The big question is – how do you make life easy for your site visitors so that they can easily share your content across various social sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, Stumbleupon and so on?

One of the best ways to encourage social sharing of your website’s pages is to use blog widgets and buttons. Almost every social network has it’s own widgets page where you can grab some code and embed it on your website’s design template. The widgets and buttons go to work out of the box but there are a couple of disadvantages of using too many widgets and buttons from different social sites.

First, these buttons don’t blend well enough with your site’s design and in some way, they increase visual noise and clutter. Facebook like buttons are blue, Twitter’s retweet buttons are shallow green while Digg’s thumbs up button is grey. When you arrange buttons and widgets from 6 different social networks below your content, they look really bad and knocked out. It’s a general rule that common users don’t like ugly buttons which don’t complement each other

Second, these buttons are fetched from different sites which will eventually slow down your site’s overall loading time and usability.

Third, there is no easy way to integrate these default widgets as an “always on” toolbar which would stay visible, regardless of whether your readers are scrolling all the way bottom to read the content.

Bumpin Social Bar – Ensure Easier Social Sharing of your content

This is why I highly recommend using Bumpin social bar.

Bumpin offers a range of social engagement widgets which are easy to customize and embed on any website or blog, irrespective of the content management system being used to manage it. Bumpin provides a social toolbar and a shoutbox for your website which can be customized with Facebook “Like” button, a Twitter “retweet” button, a visitor chat widget, a site specific search box and lots of other goodies which you can’t afford to miss.

Let’s quickly learn all the features of Bumpin social bar and how you can use this free service to add a lot of social sharing goodness on your site within 5 minutes:

Site Search widget:  On the far left of Bumpin’s social bar, you can choose to include a simple site specific search box which can be used by your site visitors to search for content within your site. This is a great way to let your readers find the content they are looking for. The search box remains visible even if a user has scrolled all the way down to read something, so Bumpin’s search widget clearly holds an upper hand – when compared to regular search boxes.

Facebook and Twitter Integration: Another neat thing regarding Bumpin’s social bar is it’s deeper Facebook integration without any clutter and waste of valuable space. The “Like” button, “activity stream” and “Facebook suggestions” are aligned horizontally and they are revealed only when a user clicks them.

And here is how your Twitter feed and mentions will look like:

Hence, there is no need to hunt down all the codes for Facebook social plugin or Twitter widgets and further tweak them to go with your site. Bumpin takes care of all the hassles and integrates Facebook social plugins and Twitter widgets on your site in a matter of few mouse clicks.

Inline Language Translation of your content: Do you get a lot of readers from different countries and have always wanted a better alternative of Google Translate, which offers no branding whatsoever.

Enter Bumpin’s inline language translation widget – a simple magic button which lets your site readers translate a page in any international language of their choice. The translate button performs inline language translation of your content so your site visitors would never feel the need of a third party translation service. The clear advantage here is that Bumpin’s translate widget makes your site more “sticky” and globally acceptable.

Complete Social sharing:  All other social sharing buttons are organized under a sleek on-click drop down menu. This is more visually appealing and never harms your site’s design template with tons of buttons and independent widgets floating around like anything.

Customization and branding: The social bar can be fully customized to match with your site’s current design and brand. You can choose a skin or theme and define a preferred placement, size or position for the social bar. The bar can be used to look like Facebook-style chat tab to a full horizontal bar with applications and widgets you have chosen.

Rising posts, Random topics and announcements: This is yet another superb feature most social bar providers lack.

Bumpin displays the hottest content on your website as well as random topics from the social bar itself. This helps your readers discover popular content directly from the social bar, without having to search them manually. No customizations are required – it works out of the box.

Bumpin Shoutbox:

Do you have a forum and you want all the registered users or members to be able to chat with each other, without leaving your site? Apart from the social bar, Bumpin also offers a very useful chatbox and shoutbox widget, adding which will allow your site visitors perform a one on one instant messaging chat, without having to leave your site. You do not need to install anything or write any code to enable a shoutbox or chatbox on your site, simply customize your chatbox from Bumpin’s web interface and copy a few lines of codes in your site’s design template. It’s that easy and simple.

The best thing regarding Bumpin is that their social bar and visitor chatbox is super easy to add to any blogging or CMS platform, with drop-in plugins available for WordPress, Blogger, Joomla, Drupal, Movable type, Tumblr and more content management systems.

Overall, Bumpin is a really cool and useful tool for bloggers, webmasters and anyone who wants to add a layer of interactivity on his site. There are no lengthy registrations or paid signups, Bumpin is completely free to use and you can customize a unique social bar for any number of sites you have.

That’s right, Bumpin’s price tag is $0.

Get a BumpIn ShoutBox or Get a BumpIn Social Bar

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What can you use the application for?


Act.ly is an application for creating a twitter petition. “Signing” the petition is as simple as tweeting or retweeting the petition. Each petition is targeted to an individual so the tweet shows up in their mentions every time it is retweeted. Anyone with a Twitter account can set up a petition, be petitioned, or sign a petition. Petitions may be serious or humorous.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Act.ly was created by 3dna, the team also behind NationBuilder. It was co-founded by Jim Gilliam and Jesse Haff as a tool for viral petitions. It has been used by politicians, rappers, nonprofit organizations, bloggers, and more. At the time of this review, it has 3,840 petitions, 170,164 tweets, and 402 responses to petitions.

What are the differences to other apps?


Because so many people use Twitter, this application can be far-reaching in its efforts. Users just have to understand the process for use and that a retweet (RT) equals a signature.

How does the application look and feel to use?


After linking to Twitter, users are taken to a home page. They may start a petition, view petitions catching fire, who’s in the hot seat, or smokin’ recruiters. To start a petition, users simply enter the Twitter name of the person or organization they wish to draw attention to and what they think this person should do. Because the tweet has the person’s Twitter ID in it, they will automatically see all of the RTs in their timeline.

Once the information is entered, users review the default tweet. They may change it if they wish, and the application reminds the user what information MUST remain in the tweet. When satisfied, users may embed Youtube or Vimeo links and save the petition. Once tweeted, the petition goes live.

To post the petition on Facebook, Digg, delicious, reddit, myspace, stumbleupon, or to embed a tweet button, options are offered. Sharing is easy and can help make petitions go viral or at least attract more attention.

Act.ly will notify the user via DM if the person who was petitioned responds in any way to the petition. This is one of the most interesting aspects of the website. While many are simple, personal requests like “Go home for the weekend”, some are very thought provoking responses from public figures. Some responses appear to merely be retweets, so it is uncertain whether they actually read it or just saw “RT” and did it. Some, however are actually sincere responses from those who were petitioned, for example Senator Gillibrand responded to a petition about Big Oil and promised to vote to close their tax loopholes.

In one case, Senator Gillibrand herself started a petition directed at the US Secretary of Transportation to ask Florida Governor Rick Scott to redirect rejected funding to high-speed rail projects in NY. The Secretary of Transportation responded by dividing up the funds among 15 states.

It’s also interesting to see who is in the hot seat as far as the number of petitions. As expected, many are political figures, but Google, Twitter, and Bravo TV are also under fire for various reasons during this review.

How does the registration process work?


Users must sign in with Twitter accounts and authorize the application. Act.ly cannot view direct messages or passwords with this authorization.

What does it cost to use the application?


Act.ly is completely free to use.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Anyone who wishes to start a petition, uses Twitter regularly, and feels that they can build enough interest to get attention for their issues may choose to try Act.ly. Whether for celebrity interests, ecological issues, nonprofit interests, government requests, or even personal petitions, Act.ly is easy to use and just may get a response from someone you don’t expect.

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What can you use the application for?


Digg is a socially driven website that provides uses with content from all over the web. The site is intended to help users share and discover new content that spans a variety of topics and themes. Users can choose to “Digg” a link they like, which gives it more notoriety in the Digg online community. The homepage shows the user top news, recently added news as well as a listing of all current Digg stories. Each is presented with a headline, the number of “Diggs” it has received, a small image (if one is available) and the first few lines from the article or blog post. Users can submit a link and save links to their Digg profile that can be accessed later. Digg also presents its own short list of hot stories in a separate column on the homepage.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Digg was founded in October of 2004 by Kevin Rose. The company is based in San Francisco, California and employs around 60 individuals, including CEO Matt Williams, Vice President of Engineering Ben Folk Williams, board members David Sze and Richard de Silva, Designer Tyson Rosage, Product Manager Mike Cieri and Angel investor Reid Hoffman. After a redesign in 2010 traffic from visitor in the United States declined 26% according to Hitwise.

What are the differences to other apps?


Digg gives its users a place to store and share their favorite URLs. The site stands out because it is very popular and includes a huge list of links which continues to grow through the large Digg community. The site currently has quite a bit to offer new users who are interested in exploring various topics online.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Digg website utilizes a blue and green color scheme set against a plain white background. The layout keeps the links near the center with a row of popular topic that span the top of the page (under the dark blue header). A rounded button to the left of the links allows the user to browse all available categories while a search bar is positioned in the upper, right hand corner. Each listing includes the Digg count to the left, the headline at the center and a small image to the right.

How does the registration process work?


A new user can become a member of the Digg community by clicking the green and white “Join Digg!” button found in the upper, right hand corner of the page (inside the dark blue header). A pop up box appears and asks the user for an email address, username and password. The user can also click one of the two buttons along the right side of the box to sign in with a Facebook or Twitter account. A small note at the bottom of the registration form advises the user that by submitting their information they are automatically agreeing to the Digg terms of service and privacy policy.

What does it cost to use the application?


Digg is a helpful, entertaining tool however the site would be hard pressed to start charging for what it does. Anyone can enjoy the benefits of a Digg account for free. There are no subscription fees or other charges associated with using the website. Users can submit URLs, save their favorite and share as often as they like.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Digg is aimed at anyone who loves to save website links. The site adds a social element and gives users an easy way to share what they find with a large community. Others can turn to Digg as a way to research topics or find a few entertaining websites to pass the time.

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You can sign-up here and start in a matter of seconds, for free. The idea is to track problems before they fester, because you are only as good as your cloud provider’s uptime, as Digg and others who have been hurt from AWS’ availability issues can attest. You can also do benchmarking across cloud providers, something that is catching on. To instrument your servers, you copy a line of code that connects them to your own Web-based dashboard. Each of your servers is keyed to your particular URL and as long as you keep it private no one else can view your stats. Information displayed includes network and CPU usage and disk activity. RevealCloud’s claim to fame is that it continuously monitors your clouds, unlike some other solutions that poll or ping every few minutes. This can highlight capacity and load issues that less frequent monitoring service might miss.

Right now the service is free, but CopperEgg expects to add additional features that they will eventually start charging for. They also have a separate storage performance monitoring solution as well.

CopperEgg has gotten an initial funding round from Silverton Partners and is led by Scott Johnson, who was one of the founders of Thomas-Conrad Corporation, an early networking pioneer (remember Arcnet, anyone?).

This approach could be complementary to what Uptime Software is doing here. The company has put together a collection of screencast videos showing how to install and use it, and comparing what they do with AWS’ Cloud Watch service.

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For that purpose, we have gathered a list of some useful WordPress plugins which a blogger or website owner can use. You are welcome if you want to share more useful wordpress plugins that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com, just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.

Google XML-Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generate special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. Sitemaps make it easy for crawlers to check the structure of your site and retrieve relevant data efficiently. It notifies all the search engine every time a new post is made on the blog.

