Its no surprise that the big package holiday firms are playing down the importance of this new trend and keeping quiet whilst they try to evolve themselves as they see their traditional package holidays losing favour with customers !! Even Premier Inns is moving over to self catering apartments within cities and Coastal resorts.

How many times has Thomson Holidays, Thomas Cook and First Choice been featured on the BBC’s Watchdog for poor hotel standards? and dumping holiday makers in airports for hours due to plane delays even though they knew well before of the delays but choose not to tell their customers !!!

It is no surprise to see a rising tide of holiday makers choosing to rent private accommodation. The quality of many apartments and villas available to rent through websites such as RentInNerja.com, Meon Villas and VillasPlus are the equivalent of 5 star luxury on a self catering basis. The properties are essentially home from home, I recently booked a villa with one of them on the northern end of Corfu for the same price as a 3 star package holiday for two. The villa even came with an introduction food hamper in the fridge plus detergent for the dishwasher !! The book collection and DVD’s in the lounge were a treat too, as was the private pool where I was able to strip off completely and get an all over tan

Thankfully FeedBurner understand this and have included a setting within the control panel allowing you to set your article links to 301 Permanent Redirects - ensuring the actual articles’ URL gets the full link value instead of sharing the value with Feedburner as per the default setting. The only downside to this is a slight reduction in follow through stats provided within the FeedBurner account itself… no great concerns for those focussed on PR values and search result positions…. Unfortunately, many folk don’t realise this is even happening.

I feel sorry for those who take advantage of the House Rescue cash on offer over the next 12months… undoubtedly, the property market will continue down as the wider economy continues to fail and core living costs continue to rise. Values in the property industry need to adjust a lot further yet ! The governments action basically encourages folk to increase debt and high chance of negative equity as prices continue to fall, whilst at the same time falsely inflating the prices of repossessed housing at auction by passing finance through to housing associations to bid on property - the last place and sanctuary for people struggling to raise sufficient funds to get on the housing ladder.

This clearly poses a problem for the search engines and advertisers alike. Privacy campaigners will undoubtedly be happy…but I can’t help wonder why such a move by Microsoft has been adopted for “Privacy” and yet the international child protection agencies such as CEOP have been pushing for a “Report Button” for unsuitable content/behaviour in all browsers and nothing has happened !!! How about re prioritising civil responsibility ahead of financial positioning for a change?

I personally find this remarkable and quite funny not only are the Chinese renowned for flaunting copyright and intellectual property rights with cheaply copying pretty much anything ! but their desire towards portraying a great public image during the games and focus on everything great about China - only cheapens their ‘image’ in my view if such a claim of cgi fireworks being passed off as the real thing is actually true ! Has anybody got a copy of the Beijing Times article they would like to scan and send me ?