I’ve decided to create a RSS (Blog) feed to aggregate all of the RSS from all of the NZ mapping and spatial companies. I thought it would a great idea to promote a single RSS feed to the industry to promote ideas, products etc.

After a quick look at some of the top players in the space, very few have RSS feeds. (Which is very disappointing!)
If you know of a blog that should be on this list either email me john at projectx.co.nz or add it on the wiki page I have created at barcamp wiki.

Spatial bar camp is being held in Wellington on the 1st of May. They are running a spatial mash-up competition in which they are asking companies or people mashing spatial data. More information at http://barcamp.org.nz/wellington-spatial-mash-2008-1-may-2008

ProjectX will be submitting 2-3 entries, showcasing our new visualisation engine.

We’ve just taken another looking at Google sitemaps for the first time in a long while. We’ve had mixed resulting using the sitemaps. Changes that we’ve made were taking weeks to come through. So with all the frustration at the way Google indexes our site, we decided to write a little program that parses our weblogs and looks at our crawler traffic. Its been incredibly useful to see what the google crawler is upto.

Here’s how it helped us, as we refine our SEO for our recent photos page, we got to see the effects to the crawler and on the site.

Our Google sitemap had this :

<url>
<loc>http://www.zoomin.co.nz/?recent/photos</loc>
<changefreq>hourly</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>

And this was our traffic before the changes

2008-04-10 /?recent/photos MSN [65.55.209.80]
2008-04-10 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-10 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-09 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-08 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-08 /?recent/photos Yahoo [74.6.29.187]
2008-04-07 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.94]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-06 /?recent/photos Yahoo [74.6.29.187]
2008-04-05 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.94]
2008-04-05 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.99]

We changed the changefreq to always and it seems to have had an affect.

<url>
<loc>http://www.zoomin.co.nz/?recent/photos</loc>
<changefreq>always</changefreq>
<priority>1.0</priority>
</url>
Using the always change frequency tag denotes that a page is dynamic and changes all the time. Our photo page doesn’t change all the time, but it wasn’t getting indexed by google as often as the content has been changing.

The change had an effect within 24 hours of changing our sitemap.

Displaying 1-25 of 70
Date Place Crawler
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.58.157]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-13 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.52.85]
2008-04-12 /?recent/photos Google [66.249.65.206]
2008-04-11 /?recent/photos Yahoo [67.195.37.116]

We’re currently thinking about making our seo tool opensource, as its really useful for medium sized sites to figure out what Google is upto.

Just upgraded our ProjectX blog to wordpress 2.5. It was amazing easy to upgrade and instructions are really comprehensive. So far, I really like the backend . They have really improved the whole interface. Most actions that I want to do are now within the first screen roll.

Nice work to the Wordpress team.

Recently, we’re looking at Google Analytics and we found that the bounce rate for one of our important pages had crept up to 50%.
Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from that page) - the stat helps to determine the quality of the page.

Initially, we were a little perplexed and even arrogant when we were trying to figure out why people were exiting immediately. We started asking ourselves some questions…

• Whats wrong with page?
• Why aren’t the user getting it?
• Does the page match what the users expected to see?
• What information do the users expect to see?

Then we started to look at which pages the users were coming from, then it became clear that we’d mucked up the task flow of this particular action. We made some changes to the our task flow and the result were immediate and dramatic.

We had a 5 times improvement across those pages on the site it dropped from over 50% to 9% . And we’ve noticed 100% improvement in time on site as a result.

I can recommend that some analysis of your key metrics, can help you analyse whats working and whats not working on your site.

Mobile development wizards Innaworks have just released alcheMo for iPhone .

alcheMo for iPhone is designed for simultaneous Java ME and iPhone development. Initially targeted at game publishers, alcheMo for iPhone is fully automated and designed to instantly port a standard Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) mobile game to iPhone and iPod touch without the need for further manual adjustments.

Will be handy for those companies that are wanting to port their Java apps to iPhone.

Update: Article in ComputerWorld - Kiwi developer ports Java games to iPhone

Joel Sposky talks about business strategy and compares it a simple concept that he learned in the army - Fire and Motion.

Here is how it works. You fire at the enemy. That’s the fire part. And you move forward at the same time. That’s the motion. Get it?

You’re firing because then your enemy has to take cover. He can’t fire back at you when he’s cowering behind a wall. But firing is not enough. You also have to move forward, or you won’t make any progress.

Its all sounds all pretty standard stuff. When you start to think about the parallels in the business world that it start to really hit home.

If you look at a competitive market, the successful company is always the one setting the agenda and forcing competitors to match it.

If you’re constantly looking at matching your competitor’s features, thats equivalent to firing at the where your enemy was, not at where they are or where they are going.

Joel offers some insight on how to break this cycle.

The good news is that this isn’t terribly difficult: Instead of paying attention to what your competitors are doing, start reading your customer feedback e-mail personally.

…

Rest assured that your customers are already trying to tell you that this opportunity exists, if you’ll only listen.“

And finally here’s a quote from the ice hockey legend Wayne Gretzky that sums up what business strategy should be about.

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.”