Wp Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. It helps to reduce the load on the website as well this way so that your website does not face any down time.

Digg Digg

Digg Digg is an excellent wordpress plugin which helps users integrate different social networking buttons on your wordpress blog. It supports almost all the popular social networking websites including Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Reddit, dDone, Twitter, TweetMeme, Topsy, Yahoo Buzz, facebook share, facebook like, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Google Buzz, Designbump, WebBlend, BlogEngage and Serpd.

WP-DbManager

Wp- DBManager allows users to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. With DBManager, users can easily schedule backup and optimizing/repairing of WordPress blog.

Insights

I started using Insights few months back and I must say its an excellent plugin which every blogger should try. With Insights, users can easily find and interlink posts on their blogs, insert YouTube videos, insert Flickr images and much more.

SEO Smart Links

With SEO Smart Links, users can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.

Akismet

Akismet is one of the most important plugin for every wordpress users. What this plugin does is that it checks the comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is another useful plugin which helps users create contact forms for their wordpress blogs. With Contact Form 7, users can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

FD Feedburner Plugin

With FD Feedburner plugin, webmasters can redirect the main feed and optionally the comments feed seamlessly and transparently to Feedburner.com. It can easily setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed, without modifying the template of your website.

Yoast WordPress SEO

Just like All in on SEO, yoast is another good WordPress SEO plugin that helps users optimize their page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.

Yet Another Related Post Plugin

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) for WordPress gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.

Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

Google Analytics plugin helps u track your blog easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.

WP Page Navi

Page Navi adds better pave navigation interface to your wordpress blog and replaces older and newer posts with page numbers.

LinkWithin

LinkWithin is an excellent related post widget which adds related posts with thumbnails to your blog posts.

SEO Friendly Images

EO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set.

If we missed any plugin, please share with us using the comments section below.

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To put it simply 200 visitors that browse an average of 5 pages on your website (because they are actually interested in your quality content) and stay 5 minutes on your website is better than 500 visitors that browse an average of 1.2 pages and stay an average of 10 seconds on your website. This and the fact that those 200 designer visitors will be more likely to come back to your website at least once more, lead to the obvious conclusion that quality traffic matters. Below there are 10 websites that will turn back quality traffic. There are a lot more than these 10 websites, but in out experience these websites have been rewarding over time.

StumbleUpon

Website : StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is probably the best website for this. For us it has provided in time over 1 million visitors. The quality of the traffic is really good since people browse the website based on topics of interest. The down-side is that getting something popular on StumbleUpon is really hard. The best chance of getting an article viral is having great, original content.

Digg

Website : Digg

Getting something on Digg‘s first page is incredibly hard, but once there, get your website’s cache into lockdown because the traffic will only keep incoming.

Facebook

Website : Facebook

I don’t think this needs an introduction. If you are reading this article, you probably have a Facebook account, not to mention that probably every breathing designer in this world has a Facebook. Besides that there are large designer groups and pages you can check out and share links with fellow designers.

Twitter

Website : Twitter

One of our favorite social media websites, Twitter offers you a huge potential for quality traffic, because people that follow you are directly interested in what you post. There also the option of having your articles published on your profile automatically via websites link TwitterFeed.

CSS Globe

Website : CSS Globe

On CSS Globe quality is the key word. They only accept high quality articles, but the ones that make it return a good amount of traffic. Overall a great website, that I personally find it challenges me to be a better writer every time.

Design Float

Website : DesignFloat

Probably the oldest design social media website based on Pligg, Design Float has a new owner for about 1 year and it’s still going strong. I have noticed some great changes on this website recently and almost exclusively quality links.

Design Bump

Website : Design Bump

Based on Drupal’s Drigg platform, Design Bump established itself as one of the most robust and stable design social media website. The return traffic is really good, so submission here is a must.

Reddit

Website : Reddit

Reddit is an amazing online community populated by cool, smart and funny people and to be honest, one of the few websites I visit every single day. It has a design section, but getting your articles popular here is really hard. You have to come up with some really unique and amazing content in order to surprise the redditors.

Design-News

Website : Design Newz

Design Newz is a solid website to promote your articles and links. The submission process is really easy, you don’t need an account and the return traffic is really good.

zaBox

Website : zaBox

Yes, I know …. zaBox is our website and you probably think we are being subjective here. Well, yes and no. Yes, it is a part of our network and obviously we want to promote it and no because, well, we can’t afford to promote junk on CrazyLeaf. Never did. Never will. zaBox is a good, growing community with over 30000 members and the manual screening of all submissions assures 100% a non-spamy and quality environment. Plus after the new changes, only users that keep posting fresh and good content get promoted to the front page assuring quality content at all times.

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The truth is that if this were October of last year, you would have been right in thinking that Twitter was our top referrer in terms of social websites. But since that time, Facebook has far surpassed Twitter in terms of traffic coming our way each month. In fact, Facebook.com is now sends nearly double the traffic that Twitter.com does. This is probably due to the fact that last November, we added Elin, our excellent community manager, who curates and engages with people from our feed on Facebook. I also suspect it has to do with the rise of the Like button. Ever since it was released last year, Facebook has been steadily referring more readers our way.

But this info, while interesting, isn’t all that surprising. After all, Facebook is by far the largest social network in the world. With over 750 million active users, it still dwarfs Twitter. The really surprising thing is that Twitter isn’t even our number two social referrer in terms of websites anymore. As of this month, that distinction goes to LinkedIn. And it’s not even close.

Yes, LinkedIn, the professional social network which just went public is now by far our second biggest referrer of social traffic. That’s crazy when you consider that just last month, it was around half the size of Twitter (in terms of referrals), and trailed sites like Hacker News. And two months ago, it was roughly 1/8th the size of Twitter, trailing Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and others in terms of referral traffic to TechCrunch. But the biggest stat of all is that a year ago, traffic coming from LinkedIn was 1/50th what it is today on a monthly basis.

So what changed? As far as we can tell, this is all about LinkedIn Today, the social news product the service launched back in March. It was around that time that was saw the first big bump in terms of traffic coming from LinkedIn. In March, it roughly doubled from February. Then April was pretty flat — it was still much higher than previously, but not growing. Then in May, traffic went up 5x. And in June, it more than doubled from that. The growth has been astounding.

Of course what’s perhaps most interesting about that is that LinkedIn Today is powered by Twitter. Twitter shared links determine what shows up on LinkedIn Today, but the traffic does not go back through Twitter.

Again, this is just traffic from LinkedIn to TechCrunch. And the truth is that with its cross between technology and business, LinkedIn may be the most perfect social network for regular TechCrunch readers. But talking with some other bloggers, they’ve been noticing the exact same thing. All of this is undoubtedly buoyed by the LinkedIn social buttons that have been appearing all over the web as well. recently (and on TechCrunch recently).

The bigger question in my mind is what this means for the future of Twitter’s website as a disseminator of news? While Twitter has attempted to help journalists and bloggers a bit with things like the recently-launched Twitter for Newsrooms tutorials, they haven’t had much in the way of new features to better surface information. Referral traffic from Twitter had been steadily rising over the years, but it was only as we gained more Twitter followers incrementally. And in the last year, that traffic has flattened completely. And now in just a couple of months, LinkedIn has shot by it when a hot new product.

Part of the explanations on Twitter’s side may be the increased use of HTTPS, which likely scrubs referrer information in traffic sent. But Facebook and LinkedIn both have HTTPS options as well, and again, those numbers are rising fast, Twitter is not. Also a part of this is the use of Twitter mobile clients. But again, Facebook has hugely popular mobile clients too (though, admittedly, LinkedIn’s mobile clients don’t appear to be as popular, so most of their traffic will likely be from linkedin.com).

If that trend is true on a larger scale, that’s not good news for Twitter. It’s substantial traffic that can’t be ignored, obviously, but the numbers point to it stalling out as others come along. In the same year timespan that Twitter referral traffic has flattened, Facebook referral traffic has gone up six-fold. Again, that doesn’t look good for Twitter. Digg was once the undisputed king of referrals as well. Last month, they were in 17th place in terms of referrals to TechCrunch.

Update: Twitter says the lack of growth on twitter.com is due to the soaring of Twitter mobile usage and says they will share some stats soon which I’ll post here. Though that would also suggest that people are turning away from the website in order to use mobile, which would be interesting. Either way, I altered the title to better reflect that Twitter.com is mainly what’s being discussed here.

Update 2: Twitter has pointed to these previously stated numbers to share in terms of mobile growth.

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As of tomorrow, beRecruited will officially acquire Fanvibe, we’ve learned. With the deal, Fanvibe’s Vishwas Prabhakara will become the new CEO of beRecruited, and Art Chang and Joe Pestro will come over in the deal, we’re told. Prior to their current roles, Prabhakara was at ESPN and Digg, while both Chang and Pestro were at Yardbarker.

BeRecruited is the web’s largest sports recruiting network, with some 81 percent of all U.S. high schools signed up on their network. They also count 68 percent of NCAA coaches among their ranks. Athletes pay a month subscription fee for premium features, which has led to seven-figure quarterly revenues, we’re told.

“I’m excited to take on the CEO role at beRecruited, and Fanvibe co-founders Art Chang and Joe Pestro are pumped to be leading product and engineering for beRecruited.  We’re big believers in using technology to improve people’s lives, and beRecruited is doing just that, helping millions of high school students pursue higher education.  The traction, solid business model and great investors made our decision to lead beRecruited pretty easy,” Prabhakara says, in confirming the deal.

He notes that Fanvibe (which was previously called Fanpulse) will continue to operate with its roughly 100,000 users. “We also plan to leverage the Fanvibe platform to the extent we can in improving the beRecruited platform,” Prabhakara says, also noting that the impending NFL and NBA lockouts make things a bit cloudy at the moment.

“beRecruited is far and away the largest recruiting network on the web — and it has consequently become a really great business. With the Fanvibe acquisition, we are thrilled to move headquarters to San Francisco and have Vish, Art and Joe lead the business into its next phase. They are perfect fits as they all have strong backgrounds in sports, product and social web,” beRecruited founder Ryan Spoon says. He currently works for Polaris Venture Partners, though they were not involved in the deal.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but Prabhakara says that “we are very happy with the outcome for ourselves personally and for Fanvibe’s investors.” The service had previously raised money from individual investors as well as Y Combinator.

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What can you use the application for?


Quarkbase helps users gather information about a website. The user can enter a URL and read an overview of the website, see which tags apply to it, learn the names of key people associated with it and view internet traffic details. The traffic details include the site’s Alexa rank, complete rank, how many unique visitors it receives per month and the general trend of its traffic. The user can also see if it is highly bookmarked, when it was launched and view similar or competing websites. Quarkbase goes even further by showing the user the most recent Twitter comments that mention the website, where it was discussed in blogs, which countries it is famous in, its PageRank, the language it is presented in, social popularity for Delicious, Digg, Twitter, Reddit and other sites as well as a social tally that covers Wikipedia, Twitter, Delicious, Digg and Yahoo Answers. A development area shows the user which tools were used to create the site, who sold the domain to the owner, where it is hosted (with an embedded Google Map) and who the current ISP is.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Quarkbase was founded in September of 2008. The application was intended to provide a great deal of information about websites. The site bills itself as “Who Is on steroids” and as the “IMDB of websites.” Today, Quarkbase saves many users a great deal of time by supplying them with a wealth of information on any URL they enter.

What are the differences to other apps?


