Happy New Year to you all.

I have returned back from a magic trip up in Far North Queensland with my girlfriend. Spent about 6 nights on beautiful Dunk Island, 2 nights at Mossman Gorge in the Daintree Rainforest and then a final 6 nights at Port Douglas. It is certainly amazing what a short break does to your brain and wellbeing. Its also just as amazing how lush and healthy the environment is up that way. I have never seen so many frogs, tree snakes and colourful fish - just beautiful..

It was awesome to catch up with some of my best mates in Newcastle just before Christmas also. One of the best things I love about Christmas is that it always seems to bring friends and family back home together to recite fun memories and remember how important people are to the centre of your life.

I was feeling semi burnt-out late last year, doing shorter and shorter consulting days at work, taking off a little earlier each day as it became closer to Christmas. Now I feel refreshed and ready for action once again - and 2007 is going to be a big year.

The best thing about the break for me was that I did not check my email or web stats for almost an entire month. I completely lost the desire to even care about the stats for a while as I was feeling very jittery and sick of constantly checking mobile phones, emails, messenger programs, skype, web stats etc. Having too many things constantly beeping and flashing at you over a long period of time can eventually get to you. Then I realised when I returned home, how much I love this stuff and now had a fresh energy store ready to get stuck in even more this year.

It was great to find out how my new web startup had performed over the break. As I’d previously mentioned, it was never officially launched, but kind of spread via word of mouth to outsiders before we had even finished coding it. Considering, internet traffic from random browsing generally becomes a lot lighter over the holiday season, we still gained an extra 200 users in a relatively short time. This brought the total to 300 users and even more since being home. User participation in the site has sky rocketed and now we’re facing a whole heap of exciting new decisions on how to improve the site simply based on the spike in user data that has forced us to consider new ideas and fine tune our direction to cater for what users are doing.

A previous site I coded up about 8 years ago, only now, has approximately 1650 users, simply because the site is so niche specific. So I have been very impressed with our ability to attract 300 users so quickly without even completing or launching this new site officially. We have already been written about on the homepages of PageRank 5/10 web sites in this short space of time. A PageRank of 5/10 is certainly not an internet heavy weight, but it is respectable.

We are receiving a lot of emails coming in from these early users demanding new features and really caring about what we are trying to accomplish. That definitely drives you to work even harder and to push out a nice feature set for them. Its a funny concept to think that users actually care about something that you created from scratch only a couple of months ago. Some of them really get into it and are leading the way in terms of the amount of User Generated Content they are pumping in.

I know 300 users is miniscule, but the site kind of works exponentially. The more users we get, it catches on and attracts other users. We have already found examples of 5+ users signing up simply to participate in something that someone they knew had initiated. We are preparing to start actually pushing the site by kicking off a couple of advertising campaigns and submitting links all over the place, but at the same time, it seems the users are doing a good enough job for us. I am excited to think about the number of users we can attract with some gentle marketing efforts. An informal viral email marketing campaign that will spread through Australian workplaces is high on the list.

We also thought we would get in quick and launch the New Zealand version of the site.

There is definitely a great feeling associated with having something exciting underway outside of your normal 9-5 employment. Its a case of doing what you truly love after hours and in any available slot of spare time.