Reports have come in that Twitter is not getting the retention rate that it needs to ensure continued growth. Nielsen Online reported that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return the following month. This means that Twitter’s retention rate is only pegged at 40 percent, and that’s Post-Oprah figures. Pre-Oprah, the retention rate was only at 30 percent.

Even though a high retention rate does not necessarily guarantee a big audience it is still considered important. For instance, MySpace and Facebook had a retention rate that was twice that of Twitter’s right now. When these two sites exploded into the public consciousness, the retention rate increased and are now pegged at 70 percent.

I’d love to find out what strategies Twitter will use to increase retention among its users. This will be a make or break phase for the new kid in town.

In the global travel industry what you need is great service and great fares to capture the attention of travelers anywhere. It’s a good thing that expedia.com.au realizes this and has come up with a great product and service that really benefits travelers.

Anyone who has traveled before and who has more than a baby’s knowledge of the internet knows that online travel booking is the wave of the future and Expedia is a brand that is quite well known in the industry. Expedia.com.au basically offers the same great service that its American counterpart has been known to give. And when I say great service I mean great flights—cheap flights, that is. Expedia always manages to give the best rates to almost any destination, and all of this happens while relaxing at the comfort of your own home. I think e-commerce is really best suited for the travel industry because you get a good complement of information tools in the form of the internet and the data provided by the online travel service. Expedia gives travelers a good deal of information that is quite useful. I particularly love the easy access to car hire information, probably one of the most confusing and frustrating arrangements you can make when travelling.

Speaking of information, the website is well thought out. It’s easy to get the information you need. I also love the Holiday Packages tab, which gives visitors a quick glance at the cheap rates being offered for these travel packages.

Travelers should really consider using Expedia’s services if you want hassle-free bookings at the best rates possible.

A new survey done in the United States by Deloitte and Touche shows the level of connectivity that we have and the results have been quite interesting. For example, 38 per cent of US consumers now watch TV shows online, while 36 per cent use their mobile phone as an entertainment device. Also, 45 per cent have made it a habit to make online content for others. This include music, videos, blogs and websites.

The survey confirms that new media is now a legitimate form and advertisers see a more universal strategy as the most effective means of reaching your target audience.

The figures cited have actually increased quite dramatically from the last survey and this is quite telling because it means the level of acceptability and absorption of these devices has also increased. Advertisers should take heed of this new development in making new ad strategies this year. We should also look at this as a sign that society is really becoming more and more connected whether we like it or not.

“I think for advertisers one of the conclusions is you don’t make decisions to advertise either on television or the Internet when you want to hit all the demographics, but rather you need to have a multiplatform strategy,” said Ken August, vice chairman and national sector leader for Deloitte & Touche’s media and entertainment practice, which commissioned the study. “It shouldn’t be an either or proposition.”

Among the study’s other findings:

– 54 percent of consumers said they socialize via social networking sites, chat rooms or message boards, and 45 percent said they maintain a profile on a social networking site.

– 85 percent of consumers still find TV advertising to have the most impact on their buying habits, but online ads are second best, with 65 percent of consumers saying they have the most impact, beating out magazines at 63 percent.

One of the things I’ve learned about travel and business is this: It’s Hard.

When I’m travelling I have absolutely no focus on work. I have the Look It’s Shiny mentality and I get nothing done. Last year after barely exiting Mexico with my head in tact I managed to find a way to lock myself into a small house and just work for a few months.

Sometimes this is what it takes. However I need travel in order to find peace sometimes. I think a great business that could work is a lead generation business for certain businesses like Real Estate and Mortgage companies. Now this is just an example and I wouldn’t touch that industry with a 27 foot pole but it could be worth a shot.

In your experience what has worked for you as far as mixing business with travel. What brings you success and a measure of happiness?

Sweet, another dose of insider blog news. I missed those!

Contrary to many directories, and top lists, EatonWeb uses an algorithm based on over 20 different factors to track the metrics, strength and momentum of a blog and not just the number of pageviews. Elements of the algo are PageRank, traffic, incoming links, estimated number of subscribers, Alexa Rank and some more secret numbers. Weekly the values are updated and in every category fastest climbers and sinkers are listed.

Submission to the directory is free. EatonWeb is a manually edited directory, not a website-additional-directory serving some shady SEO wannabes free link juice and monthly income based on submission fees.
Go add your blog to the oldest blog directory on the internet and show off your blog strength.

Go add your blog now now! It’s free!

With the introduction of the excellent offline Google Reader [modus], we can delete FeedDemon from the list and save $25.
Although FeedDemon still has some more features than Google Reader, Google Reader performs well and fast.

Another addition to the list, comes in the form of the new version of Windows Live Writer.
Windows Live Writer is an all straightforward, out of the box editor for most blog platforms. Installation is easy and writing is even easier. It feels like writing in Word, with support options for your theme, just less bloated than MS Word. If you blog alot and hate to be stuck in your blogplatform editor, Windows Live Writer is what you need.

The Editor comes with many insertion and formatting possibilities and also supports tags properly, but not 100% correctly if you want to use site internal tags.
Live Writer can ping services when publishing entries, or publish entries at a specific time. Basically you’ll find everything you need and the feel is nicer than writing in the WP editor.
Screenshots after the jump

Writing for JOAB with enabled theme mode.

Lets have a look at a list of 4 applications every web worker, problogger, designer who prefers classic bistros over Starbucks, professional who spends two hours or more daily commuting in a train compartment or traveler on a cruise ship, charged a whopping $15 for half an hour of internet connection, needs.