There are a number of ways to obtain information on the internet about a website. Each piece of information provided by Quarkbase could be located elsewhere, however the problem is that few resources compile each detail. To find all the information, the user would have to scour numerous resources to get the same detail as they can read on the Quarkbase results page.

How does the application look and feel to use?


Quarkbase presents users with all the information in a neat, list style format. After submitting a URL, the user can scroll down through the page to find headers that include an overview, social, additional details, social popularity and development area. The site also incorporates recognizable icons in the social popularity area so the user can quickly identify where the stats are coming from. A few Google advertisements are found throughout the Quarkbase site, but these do not get in the way of reviewing website statistics.

How does the registration process work?


Quarkbase provides a very helpful service, however it is not one that really needs an account or registration option to fully appreciate. At this time, there is no account registration option. As soon as the user arrives on the Quarkbase homepage, they can access the URL submission tool and begin reviewing website data.

What does it cost to use the application?


Quarkbase pulls together information that is readily available for free in a number of locations. Charging for this service would seem a bit off putting, especially since the site also works in advertisements which likely pay for its operational expenses. Luckily the creators have kept Quarkbase as appealing and accessible as it possibly can be by giving all users access to all the search results for free.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Quarkbase.com is a tool for anyone who needs to learn about a website. The user can gather details that cover just about everything, from the site’s development and hosting data to social networking stats and general information. The service is not unique.

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What can you use the application for?


Quarkbase helps users gather information about a website. The user can enter a URL and read an overview of the website, see which tags apply to it, learn the names of key people associated with it and view internet traffic details. The traffic details include the site’s Alexa rank, complete rank, how many unique visitors it receives per month and the general trend of its traffic. The user can also see if it is highly bookmarked, when it was launched and view similar or competing websites. Quarkbase goes even further by showing the user the most recent Twitter comments that mention the website, where it was discussed in blogs, which countries it is famous in, its PageRank, the language it is presented in, social popularity for Delicious, Digg, Twitter, Reddit and other sites as well as a social tally that covers Wikipedia, Twitter, Delicious, Digg and Yahoo Answers. A development area shows the user which tools were used to create the site, who sold the domain to the owner, where it is hosted (with an embedded Google Map) and who the current ISP is.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Quarkbase was founded in September of 2008. The application was intended to provide a great deal of information about websites. The site bills itself as “Who Is on steroids” and as the “IMDB of websites.” Today, Quarkbase saves many users a great deal of time by supplying them with a wealth of information on any URL they enter.

What are the differences to other apps?


There are a number of ways to obtain information on the internet about a website. Each piece of information provided by Quarkbase could be located elsewhere, however the problem is that few resources compile each detail. To find all the information, the user would have to scour numerous resources to get the same detail as they can read on the Quarkbase results page.

How does the application look and feel to use?


Quarkbase presents users with all the information in a neat, list style format. After submitting a URL, the user can scroll down through the page to find headers that include an overview, social, additional details, social popularity and development area. The site also incorporates recognizable icons in the social popularity area so the user can quickly identify where the stats are coming from. A few Google advertisements are found throughout the Quarkbase site, but these do not get in the way of reviewing website statistics.

How does the registration process work?


Quarkbase provides a very helpful service, however it is not one that really needs an account or registration option to fully appreciate. At this time, there is no account registration option. As soon as the user arrives on the Quarkbase homepage, they can access the URL submission tool and begin reviewing website data.

What does it cost to use the application?


Quarkbase pulls together information that is readily available for free in a number of locations. Charging for this service would seem a bit off putting, especially since the site also works in advertisements which likely pay for its operational expenses. Luckily the creators have kept Quarkbase as appealing and accessible as it possibly can be by giving all users access to all the search results for free.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Quarkbase.com is a tool for anyone who needs to learn about a website. The user can gather details that cover just about everything, from the site’s development and hosting data to social networking stats and general information. The service is not unique.

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What can you use the application for?


Flying Cart bills itself as the fastest way to set up an online store. Users can quickly design an eye-catching web store by selecting pre-made Flying Cart themes. Users can also upload their logos, images and graphics and access the custom CSS for further personalization. Flying Cart supports high quality, zoom-able photos so customers can inspect items closely before they buy. The application also lets customers join a stores fan club, which generates a mailing list that the user can turn to when sending out special promotions, offers or new product information. Flying Cart also supplies easy social sharing with links that allow customers to share the user’s store through Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social networks. Users can accept all major credit cards with Google Checkout or Paypal and purchase a custom domain name for their store. Flying Cart supports coupon codes and supplies users with inventory tracking tools. Additional features include newsletters, order management tools and a no-risk registration system for store owners.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Flying Cart was founded in August of 2005. The application is designed to give ambitious new web store owners a way to create a shop in a matter of minutes. The application includes all of the basic tools a store owner could need to operate online as well as a few extras. The Flying Cart team includes Rishi Shah, Brian Beermann and Margo Baxter.

What are the differences to other apps?


Flying Cart stands out for two main reasons. The first being the application’s user friendly focus and the second the many extra features that come with it. Users can build their stores and interact with customers easily. The site also provides social networking links so customers can easily share the store with others through Facebook, Digg and other social networks.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Flying Cart website has a very whimsical feel to it. Visitors are greeted by a realistically cloudy background and a pure blue header at the top of the page. The elegant logo features a flowing font. To the right of the logo, a handful of white links help the user navigate through the site. Each user created store is just as appealing, with a neat, clean design and color images that can be added for each product.

How does the registration process work?


A new user can sign up for their own Flying Cart store by clicking the white “Pricing and Sign Up” link in the upper, right hand corner of the homepage. The following page asks the user to click the red button that corresponds with the plan they would like to purchase. Next, the user is taken to the registration form. The form asks for a store name, email address, password and how the user found Flying Cart. The next section asks for the user’s desired Flying Cart URL. The bottom of the form is reserved for the user’s billing information. Flying Cart accepts Visa, MasterCard, Amex and Discover cards.

What does it cost to use the application?


Each new Flying Cart user is given a 30 day free trial of the plan they choose. The available plans start with the Glider membership, which allows up to 25 products, custom domains, theme editor access, SSL security and custom CSS access for around $10 per month. The Helicopter membership costs around $30 per month and upgrades to include 250 products and inventory management tools. The Jet membership costs around $60 per month and includes up to 1,000 products and an email address. The Airliner membership costs around $120 and includes up to 5,000 products and phone support. The Rocketship membership costs around $350 per month and allows up to 20,000 products.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Flying Cart offers store owners an easy way to set up online. The application includes many helpful features that allow users to get their store ready quickly. The membership options are also very diverse, making Flying Cart a great choice for startups as well as larger stores.

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What can you use the application for?


Thinkery.me provides users with a tool to organize their thoughts and save ideas and lists. The user can get their brain together with to do lists, tab bookmarks, thoughts, URLs and other items. The user only has to enter them into the Thinkery.me, which gives the user the ability to add a tag, remove tags, make the item public, make it private, archive items, un-archive or delete. The user’s item appears at the bottom of their list after adding it. the application provides a very simple way for user to get organized. Users can also add items from Facebook, Digg, SoundCloud, Amazon, Twitter, XKCD, Flickr and YouTube.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


Thinkery.me was created in 2011 by Compuccino and Alexander Kirk. The application was intended to give users a streamlined way to organize their thoughts, ideas and to do list items. The service currently provides a very simple solution, although perhaps not quite as effective as it could be. The current version relies primarily on tags to organize each item the user adds to their Thinkery.me page. Thinkery.me is currently in beta.

What are the differences to other applications?


The service offered by the Thinkery.me isn’t terribly unique. The service is very simple and the user can begin accessing it as soon as they arrive on the homepage. This might be appealing for some, although the page appears to suffer from some design issues depending on what type of browser the user is trying to view it on. When functioning properly, Thinkery.me provides a very simple way to keep thoughts, ideas and commitments in order.

How does the application look and feel to use?


The Thinkery.me website users a light blue color scheme with hints of vibrant green and a white background. The item entry field is presented right at the top, center of the homepage as soon as the user arrives. The user profile area shows the item along with basic details, such as how long ago it was added and whether it is public or private. Blue and red links along the lower, right hand side of each item allow the user to edit, archive or delete it. A gold button at the top, right hand corner of the page must be clicked to save changes to the user’s Thinkery.me page.

How does the registration process work?


Getting started with the Thinkery.me is easy. As soon as the user arrives on the homepage, they are greeted by a light blue header with a data entry bar (under the black “Get Your Brain Together” header. The user can add thoughts, ideas, items, URLs or to do list entries to the field. After adding an item, the user can click the green plus button to the right of the bar. This adds it to their list. Thinkery.me does not require a registration. Users are given access to all current features as soon as they arrive.

What does it cost to use the application?


Thinkery.me does not require a log in, making it difficult to charge a fee for its services. Luckily the creators have kept it very appealing by offering it to all users for free. There are no subscription fees or other charges for using Thinkery.me. The user can access their account any time and as often as they like.

Who would you recommend the application to?


Thinkery.me could be a helpful tool for users who want to organize their personal thoughts and ideas. The application is simple to use, but seems geared more towards the non-professional user. User can create to do lists, reminders for events and much more using Thinkery.me.

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bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.

Q&A allows any WordPress site to have a fully featured questions and answers section.

Wiki allows you to create a wiki as easily as adding a post.

WP Help allows administrators to create detailed, hierarchical documentation for the site’s authors and editors, viewable in the WordPress admin.

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AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

MarketPress brings you a solid, simple yet extensible foundation for a WordPress-Powered store.

WordPress PopUp allows you to display a fancy popup (powered as a popover!) to visitors sitewide or per blog.

OrangeBox is a lightweight, cross-browser, automated jQuery lightbox script. It can display images, quicktime videos, YouTube and Vimeo videos, Flash SWF files, and inline content (along with links in the inline content to open another lightbox).

Simple Top Posts is a super simple top posts widget based on comments. Choose weekly, monthly, or all time.

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AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

Exploit Scanner searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Many of the current users migrated from Digg when they changed their site design, like what happened to the Gawker network.

Last April Fools Reddit admins introduced Reddit Mold which ran for a whole day. Redditors sent molds to other users, and the user who got “molded” was banned from using specific letters. The more molds, the more letters were disabled. Many Redditors resorted to using Braille. So I guess that gives you an overview of how Reddit works. The design is not that great, but that’s what makes it great.

Terms you need to know

AMA –  Ask Me Anything

TL;DR –  (Too long; didn’t read) Followed by a summary of what has just been said. Some, if not many, love TL;DR versions of stories/comments because it saves time, or saves the Redditor from reading a very long text.

Redditor –  users of Reddit. But the term is loosely defined as someone who is actively engaged in the community. A Redditor loves bacons and narwhals and believes that France is Bacon. I’m pathetic, I’ve just inserted a joke that people who don’t know what Reddit is might not understand.

Lurker –  a person who spends some time on Reddit on a recurring basis but does not actively join in on conversations.

Upvote/downvote –  Reddit’s version of voting submissions and comments. Upvote is colored orange, downvote is blue. This determines whether your submission will see the front page (which most Redditors would kill for) or not.

Karma –  refers to points from the upvotes.

Orangered –  it is that envelope just beside your username. When someone replies to your comment or on your self-posts that envelope changes its color from white to orange…or red, somewhere in between red and orange. How to use this term: “Oh, I have an orangered!” For forever alone Redditors this is a very exciting thing to happen, because, finally, somebody noticed them.

