used as a means of navigation, which on sites where there is good structured navigation this becomes less necessary and the tagging less effective. Consideration to the functionality of the tagging is essential. This could be an impediment to success on the Backpacking Queensland site as the navigation is well considered.

Building good quality search around tags (as we have done on the Backpacking Queensland website) is the first place to start. As one critic of Amazon says” I can use LibraryThing’s tags to find books I might like, to find others who have the same tastes in books I have, etc. It’ loads of fun, and it’s one of the things that makes LibraryThing so great. LibraryThing is much more user friendly with tags than Amazon is, so I tag everything in sight! LOL!”

3. Tagging is essentially a selfish act

Joshua Porter’s The del.icio.us lesson states that “personal value precedes network value,” or, rather the basic marketing rule of “what’s in it for me”. Users need an incentive to tag. The biggest being the need to organise for THEMSELVES a large collection of data. Users will not tag for the alturistic benefit of others. “Its’ as fun as straightening items at the supermarket. It’s not your stuff and it’s not your job” says Tim Spalding.

4. Yet tagging really kicks into gear when the personal blooms into social

When tagging content turns into an hours-long exploration of others’ web page categorisations tagging takes on a whole new level. Amazon (and unfortunately Backpacking Queensland) do not list their taggers. You need to click around a lot before the tags turn into people. (The failure is particularly surprising in light of Amazon’s clear grasp of social software. Amazon got “social” years before it was trendy.)

Tagging site should allow users to publish the lists of tags and equally other users to identify taggers with similar minds to see how they consider things. This particularly relevant in travel where recommendations and worth of mouth are important. If users feel like they are gaining something from the community (ideas on where to travel and so on) they will be more likely to feed the machine and tag themselves.

To dismiss people purely as selfish is wrong - look at the review sties where users go to great lengths to sing the praises of a product, or equally dismiss it. The answer can be found in usefulness - reviewers add reviews to a site if they themselves feel that the site is giving them good feedback. Users will tag a site if they feel that the tags are useful to themselves. Sites that send surveys as part of their customer review process should consider adding tag functionality at this stage.

So, there we have 4 principals of tagging: the importance of critical mass; the use of tags for a reason not because of a fad; the recognition that users tag pages for their own use not for the use of others; and that to make tagging really work a recognition that the personal agenda of individuals can be ratcheted into a social value. The Backpacking Queensland website goes live at the beginning of November and it will be interesting to see the tagging functionality take off and hopefully at some time in the future we may even get to develop it further, attach users to the tags, generate itineraries or other exported documents from the tags or even share the tags with other sites for integration - wouldn’t it be cool if the Calypso Hostel in Cairns listed their tags as seen on Backpacking Queensland on their own site!!