Sourced from scoop.co.nz

Press Release: Ministry of Tourism – Wednesday, 28 February 2007

The Internet is the number one information source for domestic tourists, latest Regional Visitor Monitor (RVM) research released by the Ministry of Tourism reveals.

The Internet has now surpassed family and friends, as a source of information for regional trip planning. Over half of all domestic travellers interviewed (51%) had used the Internet to plan their trip to their destination region for the last quarter of 2006, up from 38% in the first quarter of 2006.

“We believe this is a definite trend emerging here,” said Bruce Bassett, Ministry of Tourism Research Manager. “Information from family and friends and travel books are also highly important, but now the Internet is king for kiwis.”

International visitors surveyed were also increasing their use of the Internet to research their destination region. Nearly half (49%) of the international respondents said the web was a source of information for the last quarter of 2006, up from 37% in the first quarter.

However, for international travellers the Internet is still less significant than guide books and word of mouth.

Since January 2006, 6775 respondents have been surveyed, actual Internet booking of tourism related products by both international and domestic travellers has trended upwards for accommodation (38% to 42%) and activities and attractions (33% to 43%).

Internet bookings for transport over the period experienced softened (50% to 46%).

Mr Bassett said that the research implied that serious consideration needed to be put into web design and strategy by the tourism industry, particularly for those targeting the domestic market.

“We knew the Internet was a key tool for travel planning and booking, but to be seeing this growth over the period of one year sends a clear message to marketers and operators. Your website had better be up to scratch if you want to win a tourist’s business.”

The Regional Visitor Monitor (RVM) is a survey managed by the Ministry of Tourism in conjunction with Tourism New Zealand six participating regions, Auckland, Rotorua, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin and Queenstown. It provides seasonal ‘snapshots’ of visitors’ experiences in the regions of New Zealand. For more information contact Bruce Bassett, bruce.bassett@tourism.govt.nz, tel 04 498 7448.

www.tourismresearch.govt.nz
www.tourism.govt.nz

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IP - Unique visitors can be measured using a number of methodologies. Traditional Log analysis used IP addresses to identify unique users however this approach over reports people using dialup connections and under reports people using corporate gateways to access the internet.

Cookie - The most common method of evaluating the number of unique visitors to a site is by giving users browsers a cookie that can be used to identify that person as unique. This system is more accurate than IP but there is still the issue of people whole block or delete cookies and also people who use more than one PC to access the internet (business and home) and people who share a login (family PC). However this is the industry standard for reporting unique visitors and Red Sheriffs particular approach to unique cookie tracking is recognized by OPG (Online Publishers Group)

Identified - The only true measure of unique people is to require a login to access the site or place and order. This can be supported by cookies to store login names between sections. This approach will always underreport but does provide the number of unique people who actively interact with you site.

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CPM - Cost Per Thousand view. Even if banners are booked by the week you will need to understand the total number of impressions that are likely and the distribution of these impressions over the days of the week and over the hours of the day. Without this it is difficult to accurately predict the effectiveness of the campaign in real time.

CTR – Click Through Rate. What % of people actually clicks on an ad. This is used to access the popularity of a particular creative or placement.

CPC – Cost Per Click. How much each click cost you.

CR – Conversion Rate. What percentage of clicks/visitors took the desired action of the campaign (business outcome)

CPA – Cost Per Action. How much did each action (business outcome cost)

CPO – Cost Per Order. In e-commerce situations the cost per order is a vial measurement.

ROI - Return on Investment. For every dollar you spent how much profit you made. Often this is less than 1 in the case of new customer acquisition.

LTV - Life Time Value. For every dollar spent on customer acquisition and servicing how much profit did you make each period (week/month/year). At the break even point this is equal to 1 and should increase above this as repeat business is generated.

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Sourced from informationweek.com

By Thomas Claburn – February 8, 2007

Yahoo has opened the way to the post-Web 2.0 era — call it the Recombinant Web — with the release of its new Pipes mashup service.

“Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment,” Yahoo explains.

In other words, it’s a way for non-programmers to create new Web services.

Other companies have been pursuing this goal as well. Ning offers a platform that allows users to easily create custom social Web sites. FortiusOne is developing what it calls the GeoCommons, a public data-sharing resource for map mashups. And a startup called Teqlo is building a mashup platform that promises to let non-technical users create applications from Web services without programming.

But Yahoo deserves credit for recognizing where the Web is headed and providing the first mass-market platform to get there.

One of the central tenets of Web 2.0 is that data should be exposed through APIs for use by others. Many Web services have done so, but using that data still isn’t easy.

The problem, as Yahoo engineer Jeremy Zawodny describes it, has been a lack of good tools to combine online data sets. “In the Unix world, we often connect sources of data to filters and utilities using pipes,” he writes in his blog. “A pipe is a way of constructing ad-hoc workflows composed of any number of inputs, filters, and manipulation tools. And the beauty of the whole system is that they all use a very simple input and output method, so there’s a nearly infinite set of ways you can combine and recombine them.”

“On the Web, however, it’s harder,” Zawodny continues. “There are data sources and feeds, but until now we’ve had no pipes! Pulling together and integrating data sources using JavaScript [on the client] isn’t for the faint of heart. The browser isn’t the same as a Unix command-line, so building mashups has been more frustrating and time consuming than it needs to be — especially for Unix people like me.”

Yahoo Pipes aims to solve that problem by offering what amounts to a visual integrated development environment for mixing and managing online data sources. Using Pipes, you can, for example, create a single RSS feed of news alerts — automatic searches for a keyword like “Yahoo” — from a variety of different sources. And Yahoo expects to expand the possibilities in the future.

If Yahoo can figure out how to keep the Pipes site up and running — it has been overwhelmed by user interest most of the morning — it will be able to boast a truly innovative service for which Google, at the moment, has no answer.

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Sourced from arstechnica.com

By Jeremy Reimer | Published: January 15, 2007 – 10:53AM CT

A major change to the way Outlook 2007 renders email has created quite a stir online, and Microsoft’s plans have largely been met with derision and critique.

The change, which is explained in detail on Microsoft’s site, involved decoupling Outlook 2007 from Internet Explorer’s HTML rendering engine. Instead, Outlook will use Word 2007’s HTML viewer, which is an incomplete rendering engine missing a few features previously supported by the IE engine. The end result is that e-mails that use certain advanced HTML and CSS features will be somewhat degraded in appearance in Outlook 2007, yet they will look fine in earlier versions of Outlook. One benefit is that this will make Outlook email more secure by making it impossible to hook potential IE exploits via email. Dud, or stud?

Continue Reading »

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