Ralph –  I’m not entirely sure if this refers to one person who has a very bad taste when spamming using his/her Blogger accounts or a collective term for spammers that leads to websites full of ads. You get the idea, Ralph is a spammer, he spams to earn revenue through ads that pay per page view. You don’t want to be called one if you’re a marketer.

Reddiquette –  guidelines for using Reddit properly.

NSFL – (Not Safe For Life) usually seen on titles of submissions which are not for the faint of heart. Submissions with the NSFL tag mostly contain gore and extreme violence. It is important to note for first time users that adding a tag means typing it manually on the title.

NSFW – (Not Safe For Work) same with NSFL, but submissions with this tag are things that you wouldn’t want people at work see on your screen. Usually used for mature content.

Subreddit

This is something you need to know fully before being able to use Reddit to its full potential, especially when you’re thinking of sharing your content with people. A subreddit is what websites would normally call a category. You can subscribe to different subreddits, your subscriptions to these subreddits will affect what you see on your page. It morphs to whatever you want it to be. But you must be careful about subscribing to many subreddits, because you might end up looking at photos of bacons and narwhals only.

The image on the left is a screencap of my subscriptions, I’m a fan of zombie novels/films so I subscribed to that subreddit.

Famous Subreddits

Over the years there have emerged subreddits built by its users, a couple of them even caught internet media attention. One particular famous subreddit is IAmA (I am a [insert what you are here]). In IAmA, people present themselves to the community for questions that they will answer, there are lots of anonymous IAmA’s and a handful of what we can call celebrities. To give you an idea, the owner of 4chan, creator of jQuery, Mike Rowe, Ken Jennings (74–time Jeopardy! champion) once answered questions from the community. There are still lots of personalities presenting themselves for perusing, see for yourself.

It is pretty hard to come by a good subreddit, sometimes you won’t even know that it existed. To help you with this, future Redditors, here’s MetaReddit.

Is it Safe?

Some website advisors might warn you when you go to Reddit, saying that it is not a safe place for you to visit. There’s a joke floating about saying “Don’t go to Reddit, it gave my PC a virus!” of course, this is only a joke, I haven’t heard of anyone who caught a virus through Reddit. The thing is, to a degree there is a truth in the dangers of browsing Reddit. Imagine a place where people from all walks of life gather and discuss ideas, heckle people, and talk off-topic. That’s how it usually works in a normal day on Reddit. People talk about politics, religion, entertainment, how their cute cats caught malaria, how their dogs can speak ten words, and things that people normally wouldn’t talk about in person. There are also words that are inappropriate for children.

If you’re asking about your anonymity, it is one of the best sites for keeping your identity. How is that? When you register, you are only required to enter your desired user name and password. End. No personal information whatsoever, e-mail is not a requirement. But then again, when you engage in the community and share your personal stories, that’s where you need to be careful when telling specifics about your life because even though the internet is a very large place, it is still that small to pull information from instantly.

Pros and Cons

Remember the latest server problem from Amazon that shut down Quora and Foursquare? Reddit was affected too, and is affected almost every week. For a big website it is indeed record-breaking to have incidents.

Sometimes, Reddit is too trusting about people. There has been an issue about people pretending to have cancer and that they’re pulling the plug soon, registering on Reddit to give the chance for the community to ask anything. People ask for anonymity and in return there are still people who will try to ruin the community’s trust, that is a bad thing. That’s the very reason why we can’t have good things from the internet, because people are sometimes too self-obsessed. Okay, that’s more of a personal note but you get the point.

It is important to note that Reddit can be addictive. For people who crave lots of information, this place is heaven. However, many Redditors who are students and are already working find their productivity damaged by the website. I am a little guilty of this, and I sometimes thank Reddit when it’s down.

A good thing is you can actually seek advice from professionals here. There are lots of web designers that can help you with trivial questions. The last time I checked, there are even rocket scientists!

Is Reddit a Place to Advertise your Product?

They have a system called “sponsored link” which rotates every page load, cost is not that high, for as low as $20 your text ad will be placed in a targeted audience. For people who’d rather not spend bucks, submitting links to specific subreddits MIGHT work.

A good thing about ads on Reddit is that advertisers can interact with the readers through the comments. There are startups that have engaged with Reddit and further improved their performance because of the critics and suggestions laid before them. Since Redditors are mostly anonymous users, they won’t hold back and you’ll get real feedback, not “scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” type of feedback.

This one is quite hard to answer, as previously mentioned there are things called “subreddits” which is Reddit’s term for categories.

Ralph is a name generally attributed for blogspammers, those who submit links directed to their blogs with advertisements that pay per page view. Reddit hates that, and they are reported to the moderators for removal. Well, you might wonder what’s wrong with having ads? The thing is, Ralph creates Blogger pages and uploads stolen content, and for whatever reason these people seem to have found a way to circumvent Google Ads.

For websites and blogs, if your main purpose is to generate revenue based on page views then this is not a good place to market. Again, Reddit loves intriguing and quality content, things that make procrastinating worth it.

Like Digg, hitting the front page or the second page will bring great traffic to your website. Of course it’s not easy to hit the front page because you need votes to do that. There have been marketers who’ve created several accounts just to upvote a submission, which by the way is very obvious for Redditors. Never ever do that, Redditors know when they’re being played at (at least to a certain degree) and they will hate you for that and be downvoted to oblivion.

Comments like “this website boosted my productivity, I recommend it!” and “I’ll be sure to pass this along my friends!” are too cliché, very obvious and won’t see the light of day.

There is nothing wrong with marketing your product on Reddit, but if you ever decide to, please be sure to post it on the correct subreddit and be sure that the quality is worth visiting, it should be entertaining or very critical. One thing marketers should also take note of is that gaming the system will only give you momentary success, because when people find out that you’re gaming them…

On another note, see The Oatmeal’s guide on Reddit’s Self-Serve Advertising.

Breeding Ground for Creativity

Over the years a couple of startup companies have emerged from Reddit such as imgur, a tool that lets users upload and share photos. Mostly used by Reddit.

There is a subreddit called Do It Yourself with almost 40,000 subscribers, submissions range from a simple fireplace to an electron microscope.

Months ago I wrote an article titled Is The Art of Handwriting Really Dying? and featured some handwritings by fellow Redditors.

Here’s a subreddit for web designers: /r/web_design

For programmers:  /r/programming

Did I mention that Reddit’s code is available for the public to see and experiment on? If you think you can help make things better, click here.

Novelty Accounts

Novelty accounts are accounts that are made for a specific purpose, mostly to humor and entertain the community. There are many successful Novelty Accounts like Sure_Ill_Draw_That whose mode of commenting is in form of drawings. There are others whose usernames are after celebrities.

TL;DR

Reddit is awesome! (I hope the Reddit gods won’t downvote me to oblivion!)

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The course of social media never did run smooth — not for long, anyhow. And for some Web 2.0 companies, it’s running less smoothly than ever.

It goes without saying that Facebook is the network du jour, but even though the reigning champion’s user stats keep soaring, social networking as a whole might be leveling off. Nevertheless, there are still scores of other highly competitive social sites that are waxing and waning; and different networks and apps are more popular in specific geographic areas, with certain genders or age groups and even among various social classes.

For example, Plaxo is the network with the most users over the age of 65. Facebook is more popular with women, but Digg and Reddit tend to be more popular with men. LinkedIn is the “richest” social network, but Plurk outranks it when it comes to well-educated users who have graduate degrees.

Check out this infographic from social media agency Ignite Social Media, and let us know what you think in the comments. Do these findings line up with your own perceptions and usage habits?

Click image for full-size version.

Lead image courtesy of iStockphoto, BeholdingEye.

More About: infographic, social media, social networking, stats

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Back then, it all seemed so hurried and meaningless to me, but now I realize I’ve become one of those Internet speed readers myself. Many of my friends do this same thing. It’s all part of our deteriorating online attention span. If you have a website, check out your own stats. You might be surprised to learn how many seconds each visitor stays on a page. Yes, I said seconds, not minutes.

If you are very active in social media, like me, you are probably used to content being in your face 24/7. Like crack addicts, we want more, our expectations are getting higher, and we are becoming very selective about which posts we’ll read from beginning to end. We’ve all seen those long blog posts that look really interesting, but we don’t want to read the whole thing. Is it possible to speed read a long post and still get the gist of it without sacrificing too much comprehension? I believe the answer to this is yes. I’ve been studying this for a while, and here are 4 tips that I hope will help you.

1. Don’t read the text out loud to yourself

Many people have the habit of reading out loud (sometimes in a whisper) to themselves while they read online. Eliminate the need to hear the words at all. Don’t even sound them out in your head. We can all read by seeing or watching the words much faster than we can read by associating the sound to the words. Try it. This is a trippy trick once you get the hang of it. It’s like you bypass a segment of your brain or something.

2. Read faster than is comfortable

When I started doing this, something really strange happened to me. I started not really seeing each word in my mind, but my brain knew what I read. It was like my eyes couldn’t keep up, but I still comprehended the information. Your brain is actually able to group words and sentences together. In time, you will feel more comfortable quickly running your eyes across the text. It just takes practice like everything else.

3. No matter how tempting, don’t go back and re-read

You may not really notice it, but many of us read a sentence and then go back and re-read it. We are so worried we are going to miss a detail that we go back over words we’ve already read. This can add double the time to reading a long post online. Try to resist that urge. If you feel like you missed something, just keep going. There’s no rule that says you can’t decide that post is worthy of reading a second time later.

4. Know the myths

Myth 1 – It’s a popular myth that if you read each word at a time, really slowly, you’ll comprehend more. It’s simply not true. How many times have you read a sentence slowly but been thinking about something else, so you didn’t even know what you read? It’s happened to me a million times. Comprehension is related to focus, not speed. If you are focusing intently on what you are reading, your comprehension will be good whether you are reading fast or slow. Keeping distractions to a minimum will help you focus.

Myth 2 – It’s also a myth that once you learn how to do this, you will be able to read every long post really fast. Speed reading has a lot to do with how familiar you are with a specific topic. If I read a post about Twitter, I can speed read through it in a flash. If I read a post about brain surgery, I don’t care how much I try to go fast, since I don’t understand the vocabulary, it’s just going to take longer.

Myth 3 – The third myth I’d like to point out is that skimming is very different than speed reading, although many times people interchange the words. Skimming is when you just skim the material, hitting the words here and there. Speed reading is a completely different technique. With speed reading, you are actually absorbing the text. Skimming a long blog post can get you through it quickly too, but you will not comprehend as much of the information as you would if you were to speed read it effectively because you didn’t read the whole thing.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the fastest reader ever is Howard Stephen Berg. He can read 25,000 words per minute. This fun infographic by Sharenator shows how long it would take to read the whole Wikipedia. For Howard, it would take a little more than 4 months. For you and me, it would take 12 hours a day for 30 years. Hmm… I need to work on my speed reading I think.

Via: [Mindflash] [Speed Read The Net] [Study Cram] [Level X] Image Credits: [wrangler / Shutterstock] [Konrad Bak / Shutterstock]

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PressTags is a network for WordPress bloggers designed to help you discover relevant posts written by other WordPress bloggers.

rootsPersona provides WordPress users with a simple tool for displaying their family trees in WordPress pages/posts.

Updated plugins

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

PressTags is a network for WordPress bloggers designed to help you discover relevant posts written by other WordPress bloggers.

rootsPersona provides WordPress users with a simple tool for displaying their family trees in WordPress pages/posts.

Updated plugins

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

What can you use the application for?


