Well I’m fresh back from Jamaica (well actually not very fresh at all with the jet lag) which will explain the lack of blog posts for the last couple of weeks. My wife encouraged me to avoid the Internet like the plague while I was away which I thought was very unlikely but the £5 for 30 minutes charge at the hotel managed to dissuade me!

I spent the time relaxing, drinking and reading while I was there soaking up the Caribbean sunshine. One book I was lent by Digikev is Blog Schmog by Bly - a good read and although Bob Bly is by no means popular within the blogging community he speaks a lot of sense with regard to blogs and business. I find myself on a very similar wavelength to him however I do still feel evangelists do have their place in technology otherwise some applications would just never get off the ground (future post to follow).

Anyway I digress. The one main observation I made on holiday was the use of social networking by fellow holidayers (vacationers to our American cousins). I believe this is one area that social networking really has a very high penetration - everyone I met (and I mean everyone) had been on the Internet to research holiday locations and accommodation in particular trip adviser and holidays uncovered came up again and again.

We’re not just talking dipping a toe in the water here either, some have obviously spent a lot of time doing this and it’s amazing the type of information they brought with them from their online travels that really impressed me. For example we were recommended taxi drivers by name and telephone number, told which staff members provided the best service (and were most entertaining) and given insights into where to go to on the island; all originally were suggested by the online community. Every time spot on and really contributed to an excellent holiday by all accounts - Terrance the taxi driver certainly does know all the best jerk centres! Obviously a certain amount of this information is passed around when you talk to people on holiday anyway however coming away prepared means there are so many more heads available.

The thing I found really interesting here was that there seems to be a really small but incredibly popular niche for social networking for holiday research. A great number of the people I talked to did not know what social networking was and didn’t seem to be involved with it in anyway apart from the holiday review and forum websites that kept coming up time and time again.

Thinking about it’s obvious why this is: people spend a few weeks a year and proportionately a large amount of money on their holidaying. Therefore people are bound to spend a large amount of time researching the subject - time that they wouldn’t necessarily reserve for other subjects.

Also having a good holiday is so important to people that having a great or bad holiday will invoke an emotional response. This means they are also more likely to post about it when they get back also.

Both these factors makes social networking boom for travel information even if the activity by users is sporadic.

I do feel perhaps there is a gap here however, these sites are generally review sites in nature but I really think there is a niche here for a specific Facebook style holiday friends/reviews type site. I’ve not got the time myself to take the plunge but if anyone has give me a shout and I’ll pass on my ideas!

So it’s a month since I wrote my first blog post and I’ve got to say I’m surprised at several things I’ve encountered.

Firstly shock of shocks is that I’ve managed to post a decent amount of entries. 34 actually which is quite a few more than I actually thought would be possible. The only way I can really describe how I’m doing this is simple posting whatever is on my mind at any point in a day. The informality of it certainly helps.

It’s also made me much more aware of other blogs (particularly in the Birmingham area) and the different writing styles and subjects - which reminds me I must update my Blogroll accordingly to give credit where it is due.

But the thing that has really amazed me is how quickly a brand new blog on a brand new domain has actually been found by people so quickly. I was ready to be posting for several months before getting any traffic at all. But I’ve had a regular readership it seems which has only encouraged me to spout forth even more! Blog on…

I love Google Analytics and can always be found looking through all the pretty reports it generates for various websites I am involved with. I never cease to be amazed at the various routes people find a website.

One major downside of Google Analytics however is its reliance on JavaScript which makes some things on a website difficult to track. One example of a figure I would love to know is the true number of subscriptions to an RSS feed.

I’ve found a half way house solution to this posted by Hamlet Batista which tracks people clicking on RSS links on a website using the same code I use to track conversions on dynamic pages. For your reference this is:

<a href=http://www.digital-rant.co.uk/feed/ title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker(’/tracking/feed’);”>

Or if you are using the latest Google Analytics code:

<a href=http://www.digital-rant.co.uk/feed/ title=”Subscribe to my feed” rel=”alternate” onclick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/tracking/feed’);”>

Where “/tracking/feed” is your goal URL setup in Google Analytics.

 However this code makes the following assumptions:

1. Everyone subscribes using the RSS links within the page and not the RSS details in the page header (picked up by various browsers).
2. Everyone that follows an RSS link actually subscribes to the feed.

If anyone has any other suggestions to overcome these problems give me a shout - I’d love to know! In the meantime I’ll have to survive on these approximate figures.

Of course if I had the cash I’d upgrade to Google Analytics’ big brother Urchin 6 which recently came out of beta which sorts these issues but as I don’t have $2995 I’ll have to carry on as I am.

Another reason for global warming! The end of the horrible gnat’s piss that is produced down under!

I’ve turned the heating up a few notches!