• Email : Thunderbird.
  Little needs to be written about the free open source and very customizable Thunderbird. Unless your employer requires you to use Outlook, and you really know how to take advantage of the power of Outlook 2003 and higher, Thunderbird is what you should be using.
  Customize your Thunderbird with one of the many available extensions.
  Start your email client before leaving and read your mail while offline. Prepare your answers on the road, ready to be uploaded as soon as you’re online again.
• Feed reader : FeedDemon.
  Every modern webworker spends several hours daily reading feeds and every webworker has many entries waiting to be read. Power up your offline feed reader before you leave, wait until all the feeds are downloaded and catch up with your feeds during your commute, at the cafe behind a cappuccino or as morning literature on the ship. Even with 400+ feeds it will hardly ever take more than some minutes to download every entry.
  FeedDemon sadly isn’t free, but the $29.95 surely are worth it. I even FeedDemon when online, because it allows me to set the update rate manually for every feed or for categories. Over are the times when you only read entries when every one had already added their cents or pennies.
  FeedDemon also has an awesome caching engine you’ll love when you want to search for older entries.
• Offline server : XAMPP.
  Anyone who’s into design, or programming sites based on PHP should have XAMPP installed. XAMPP brings Apache, MySQL and PHP to your notebook, allowing you to play with your design or the code of your sites offline. Have your own (test) server without being connected. Feel free to hack anything without crashing your site. XAMPP even doesn’t need to be installed, unzipping the package is enough. Install now your blog, WP, TextPattern, Expression Engine.
  If I mentioned that you don’t need to install XAMPP there’s a reason for : most blogger will with time play with other, probably also non-PHP blog platforms, such as Django. Especially with older versions the standard installation paths of certain server components might cause conflicts (If you want to run Django on the road, follow this tutorial as the required mod_python isn’t supported anymore under XAMPP).
  AFAIK every platform offers an offline installation kit.
• Offline blog editor
  There are many offline blog editors available, and Thunderbird probably is the most unknown one. Almost every blog software allows you to post over email, why not take advantage of this and use your Thunderbird also as blog editor.
  Other recommended offline editors are ecto, the choice of most probloggers, but makes you $17.95 lighter.
  Qumana, a lightweight free blog editor, with several features such as integration of Q Ads, and available in French, Spanish and Dutch.
  Biggest problem, on WP, I’ve encountered with offline blog editors is that none supports Ultimate Tag Warrior (most do support Technorati tags though). If you’re über geeky, you can use a tool such as HeidiSQL to easily export your post and tag tables and import them on your localhost (the XAMPP install we discussed earlier on). When back online you synchronize both tables again, and every entry you’ve prepared on your localhost is up and running on your blog now.
  HeidiSQL requires remote database access, you might have to request this from your hoster.
• BONUS : picture uploader for Flickr, Flickr Uploadr.
  Flickr Uploadr is not a tool for offline usage, but I couldn’t live without it anymore. As soon as I am online again, all I have to do is drag and drop the pictures I’ve taken into the Flickr Uploadr interface and only one click later all my pictures are being uploaded to my account. Easier is hardly imaginable and it saves me time.

Right now this is everything I can think of, but I might add more tools as I discover new ones.
Of course the compulsary tools such as Notepad++, SmartFTP, the best free FTP client for private usage, and The Gimp/PAINT.NET/Photoshop, depending on your budget, also belong to this list, but they are more of general need IMO.

If you can think of any other tools, leave a comment. :)

First of all, pMetrics’ spy function rocks my world.  It gives you an up to the second pictures of your blog traffic.  You can literally “spy” on your visitors in real time.  Now this isn’t for pure voyeurism, but it is a rush.  The Spy App alone makes pMetrics worth the ride.  Each visit AND click on your site gets tracked, and displayed in a constantly updated ticker.  Doing a promotional campaign?  Watch the results in real time.

So why not just stick with Google Analytics?  It’s plenty powerful right?  Well, it may be powerful, but its also cumbersome.  You’ve got to drill down deep to find the stats that you want to see (referrals, keyword searches, incoming links, etc.)  Plus,  Google Analytics is tedious and tiresome for anyone who owns multiple blogs.

pMetrics shines in simplicity and ease of use.  It summarizes your data on just a few pages, so there’s no need to drill down deep into the navigation to find that stats you’re looking for.  That alone is why I prefer it over Google Analytics.

The coolest thing of all about pMetrics is the promise it has for expandability and widgety-goodness.  Want to share your stats with the world?  That’s an option.  Want to pull in an RSS feed of your stats from 10 different blogs?  Again, that’s an option.  View all your stats in one place in an RSS reader.  Save time and effort.  Great feature btw.  The RSS feed also gives you the resources you need to present your stats in a customizable fashion (read: hack your own widgets!).

But that’s really not all.  The people over at  Performancing are promising a future upgrade that will allow for Google AdSense tracking (woohoo!).  Since Performancing is about open source, open community, we can expect for boatloads of cool plugins and widgets to get developed to help promote your blog and also have fun with it.

I can’t say enough good things about pMetrics.  While it isn’t perfect, there’s no doubt that it’s currently my favorite analytics program for blogs.

So go get it.  What are you waiting for?

pMetrics Blog Stats & Analytics

Congress needs to hear from you today or they will hand over control of what you do online to companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

Together we won the first round in the battle for Net freedom. But the phone and cable giants are launching a counterattack.

We need to raise the alarm and send a clear message to our new Congress: Make Net Neutrality the Law in 2007!

Politicians are trading favors for campaign donations from these companies.

They’re being wooed by people like AT&T’s CEO, who says “the Internet can’t be free.”

Sign this petition to tell your elected representatives to protect Internet freedom now.

Check out Save the Internet for more information and to sign the petition.