CeeVee is a resume/CV creation and maintenance tool. It may be connected to Facebook or LinkedIn accounts.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


CeeVee was founded in 2008 in Romania as a tool for simple CV and resume creation and maintenance. The founder’s LinkedIn profile indicates that he sold the company in January 2010, and research indicates that BestJobs.ro is the new owner. No information has been added to the site regarding this change.

What are the differences to other applications?


Users have the option to import information from Facebook or LinkedIn. Alternatively, users can create an original CV using the “fill-in-the-box” layout.

How does the application look and feel to use?


Once registered, users may add contact information and edit the content imported from any linked applications. Users may add or reorder the general sections, choose one of three themes, publish the resume publicly or privately, print or save the CV as a PDF, or share on Facebook or Twitter.

If public, others may share your CV via Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Blogger, MySpace, Digg, AIM, Stumbleupon, or MSN Messenger.

The Network tab simply takes users to Facebook, which doesn’t seem to be valuable. The Statistics tab reveals how many times a user’s CV has been viewed and how many times it has been emailed. The Jobs – soon tab is inactive.

How does the registration process work?


Users can connect with Facebook, LinkedIn, or create a login specifically for CeeVee. Registration (non-Facebook/LinkedIn) requires an email address, password, and CeeVee web address. Facebook connection requires users to allow access to their Facebook account. LinkedIn also requires permission to connect. Once connected with either application, users must provide an email address and unique CeeVee web address.

What does it cost to use the application?


CeeVee is free to use.

Who would you recommend the application to?


It isn’t clear whether there are benefits to posting on CeeVee. LinkedIn can host a resume and assists users with connections. CeeVee does not seem to be expanding or improving.

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In a letter to publishers, Digg product manager Mike Cieri announced that the troubled social news website will no longer accept content submitted via RSS.

The ability for publishers to submit all of their stories to Digg automatically using an RSS feed seemed like an efficient way to open up a firehose of content for Digg. However, Cieri says this idea had unintended consequences.

According to Cieri, “Most RSS-submitted content is not performing well on Digg.” He says the site’s analytics show that only a mere 4.5% of Digg’s “Top News” content comes from the RSS submissions. He adds that the ability to submit an RSS feed to Digg “has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content.” Cieri praised the manual method of submitting stories to Digg, saying that manual submissions “ensure that quality content appears on Digg.”

With this move, the site takes yet another step back toward the old version 3.0, the site design that was in use before radical changes resulted in a user revolt and a 24% decline in U.S. visitors in the first 11 weeks. In response, Digg has slowly added back features that readers missed, such as the ability to bury stories, and last month’s overhaul that included the return of user profiles and story statistics. Since that first fateful redesign last summer, Digg has laid off more than a third of its staffers.

I’m just wondering why Digg stubbornly refused to modify its obviously unpopular redesign after it became apparent that it was resulting in large percentages of its readership turning away. After a few days of this, why didn’t Digg simply revert to the old version and its rules that seemed to be working pretty well? If not a few days later, why not a month later? Comments?

Here’s the full text of the letter we received from Digg product manager Mike Cieri:

Publishers,

We hope this message finds you well. After a bumpy second half of 2010 at Digg, we are starting to see positive signs of improvement and are optimistic about the direction Digg is headed. In January 2011, we saw double digit growth of diggs and comments, as well as an increase in unique visitors and exit clicks out to publisher sites. We’ve taken a number of concrete steps to stay better connected with the Digg community, and we are taking action to improve Digg based on our community’s feedback. One important point of feedback we’ve heard is that RSS submitted stories are hurting Digg in a number of ways, and in the next week we are going to discontinue the ability to submit content via RSS. We’d like to share the reasoning behind the decision, and let you know what you can do to improve your performance on Digg.

Put very simply, most RSS submitted content is not performing well on Digg. For many of our users, RSS submissions take the fun out of finding and submitting great content. When users try to submit a story to Digg and find that the story has already been auto-submitted via RSS, they lose interest in helping spread the story on Digg by commenting and sharing with friends. Removing a user’s desire to champion a story results in less diggs, comments, exit clicks, and ultimately a much smaller chance of making the Top News section. Our analytics reflect this point – only 4.5% of all Top News content comes from RSS submitted content (95.5% is manually submitted).

At its core, Digg is a community of passionate users who take pride in the content they submit and engage with one another in discussion and promotion of viral content. There is a perception that some publishers don’t participate in the community, use RSS submit as an “auto-pilot” tool to submit content without discretion, and do little to promote submitted content or start discussions. This is one reason why many popular publishers, despite having tens of thousands of followers, are not seeing strong referral numbers for their submissions. Some publishers have cultivated a tight following on Digg by digging and commenting on content other than their own, adding Digg buttons prominently to articles on their site and limiting the content they submit to just their best content. These publishers are seeing much more value from Digg.

Finally, the RSS submission tool has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content. The simple act of forcing a manual submission helps to combat spam and ensures that quality content appears on Digg.

So in the next week, the feature will be disabled. We wanted to give advance notice of this change and encourage you to start submitting your best content manually to Digg. You can also enable your audience to help submit and spread your content on Digg by placing Digg buttons on each story item on your site. We are confident that removing RSS submissions will help increase exit clicks to your sites, and ultimately help you receive more value from Digg.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or thoughts.

Thanks,
Mike

More About: digg, redesign, RSS Submissions, User Revolt, Version 4.0

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Reddit has announced some small but significant staffing changes today, causing us to ponder the big picture for the little link-sharing app that could.

As longtime rival Digg takes a Titanic-like nosedive into the freezing waters of the Internet, hemorrhaging staff along the way, Reddit claims things are going swimmingly.

Today, the small team, which was acquired by publishing behemoth Condé Nast in 2006, has just announced a couple new hires and says it will be hiring more engineers shortly. The company will now include a new back-end engineer and a new sales rep, as well as a couple redditors who will be working as part-time support staff.

But you may recall things were not so rosy for Reddit in the quite recent past. Just six months ago, the site was forced to adopt a freemium model to keep itself in business. At the time, Reddit staffer Mike Schiraldi wrote,

“Whenever this topic comes up on the site, someone always posts a comment about how Reddit is owned by Condé Nast, a billion-dollar corporation… and how if they wanted to they could hire a thousand engineers and purchase a million dollars worth of heavy iron. But here’s the thing: corporations aren’t run like charities. They keep separate budgets for each business line, and usually allocate resources proportionate to revenue. And Reddit’s revenue isn’t great.”

Clearly, times have changed since those words were penned last year. For one thing, the freemium features, dubbed Reddit Gold, were considered a huge success by the company.

Also, since then, the site has grown to more than one billion pageviews per month. That figure represented a 300% year-over-year increase.

This kind of traffic growth has helped the site lure “big-ticket” advertisers, according to site admins; another rising source of revenue is the site’s sponsored link system, which is used to promote SMBs, startups, blog posts, YouTube videos and other kinds of content. And Reddit Gold continues to be a success, too.

It’s interesting to watch this company — which without doubt was smaller than Digg as far as staff was concerned and which never drove the same masses of lemming-like traffic to publisher sites the way Digg did — succeed even as Digg falters. Perhaps this is a real-life example of a slower, steadier web app winning the race.

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What can you use the application for?


Most professionals and individuals today have many contact options. OnePage allows users to compile all of their information and contact details into a single online contact card. This can be passed around to anyone quickly and easily. The user can add a brief description or paragraph about themselves along with an image. The majority of the OnePage contact card features the user’s basic contact information, such as phone numbers, websites, geographical location, email addresses and Skype information as well as Facebook, Vimeo, Last.FM, Digg, Delicious, Flickr, RSS feed and Twitter details.

What is the history and popularity of the application?


OnePage was founded in 2009 by Joel Gascoigne, Adelle Charles and Oo Nwoye. Located in Birmingham, Great Britain, the OnePage team still includes Gascoigne as the Chief Technical Officer. Nwoye is no longer an official member of the team but has moved on to continue work as a Nigerian entrepreneur who hopes to inspire others with the same background to start their own businesses online.

What are the differences to other applications?


Posting contact information online is by far not a new concept. What makes OnePage so unique is the way the application handles the task. Users can create very clear, concise contact cards that can be shared with others. The user’s profile is very easy to read and eye-catching, making them a great choice for professionals and businesses.

How does the application look and feel to use?


A OnePage contact card looks good and functions very well. A small image can be included, usually of the user who owns the contact card A small paragraph can be added with a little information on the user. The bottom of the contact card includes icons for the many ways the user can be reached. Almost anything can be put on a OnePage contact card, from website URLs to social networking profiles and RSS feeds.

How does the registration process work?


A newcomer is given many options when creating a OnePage account. Along the right hand side, the user can find three blue buttons and one green button. The blue buttons allow the user to sign up through an existing Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account. The top green button allows the user to take the standard approach. This method asks the user for an email address. After submitting an email address, the user is advised that they must check their inbox for a confirmation message which needs to be accessed to continue. After doing so, the user is taken to the final step of registration which requires a desired OnePage URL and password.

What does it cost to use the application?


Currently, OnePage is available to anyone who is willing to take a few minutes to make an account. The process is painless and requires no credit cards or other payment information. The site does not yet offer a premium paid membership. This is a nice bonus considering the simplicity of the service being offered. The Press FAQ page hints at the addition of future premium features, however it does not elaborate on what those might be or how much they will cost. For the time being, anyone can use OnePage for free.

Who would you recommend the application to?


OnePage is great way to condense a significant amount of contact information into one convenient online contact card. Users can pass their OnePage profile around as a quick and easy way to give someone access to all of their profiles and contact details. OnePage even allows users to enter RSS feed information and website URLs.

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Reddit has reached a new milestone: 1 billion monthly pageviews. That’s up 300% from a year ago and a 20% increase from just last month.

As it occasionally does, the Condé Nast-owned company disclosed its January 2011 traffic stats. Its biggest accomplishment was breaking the billion pageview milestone. Specifically, the social media service garnered 1,000,404,480 pageviews. As Reddit notes in its blog post, only about 100 other websites can stake a claim in the billion pageviews club.

Even more impressive is that those 1 billion pageviews were generated from just 13.75 million absolute unique visitors, which accounted for a total of 68.11 million visits. A big reason why Reddit can generate so many pageviews from so few people is that the average person checks out 14.7 pages per visit and stays on the site on average for 15 minutes and 40 seconds.

It’s clear that Reddit’s growth rate is accelerating. It had 250 million pageviews in January 2010 and 429 million pageviews between June 14 and July 14. And just last month, the Condé Nast website reported 829 million pageviews.

If you do the math, that means pageviews increased by over 20% in a single month. Since January 2010, Reddit’s pageviews have grown by 300%. A lot of this growth has been at the expense of Digg, which has experienced a mass exodus of users ever since it launched Digg version four.

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Digg has launched an overhaul and redesign of the struggling social media service in an attempt to bring users back and regain some momentum.

This rollout incorporates three major changes for the site. The first is a redesign of the site based on user feedback. It places the key Digg topics — Gaming, Technology, Science, etc. — at the top of the page rather than on the side. Story pages have been cleaned up, and the “submit” box has been given more prominence. It now sits at the top of every page, while search has been been reduced to a magnifying glass icon that will display the search box when you click it.

The second part of the update focuses on profile pages and the return of profile statistics. At the top right of every profile page are the Digg, commenting, submission and following stats for every user. Digg says it took “much longer” than expected to import the Digg data from V3 to the current version. It’s definitely incomplete, though — my stats say I’ve made zero submissions and zero comments in my many years on Digg, both of which are definitely not true. Some data is still missing.

