This April 7th, I’m going to be a panelist at the Oregon Governor’s Conference at the Expo Center in Portland, Oregon. The topic? Analytics. But its not about conversions, conversion funnels, and measuring intended “action” on a website. No, we are talking about something that has been on my mind for a bit actually…engagement metrics.

Most people know that for the past 6 months or so, Google has slowed its releases of very cool, interesting tools, and have acquired a good number of companies (some that make sense, and some that don’t…yet). But not too many people have figured out what Google is doing with all these seemingly one-off tools. I think today though, it became very apparent.
16 months ago, Google bought a wiki company called Jotspot (if you’re unfamiliar with what a wiki is, take a look at this definition). Wikis have been appropriated …

A good friend and colleague of mine (Mo from TravelOregon.com) in the Travel and Tourism industry notified me about the new VisitFlorida.com website today. Having worked on the TravelOregon.com website myself as well as a number of other travel-related websites, I have to say I’m pretty floored by the VisitFlorida folks for their extreme “web 2.0″ approach to their new site, even if I don’t personally agree it makes for the best user experience.

Starwood recently launched their new Preferred Guest site. Note the usage of rich imagery as the backdrop for the whole site (in fact, refresh the page a few times, as there is different photos in the rotation). I’m a big fan of this for travel sites, as I mentioned in previous posts.

Simplified navigation options, simple calendar controls, great use of AJAX search for the destination search box too.
Nice work Starwood. Hope the rest of your brand sites are on their way to similar improvements.

Incredible!ndia. This is what you see superimposed atop a number of vibrant advertisements for the country of India, the moment you step foot into this country. I consider myself very fortunate to be able to be traveling to this amazing place for my job. And although I am just embarking on it, I have had a number of experiences that have really made me think about culture, and what that word really means.