We’ve launched a blog for Mahindra Homestays, offering high quality Indian Homestays.

The blog is all about celebrating and discovering India – encouraging travellers to experience something different.

Let us know what you think – we’d love the feedback.

Highlights include:

• Series of Things To Do articles. Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Wayanad, Cochin, Kewzing and Udaipur.
• Monthly photo competition
• Video tours of the Homestays
• Special offers
• Previews of the latest homestays

Along with the design and development we’re also helping with content creation and blog promotion.

Thought I’d share a few links on some brand monitoring services.

These are tools to help monitor who is saying what about your brand.

And opportunities to monitor product/destination keywords and then provide information/feedback to those networks and online communities.

For some background, read this article for an introduction to online reputation management.

And the three tools:

• Google Alerts – free and will help you gain an idea on what level of paid tool suits you.
• Online Reputation Monitor – three pricing levels starting from £5/month. Free trial.
• trackur – One of the more feature full programs. Free trial available.

I’ve not tried these yet but here are two tools specifically aimed at hotels.

• Review Analyst
• Hotel Protect

10 Reputations All Hotels, Resorts & Inns Should Monitor Online

Any others you’d recommend?

Great blog about blogging to promote your business. The author, Mark White ( aka The Blog Coach), is running a three part mini-series looking at the planning phase of setting up and starting your business blog.

First up is ‘What you do want to do with your blog?‘ – a great primer before diving in and creating a blog because you feel you have to. Along with the more marketing focused efforts where businesses push their services and products Mark includes the following handy little diagram to suggest a range of other blogging uses.

(Hat tip to Social Media good guys Nixon McInnes)

Talking of blogs, here are the shortlisted ‘BEST CONSUMER BLOG AWARD’ category from Travolution.

* Travel Rants (Darren Cronian)
* TravelMail Blog (various authors)
* Viator Blog (various authors)
* Everything-Everywhere (Gary Arndt)
* Select World Travel (Lee Harrison)

Exciting news over at Wordpress – earlier today they posted a sneak peak at the upcoming version of Wordpress – looks great!

“Twitter for Location” from Yahoo’s Brickhouse – Fire Eagle. “Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.”

Follow Techcrunch coverage
Dopplr post announcing integration

Limited functionality but aimed at developers to start building applications before a full launch.

Best Geek Hotels in the World 2.0 from Hotel Chatter

Simple translation tool - Jesse Gardner posted this tip on how to offer your site in many languages. The translation is automatically done by Google Translation and is by no means a replacement for human translation. But it may be useful to those with little budget as a way to give international visitors a basic understanding of the site content.

The South African Tourist board has launched a microsite in conjunction with the Daily Telegraph. Site visitors are encouraged to share their experiences based around seven key themes. Each theme is accompanied by a video of a past visitor talking about their experiences. There is also a chance to win a five day holiday.

Each theme page is going to become quite long as more experiences are added. As these grow, perhaps the site could integrate a tag cloud (see below for a wiki definition or view Flickr’s popular photos tag cloud) onto each page to highlight the diversity of experiences along with their popularity.

For example, I’m a keen cricket fan and have read two related comments. I think it would be useful if i could click a ‘cricket’ link that would filter the relevant comments.

*A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.