Many of you have been eagerly awaiting (and badgering us) for the release of our XEFEED product. Well here it is in beta at last!

XEFEED, scans the “blogosphere” for content relating to particular words using all sort of RSS aggregators from Bloglines to Google Blog Search, takes in those feeds to our unique desktop manager, where they are “rinsed” (that is, checked manually for relevancy) and refed to a website for presentation as independent third party content. In essence, we are a big human powered search engine for information, comments, and reviews and ratings about your company or operating area through the social blog network. We can also set up alerts for management or marketing staff when bad news strikes - and inevitably it does - so that this can be tackled head on in the open transperant forum that the Internet creates.

Over the next few weeks we will be developing further marketing material on XEFEED and extending it to scan many of the leading other community sites that travellers use for sharing information, such as the photo sharing sites of Flickr and Photobucket and the video sharing sites of You Tube and OE.TV.

At present XEFEED is only in invited beta release, but you can see a very simple example on CarsandCampers.co.nz where we are taking blog RSS feeds from a few selected sources for the tag “spaceships”, rinsing the feeds and refeeding back to the site. The link back to the original content remains intact, maintaining the authenticity of the feeds.

If you want more information then definitely send us an email.

We are overjoyed to welcome Mat Weir on-board at XSD as this week as lead developer. Mat is heading up the Queenstown crew - with avengance in not just developing but also snow-boarding and judging by my headache on Saturday morning and the fact that James (one of our two resident US imports) had his wheels fall off by 9pm; he is also leading the late night charge.

Mat was previously web developer for 5 years with Inspire Net leading projects all the way from conception and client management to production and launch. Some of these successful projects include www.thejets.co.nz, www.studentcity.co.nz, www.morefmmanawatu.co.nz, and www.nznog.org. Mat is also solely responsible for the www.experiencequeenstown.co.nz and www.waihekeonline.com websites; sites he personally develops and promotes. His experience in PHP, Ruby, XML, and Javascript coding and content management system development brings a unique level of expertise to the success of our projects. Mat has received a number of Netguide awards on behalf of Inspire Net.

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.