Finally, Digg has added a new slew of opt-in notifications for when your stories hit “Top News.” While “Top News” has lost much of its prominence since “My News” was made the default, it’s still a point of achievement to have a story you submit reach the front page, so it makes sense that many people would want to be notified when that happens. These notifications will appear either by e-mail or on-site.

The changes are designed to counteract Digg’s painful decline by adding the most-requested user features. Users famously revolted after the New Digg launched last August. Since then, Digg has been in decline, enough to force Digg to lay off more than one-third of its team.

The new features will be rolled out over the next few weeks and will be offered at an opt-in basis. Overall, they’re nice updates, but th company still has a long way to go to regain user trust and woo users back to its platform. Every little bit counts, though, when you’re trying to turn things around.

Check out the before and after screenshots, and let us know what you think of the redesign.

Above: Screenshot of the New Digg

Above: Screenshot of the Old Digg

More About: digg, digg 4.0, kevin rose, New Digg, redesign

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Over the past few years, social media networking sites have been growing rapidly — this is something we all might have obviously noticed already. The question is whether we’re aware of how many users there are out there across the world who cannot imagine their lives without their social media networks.

Here is a collection of forty useful and appealing social media infographics that will enrich our knowledge, our lives and thoughts about the advantages and disadvantages of such networks. If you have found an infographic you’ve found useful, feel free to share it with us!

Useful Social Media Infographics

The Boom of Social Sites
The explosion of social networking sites over the past decade has facilitated a transformation in the way we communicate with each other. Here we look at some of these communities with over 1 million users, both active and defunct:

Facebook’s World
Facebook is the most dominant brand in the world of social media. Ever wonder how? Click the image below to view a comprehensive infographic:

Age Distribution on Social Networking Sites
Here’s some interesting statistics regarding the age distribution across many of the popular social networking websites:

A HubSpotter’s Guide to the (Social Media) Galaxy
Learn how marketers should explore new frontiers of social media, the blogoshere and more:

Digg vs. Reddit — The Infographic
There has always been a form of healthy rivalry between Reddit and Digg, and its respective user bases. Click to find out more:

Average Age of a Facebook User? 38
The demographics of most of the social networking sites change quite frequently. Flowtown has compiled the latest statistics about general usage of social networking sites especially Facebook. The statistics show that the average age of a Facebook user is 38 and more interestingly about 61% of the Facebook users are above 38 in age:

How are Mobile Phones Changing Social Media?
Have you ever wondered about the relationship between mobile phones and social media? The mobile web is growing at an exponential rate, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down:

Social Media Demographics: Who’s Using Which Sites?
Have you ever wondered which sites attract the most educated of social media users, or those that pull in the highest income? Below we map the demographics of the world’s most popular social media sites:

How Executives are Using Social Media
The infographics mentioned below show how executives and professionals are using social media to promote their business or goods and services. According to the infographic: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media sites used by the executives:

Facebook vs. Twitter — A Breakdown of 2010 Social Demographics
Let us take a look at a breakdown of 2010 social demographics between Facebook and Twitter:

Women and Social Media
The following is a graphic that takes a look at what sites women are using, as well as how much and why women are participating in social media:

Facebook vs. Twitter
Facebook was once the “contender” against MySpace. That didn’t last too long, but soon Twitter emerged as a pseudo-social-network-competitor-thingy to Facebook and the competition heated up again:

Social Media: A Cheat Sheet
Are you new to social media? Are you unsure about how to engage your audience via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the rest? Here’s a handy infographic that doubles as a roadmap of the social Web:

Facebook: Facts You Probably Didn’t Know
If you ever want to impress anyone with your knowledge of Facebook miscellanea, below is the ultimate cheat sheet in the form of a very large infographic. Enjoy!

The Social Media Effect
This Infographics is intended to show you how different components of social media are integrated with one another:

When Social Media Attacks!
What happens when communities don’t exactly behave the way we intended them to? Fighting and bickering is normal and actually healthy for communities. Click to find out more:

Google’s Social Media Timeline
Google hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to social media attempts. Long story:

Social Media Prisms
The prism shows the landscape of social media in Germany with all the relevant conversation channels:

Social Media Building
So much discussion in the SEO community today centers around social media because of its potential to drive traffic, increase awareness, and build links. Here we explore some ways that a business can leverage specific social sites to achieve departmental goals:

China’s Social Media Map
The major players in the U.S. social media world can be counted on one hand: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn. Not so in China, where the country’s 300 million online users have a panoply of popular social networks to choose from — and Facebook doesn’t even crack the top 10!

Twitter Perceptions of Google Buzz Over Time
Social media monitoring and analytics company Viralheat put together this graphic that shows the initial positive response to Google Buzz on Twitter, followed by shifts in opinion based on events in the developing privacy story:

The State of B2B Social Media Marketing
For a deeper look at the current state of B2B social media marketing, check out the infographic below:

Are We Too Obsessed With Facebook?
Is Facebook an amazing connective medium? A plague that preys on the easily addicted? A little bit of both, or something else entirely?

The Meteoric Rise of Twitter
Twitter is one of among those brands and companies which have experienced such a fast growth. Click the image below to view the infographic:

Facebook Privacy: 6 Years of Controversy
Here is a short history of the controversies and missteps that have tarnished the social network’s otherwise meteoric success:

The Biggest Brands on Facebook
In this infographic, we explore the timeline of brand-friendly updates to Facebook itself, as well as the brands that dominate in Facebook marketing today:

Kevin Rose’s Digg
With over millions of users, Digg has become one of the most reputable force in the social media world that allows you to share your favorite stories online with your friends, co-workers and relatives:

The Current State of Twitter
There are some interesting hidden truths about Twitter and its users. The following graphic takes a look at Twitter’s path to 10 billion tweets, what we have learned about its users and what they’ve been talking about along the way:

Twitter on Paper
This infographic contains additional interesting facts about Twitter based on some numbers that co-founder Ev Williams announced at the Chirp conference:

What the Tweet?
Every day, thousands of stories are passed around the internet on blogs and via Twitter. Click here to find out more:

How are Companies Leveraging Social Media?
Ever wonder how big businesses are leveraging social media? Here is a graphic illustrating the most interesting of their findings:

The Rise of Facebook Mobile
Facebook is the number one app across most mobile operating systems. Flowtown.com took a look at the rise of Facebook mobile, and compiled a number of the most interesting facts and figures in the above graphic:

44% of Online Sharing Occurs Through Facebook
Impressively, 44% of shares occurred through Facebook in 2010, up 33% from last year. That number does not include shares done via Facebook’s “Like” button, which means the actual, universal percentage of shares through Facebook is likely higher:

Inside the Political Twittersphere
Ever wondered how politicians use Twitter? Who are the most active politicians on Twitter? Who do they follow, and who follows them? Who are the political strategists and media personalities that politicians follow? And within the political Twittersphere, who follows the most people, and who follows them?

Twitter Users Profile Infographic
Satire and the Internet make great friends. And the newest Internet sensation to be targeted is Twitter. While many blogs make fun of twitter you must admit Twitter does have a larger group of followers. Of course, how many are actually paying attention remains to be seen:

History of Social Media – History of Social Media Bookmarking
Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries:

Social Marketing Compass
A compass is a device for orientating oneself and guiding physical direction. The social marketing compass points a brand in a physical and experimental direction, allowing them to connect with their customers, peers, and influencers, where those users already interact and seek guidance online:

Social Web Involvement
This map demonstrates the social web involvement of the users worldwide. It provides you a clear picture that every month hundreds of millions of web users create and share their content with one another. This map shows the active bloggers, social networkers, video sharers, photo up-loaders and micro-bloggers:

The Biggest Shift
The Biggest Shift tells the significance and extent of social media network. If you are keen to utilize word of mouth advertising, social media is there to assist to place heighten your works at all. With focusing your marketing interest to the top social networking websites, you will see the instant results of your efforts:

How People Share Content On The Web
This infographic will show that how people share pieces of contents on the web and how facebook dominates social media:

(ik)

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Formspring has announced $11.5 million in new funding, confirming earlier reports that the popular questions and answers service had taken on significant new capital from lead investor Redpoint Ventures.

The company has also revealed a big new way to grow its audience: a button that publishers can use to ask questions on their website called “Respond.” As the name suggests, it lets visitors respond to a question posed by the publisher. The button itself resembles the Tweet, Facebook share and Digg buttons already pervasive on millions of sites across the web.

Like typical Formspring responses, the answers can be broadcast back to social sites like Facebook and Twitter, with the key difference being that the links direct people to the publisher’s site instead of Formspring. In turn, it’s a new way for publishers to generate traffic and tap into Formspring’s 20 million registered users, many of whom appear to be quite active, with the site recently surpassing 2 billion questions answered, up from 1 billion last September. Several large publishers are already using the Respond button at launch, including The Huffington Post and IGN.

With the new funding – which also included participation from Baseline Ventures and a number of individual investors – Formspring has now taken on $14 million in capital. The company is yet to reveal its monetization plans, though in a conversation with me on Tuesday CEO Ade Olonoh and VP of Product Tom Wang did hint that it would be advertising focused.

Asked about suddenly white hot Q&A site Quora, Olonoh said that his service is more “about getting to know people [and getting] insight into their personality” as opposed to more knowledge-driven questions. “Our audience is relatively mainstream and there’s this sense that looking at an empty status box is daunting but … responding to a question is natural,” he added.

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Global Content Blocks allows you to create your own shortcodes to insert reusable code snippets or HTML including forms, opt-in boxes, iframes, Adsense code, etc, into pages and posts. You can insert them using the shortcodes or via a button in the TinyMCE visual editor toolbar.

Updated plugins

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

Dynamic Widgets gives you full control on which pages your widgets will appear. It lets you dynamicly place the widgets on WordPress pages by setting conditional rules with just a few mouse clicks by role, dates, language (WPML), for the homepage, single posts, pages, authors, categories, archives, error page, search page and custom post types. (review)

Exploit Scanner searches the files on your website, and the posts and comments tables of your database for anything suspicious. It also examines your list of active plugins for unusual filenames.

Simple Facebook Connect is a series of plugins that let you add any sort of Facebook Connect functionality you like to a WordPress blog. This lets you have an integrated site without a lot of coding, and still lets you customize it exactly the way you’d like.

Theme-Check allows you to run checks on the current theme before uploading to WordPress. This plugin uses the same API and is kept more or less in sync with the WordPress.org uploader tool.

Risale al periodo d’oro di Digg, quando il sito fondato da Kevin Rose spopolava e macinava utili grazie all’enorme successo di cui godeva. Sono passati d’allora poco più di quattro anni durante i quali Digg ha perso gran parte del suo appeal e una fetta consistente di utenti. L’emorragia di visite è peggiorata in quest’ultima parte dell’anno confermando un trend negativo preoccupante. Ad aprile 2010, un articolo del Guardian riportava che il sito fondato da Kevin Rose aveva perso in un mese oltre il 35% del traffico (tornando ai livelli di giugno 2008) e tagliato il 10% del suo staff. Un ulteriore ridimensionamento dell’organico del 37% era stato annunciato a ottobre su TechCrunch, sintomo di un evidente peggioramento della salute del popolare sito di condivisione delle news. Il rilascio della nuova versione del sito ha contribuito a seppellire i timidi entusiasmi di chi sperava ancora in un miracolo. Il risultato del restyling (non solo grafico ma anche in termini di funzionalità) è stato disastroso e ha scatenando numerose critiche e polemiche che non hanno di certo giovato all’immagine già abbastanza appannata del sito.

Ma perché Digg oggi non funziona più e attrae sempre meno utenti rispetto a qualche tempo fa? Al di là di ogni possibile speculazione su quella che è stata la gestione del sito negli ultimi anni, se per curiosità date un’occhiata alla pagina che spiega cos’è Digg trovate questa breve frase: “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web”. E il problema di fondo è proprio tutto lì, in quell’attività di scoprire e condividere i contenuti che gli utenti hanno delegato prevalentemente a Twitter e Facebook il cui utilizzo è ormai ben più radicato nella trasposizione digitale della vita di ognuno di noi.

Digg è qualcosa che percepiamo meno immediato rispetto a Twitter e meno personale e intimo rispetto a Facebook e proprio questo sentimento è ciò che ci porta a ritenere il suo utilizzo meno necessario e superfluo. Forse la parabola discendente di Digg non è ancora arrivata a un punto di non ritorno ma, probabilmente, il futuro che attende il sito ha tutto il sapore amaro della delusione.

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It dates back to the golden age of Digg, when the site founded by Kevin Rose in December 2004 drew the crowds because of the success achieved during that period of time. Just over four years have passed since that moment during which Digg has lost much of its appeal and a large chunk of users. The bleeding of visits has worsened in the last part of the year confirming an alarming negative trend. In April 2010, a Guardian article reported that the site founded by Kevin Rose had lost, just in a month, more than 35% of traffic (returning to the levels of June 2008) and cut 10% of its staff. A further downsizing of staff by 37% was announced in October on TechCrunch as a clear sign of deteriorating health of the popular news sharing site.

The release of the new Digg version has helped bury the timid enthusiasm of those who hoped for a miracle. The result of the redesign (not only in terms of graphics but also of features) has been disastrous and has sparked numerous controversies and criticisms that have not benefited the image of the site.

The question is, why today Digg is attracting fewer users than some time ago? Beyond any possible speculation about how the site has been managed in recent years, if you look at the page that explains what is Digg, you find this short sentence “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web”. This sentence in its simplicity contains the deep problem of Digg. Many users have delegated Twitter and Facebook to discover and share contents across the web, two services whose usage is now well established in the “digital transposition” of the life of everyone.

Digg is something that users perceive less immediate than Twitter and less personal and intimate than Facebook. Just that feeling is what leads them to believe its use superfluous. Perhaps the downward turn of Digg has not yet reached the point of no return but, probably, the future that awaits the site has all the bitter taste of disappointment.

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Tumblr launched three curated topic pages today as a step toward addressing the problem of discovery on the platform. The available pages, which are still in beta, include News, Fashion and Long-Reads.

Each tag page includes contributors and editors who curate what displays in the tag, which users are able to follow and get updates in their Tumblr Dashboard. According to Mark Coatney, media evangelist at Tumblr, the feature will soon be open to more categories and for editors to volunteer help curate new pages.

“We’ll be adding another three to five topics over the next few days and weeks, whenever we think we have another good curated one ready to go,” Coatney says.

Each of the pages includes the curated posts as a default, as well as the most popular posts within that tag category and the raw stream. Users are able to follow the tag, which then displays as a “tracked tag” in your Dashboard.

Improving Content Discovery

One of the troubles that Tumblr — like many other social platforms — faces, is enabling users to easily discover valuable content and follow it. Some social news sites like Digg have taken to curating content, an approach that Tumblr is also looking at. The difference, however, is that Tumblr is enabling its users by partnering with them to curate topic pages. The problem right now, likely as a result of the feature being in beta, is that topic pages themselves are hard to find. You basically would have had to stumble across them by accident or read about them in a Tumblr post, but the pages will soon be more integrated into the discovery experience.

“This is part of a larger reworking on how finding good content on Tumblr works,” Coatney says. “We’re still putting [discovery] mechanisms in place, but within a few weeks or so you should be seeing changes in the Tumblr Directory that will show off these new pages.”

Tumblr is still figuring out how these pages will be integrated, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction in helping users discover content they care about. It also, in some ways, sets the platform up to be a useful news source by enabling an army of curators to create a stream of relevant content around a specific topic.

“We’re going to use the feedback we get from these first few to fine-tune how we do these, and that will help guide what we do in the future,” Coatney says.

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I assume you have already seen how an instant search engine works, so that there is no need for me to explain that results pop up as you are typing away.

Read more

Learn more about SpidiFox.com in Dataopedia.com

Find out how much SpidiFox.com is worth with Stimator.com

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Former Digg CEO Jay Adelson has joined location-based data startup SimpleGeo as CEO. He will also join the company’s board of directors.

SimpleGeo, which has increased its staff from four to 25 since January and raised $8.14 million in a Series A in May, offers a suite of sophisticated geo-data products for purchase. The service targets individual developers and businesses who want to immediately build or enhance location-based applications in minutes.

Among its employees are former Digg staffers Joe Stump (previously lead architect of Digg), designer Jeffrey Kalmikoff, engineers Ian Eure and Paul Lathrop, and product ambassador Nicole Williams.

SimpleGeo’s current CEO, Matt Galligan, will serve as the startup’s Chief Strategy Officer moving forward, he announced in a blog post.

Adelson resigned from Digg in April, shortly before the company released what’s proved to be a hugely unpopular site overhaul. Traffic has plummeted heavily since then. At a conference in September, founder Kevin Rose said he was “burned out” and refused to confirm that he would still be working at the company by the end of 2010. In mid-October, Digg named a new CEO; later that month, he announced that the startup would be cutting its staff from 67 to 42 — more than one-third of the total team — in an effort to become profitable again. Among the casualties was Publisher and Chief Revenue Officer Chas Edwards.

More About: digg, jay adelson, simplegeo

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Check your website ranking and Social Media Presence in one click. Gives details regarding domain age, google pagerank, Digg, technorati and delicious links etc.,

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Digg is dead. Sure, the company won’t be disappearing today,
tomorrow or next week, but to anyone who lived through the first .com
bust, the writing is on the wall: the company’s redesign woes and
yesterday’s 37% staff reduction don’t bode well for its future prospects.

For Digg to survive and thrive once again, it’s going to have to beat the kind of odds that few companies do.

Perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of Digg’s rise and fall that hasn’t been discussed much is founder cash outs. As the Web 2.0 boom got underway and startups like Digg were wooed by VCs competing to invest, the idea that VCs could and should provide liquidity for founders became more commonplace.

The logic was simple: going public wasn’t an option for most of these young, fast-growing startups, so it might be good to let founders looking to take some money off of the table do so by selling some of their shares in a big investment round. In many cases, this also made sense from a shareholder structure standpoint, as founders held a large portion of the young company’s outstanding stock, and buying founder stock could potentially reduce the amount of dilution required.

One of the founders who was rumored to have taken money off the table in this fashion was Digg’s Kevin Rose. While, to the best of my knowledge this was never confirmed, there were numerous reports that Rose had sold millions of dollars worth of stock to Digg investors in multiple financing rounds. Rose’s investments as an angel (he has put money into numerous startups, including Twitter and Foursquare) might lend some credence to those claims.

If we assume that Rose took money off the table as being accurate, and couple them with the fact that Rose increased his activities outside of Digg until he took the reigns as Digg’s CEO again in April 2010, there’s an interesting question: is there a possible relationship between Digg’s current woes and the founder’s level of investment and involvement?

More broadly, do VCs shoot themselves in the foot when they allow founders to cash out before their startups do? While we have no way of knowing if Rose took money off the table, or how much, we do know that Rose was instrumental in Digg’s early success. He had an idea and vision, and he executed on it. For better or worse, he became the face of Digg, and for a time, it appeared he could do no wrong in the eyes of the Digg community. Certainly, Rose has always seemed to be more in tune with members of the Digg community than anyone else who has served at the company’s helm.

One might very well argue that as Rose disengaged from Digg and became involved in other ventures, Digg lost an important part of its secret sauce: the influence of its founder. Whether or not Rose’s disengagement was due to the fact that he was financially comfortable, it’s hard not to think that founders like Rose might lose a bit of their fire or become distracted by other entrepreneurial callings once they have some cash in their pockets.

With Digg as a possible real-world example of this, VCs might want to look at this more closely when the third internet startup boom hits. The landscape for venture capital is as complicated and challenging as it has ever been, and while there may be good reasons to provide for some level of founder liquidity, it’s unclear whether companies will be any better off for the practice, at least as it was implemented during the heady days of Web 2.0.

Photo credit: Joi via Flickr.

Digg CEO Matt Williams revealed in an interview with Mashable that Digg is focused on getting healthy again by cutting costs, resetting its strategy and re-entering “startup mode.”

Earlier today, Williams announced that Digg would be laying off more than one-third of its staff. The company’s current staff of 67 will be reduced to 42 in an effort to reach profitability by 2011. Williams told me that the cuts will be all across the board, rather than focus on a specific division of Digg. Even management isn’t safe; Williams pointed to the exit of Chas Edwards, the company’s publisher and chief revenue officer, as a sign that management is being shaken up as well.

“The burn rate is simply too high,” Williams said. He says that the company has looked at all of possible ways to cut costs, but concluded that it couldn’t keep its staff of 67 and operate profitably. He emphasized the need for Digg to be more lean in its operations. “We’re in startup mode again,” he stated.

On Tuesday the entire Digg team will gather at an all-hands meeting where Williams will outline the company’s strategy for the next year. He revealed part of that plan to me in our interview. Primarily, the company will focus on increasing engagement with the Digg community, which lost many individuals during the disastrous release of the New Digg. He wants the company to “listen hard” to users in order to re-engage them.

What about the revenue side of the Digg equation? Williams’ response was simple: Diggable Ads. He believes Digg’s new ad format is an innovative and powerful ad product. The company will be “doubling down” on Diggable Ads and finding new ways they can be utilized by advertisers.

Williams was brought in to clean house and turn things around. To do so, he intends to run Digg as a lean startup. It started with today’s layoffs, but he has his work cut out for him if he’s to spark a comeback and achieve profitability for the social news website by 2011.

More About: digg, matt williams

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Chas Edwards, Digg’s publisher and chief revenue officer, announced Monday that he will be stepping down from his role shortly.

Edwards, who plans to take up a full-time position as Pixazza’s chief revenue officer and development publisher, will remain a strategic adviser to Digg — in particular, with Digg’s ad platform strategy, he said in a personal blog post.

Edwards joined Digg in June 2009 from Federated Media.

Digg has had a tough year, following the departure of CEO Jay Adelson in April, and the delayed release of what’s proved to be a hugely unpopular site overhaul. Traffic has plummeted heavily since then. At a conference in September, founder Kevin Rose said he was “burned out” and refused to confirm that he would still be working at the company by the end of 2010.

Digg appointed a new CEO earlier this month, who immediately apologized for some of the decisions made in the redesign and pledged to continue bringing back features that users miss.

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On the Digg About blog, Williams explained, "The fact is our business has a burn rate that is too high.  We must significantly cut our expenses to achieve profitability in 2011.  We’ve considered all of the possible options for reduction, from salaries to fixed costs.  The result is that, in addition to lowering many of our operational costs, I’ve made the decision to downsize our staff from 67 to 42 people."

This is a scary sign for Digg (and Digg fans), as that’s a big cut and almost bound to have a significant effect on something.  It’s unlikely that 25 employees held the title "pencil sharpener," after all.

One important note is that everyone affected by the move should have some help getting another job, though.  Williams pledged, "I’m personally committed to help find new opportunities for everyone affected by the transition.  Digg’s Board members have also offered to help find placements within their portfolio companies."

And losing 37 percent of its employees should allow Digg to save quite a lot of money, so it’s perhaps not time to order a virtual tombstone for the company just yet.

Williams wrote, "Let’s please use today to show our sincere appreciation for our friends and colleagues who will be moving on.  Tomorrow, we’ll go forward with a new strategy for Digg."

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Originally posted at The Social

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More WebProNews Videos

Few people are more highly regarded in the blogging-for-business world than Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net. He has essentially set the blueprint for how to turn a blog into a business, and is one of the go-to sources for tips on how to do as much. He had a chat with WebProNews at BlogWorld last week, after speaking in one of the more popular keynotes at the event. 

Rowse discussed with us how people can get started blogging, and eventually turn their blogs into moneymakers. "You need a blog to start with, then really my first priority would be getting some useful content on there – some content that’s actually going to solve some problems for people," he said. "So if you’re blog’s a how-to type blog, you want to start thinking ‘what’s a beginner in this topic need to know?’ and start writing that type of content that you can be referring back to later, so that when you start promoting it, you’ve got content there that they’ll find, that is engaging for them. So that is probably the first step, and then, it’s about putting yourself out there, and trying to find some readers."

Have you been able to turn your blog into a business? Let us know. 

If the how-to path is the one you’re interested in traveling, I’d reccommend reading this article, discussing ways to create effective how-to articles, with tips provided by John Hewitt, who has written technical manuals for companies like IBM, Intuit, and Motorola. 

Either way, "First you want to know who you want to attract, because it’s kind of easy to get noticed on the Internet, but if you do it in the wrong way, you could actually 1. take yourself further away from your goals, but 2. find the wrong readers," noted Rowse. "You could get..readers from a place like Digg or StumbleUpon…some of these social bookmarking sites, but they may not actually be the type of person that you want to journey with for the whole long term. So define who you want to reach, and ask the question, ‘where can I find them online?’" 

"Answering that question, for me, on my photography site led me to Flickr. Flickr’s a place where people have cameras, and not everyone takes great photos, so it was a place for me to develop a presence. For other blogs, it may lead you to Twitter or Facebook or another blog or a forum that is related to your particular niche."

Forums can actually be great for your brand (in some cases, maybe even more so than Facebook or Twitter). Forums are a good source of relevant discussion to your niche, provided you engage in the right places. They can help you establish yourself as an expert (not unlike Q&A sites), and they can be particularly good for building a search presence. Forum threads do really well in Google for certain queries, particularly when someone is looking for help with something. 

"I think a lot of bloggers treat their blog as a hobby, and I mean, that certainly is the way I started out," Rowse told us. "I didn’t realize you could make money from blogging when I started. But my wife kind of gave me an ultimatum after a while. I’d began to dream about my blog becoming a business, and certainly was moving in that direction…one day, she kind of said, ‘you need to do it’. Then she gave me six months to get it done."

"Once I had that ultimatum, and that deadline in mind, it just switched in my mind and started making me thinking of it as a business now, and really that was the turning point for me, because I began to think more strategically about who was reading my blog, what they needed, and products that I could launch to them," he continued. "But also, I got on the phone for the fist time and started ringing advertisers to create a direct relationship with them."

Rowse recently discussed using temporary blogs as stepping stones for your broader goals:

"A temporary blog is a blog that I suggest some new users would start," Rowse told WebProNews. "A lot of people say you have to choose a niche, and get a domain name and that, but a lot of bloggers find that so overwhelming that they don’t know what they want to write about yet, they don’t know what their voice is, they don’t know what to name their blog as…so perhaps for some people, it’s more appropriate just to start up any blog – just to start learning about blogging, and start getting into the rhythm of writing, and to find what they actually enjoy about blogging and what topics they enjoy. Get some reader feedback on that."

"That’s kind of how I started," he added. "My first blog, I don’t actually write on anymore, but it helped me to build a bit of an audience, but also refine what I wanted to write about, and learn the tools as well. So, just jump on a WordPress.com blog or a Blogger blog. It doesn’t matter what the platform is if you’re not gonna be there for the long term, and just start blogging for a while, and then you’ll begin to find your ideas are refined."

On the biggest problems Rowse sees from others that are blogging, he said, "I find a lot of bloggers is, their biggest problem is they don’t start. They’re convinced that they should have a blog, but they don’t actually do it. And they can do that because they feel overwhelmed by the choices in setting it up, or they can feel nervous and not worthy to really write, but you can’t let that hold you back. You’ve got to actually start. And then another thing – a lot of bloggers just regurgitate what everyone else is writing, and they don’t actually have anything unique or useful to say to people."

"So really, it’s about identifying human need, and problems that people really have, and build something that matters to people," he concluded. "Even if it’s basic stuff that you think is too basic, a lot of people out there need to know that stuff. They’re asking those questions."

What are the biggest issues you face in your blogging efforts? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Watch our past interviews with Rowse here for even more helpful advice.

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OK. Like all Thesis customizations, we’re going to need to open up the custom_functions.php file. In this example, we are going to offer different social buttons based on where the user came from. If they came from a social site, we’ll show the interactive buttons with counts/votes. If they came from anyplace else, we’re going to show static graphic icon buttons.

For the website I’m using I put the buttons under the author byline, so my code will go in that function (if you are going to copy and paste, wait until the end for the final code so you get all the semicolons and parentheses).

//this is author byline
function uauthor_byline()

I’m going to make sure the buttons only appear on single pages so I’ll need the following bit of code:

if (is_single())

Ok now we get to the programming. We’ll need two variables and one array. The variables will hold the referring URL and a flag that tells whether that condition is true, and the array will hold the list of sites we are checking against.

$CUsocial = false; // this is the flag for social traffic
$CUref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; //this is the referring URL

$CUsocialar = array('reddit', 'stumbleupon', 'digg', 'twitter', 'facebook', 'delicious'); // this is an array of social sites

So what we want to do next is take the list of social sites and see if any of them are in the referer. If they are, we set the flag to true.

//check all the social sites
$i=0;while ($i<=count($CUsocialar)){
if(stristr($CUref, $CUsocialar[$i])) {
$CUsocial = true;
}
$i++;

}

Now, if you’re a stickler, you could make the case that, if Twitter was in the filename and not the domain, we could get a false positive, and you would be correct. I just don’t think that’s going to happen often enough to be a real concern. OK so now we know whether the referring site is any of the social websites we want to trap for. If it is, the $CUsocial variable will be ‘true’ so we’ll need this bit of code:

if ($CUsocial){
//code for active social websites goes here
}else{
//code for default condition goes here
?>}

The code above has a placeholder for the buttons you can get from places like digg, stumbleupon and facebook. Since there are so many tutorials and instructions from the original websites, I just left placeholders. Here’s the full code:

function uauthor_byline() {
if (is_single()){
$CUsocial = false; // this is the flag for social traffic
$CUref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']; //this is the referring URL
$CUsocialar = array('reddit', 'stumbleupon', 'digg', 'twitter', 'facebook', 'delicious'); // this is an array of social sites
//check all the social sites
$i=0;while ($i<=count($CUsocialar)){ if(stristr($CUref, $CUsocialar[$i])) { $CUsocial = true; } $i++; }
if ($CUsocial){

//code for active social websites goes here
}else{
//code for default condition goes here
}
}


The following is just a starting point and can be re-used and expanded upon. For example, if you want to trap for search engines, here’s the extra code you would need:

$CUsearch = false; //this is the flag for search traffic
$CUsearchar = array('google', 'yahoo', 'bing'); //this is an array of search sites

//check all the search sites
$i=0;while ($i<=count($CUsocialar)){
if(stristr($CUref, $CUsearchar[$i])) {
$CUsearch = true;
}
$i++;
}

But you can use the code all over the site content, header, sidebar, etc. You can combine it with date based triggers, or there are many, many different possibilities, if you spend time playing with the code.

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This is an audio interview with Daniel Burka, the director of design at Tiny Speck and former creative director at Digg. David Gillis, a UX Magazine contributor and partner at Teehan+Lax set up and conducted the interview to hear Daniel’s experience of moving from web application UX and UI design to game design.

You can listen to the audio using the player below (on our site), or download the audio file.

Gillis: Today, I’m going to be talking to Daniel Burka. Daniel, thanks for sitting down and chatting with me. I think that a lot of people will be interested to hear what you have to say today just because you’ve been an influential person in the community, both from a practitioner’s perspective, and also somebody who has a clear point of view and is good at communicating about how you think about what you do. So maybe we can start off by you talking a little bit about yourself and what you’ve been up to and where you’ve come from.

Burka: Well thanks for having me on, it’s great talking with you. In high school, many moons ago, some friends and I started a small web agency, originally called Whiteland Studio (a bit of trivial knowledge), that later became silverorange. This was back in 1999 and we built this company up. We were a bunch of kids, and we built up this small agency in eastern Canada into a fairly well-recognized web development and web design shop that’s still operating today, even though I’m not currently there full-time.

And then when I was at silverorange, I did a lot of work with Mozilla. I redesigned mozilla.org and was part of the Firefox and Thunderbird branding project, and later on ended up working on Digg, a news website, and worked at Digg—I guess I was the fourth employee at Digg—and eventually left last October after it had millions of users and the company had grown quite a bit. Now I’m working on a project called “Glitch” with a company called Tiny Speck. So a bunch of the ex-Flikr guys have put together a company and we’re building a massively multiplayer online game in the browser called Glitch.

Gillis: That sounds like quite a varied career that you’ve had in a relatively short span of time. Why don’t you talk a little bit about Glitch. What’s it been like for you, as a user experience designer to jump into designing games?

Burka: It’s very bizarre to be working on a game. It’s not something I really expected to be doing. The game is coming along really well. I’m really excited about it. I joined in October when the project was already fairly started, and for the last month we’ve been building a lot of disparate tools—all the bits that will function soon as a full game. Over the last few months, it feels like we’ve been working in a bit of a thick fog, and just in the last month or two, it’s suddenly coming into focus, and instead of being just solely a bunch of tools, it’s starting to develop into content, and fun, and an actual game. You can sit down for a few hours and really play, and there’s continuity and narrative in there. That’s really fun.

But it’s weird; things move and there are lots of different challenges that are very, very different from building web apps. The idea that friction can be a good thing in a game—a large part of game play is about friction and overcoming challenges—which is a very different kind of UI problem than we deal with in web applications. The other big challenge for me is that there’s a very, very deep history in game UI design. In web applications, we’re pretty much in our diapers. I’m not that old and I was there near the beginning of the Web, and we’ve learned some conventions and we’ve figured some things out, but game UI goes back decades, before I was born. So I feel a little bit out of touch with what’s possible, what has been done, what failed before, what succeeded before. So I’m learning a lot about it as I go.

Gillis: Do you feel pressured to live up to that tradition that’s been developing over the years in gaming, or do you feel like this is an opportunity for you to maybe make your mark and impart a different perspective, coming out of the UI/UX design world?

Burka: I think that’s accurate. It’s a double-edged sword. On one hand, I’m excited to bring a fresh perspective to building a game. And I think a lot of game UI is similar to an operating system or web application UI. I think bringing that level—the idea of some of the tenants of usability and easy functionality—I think that’s been underemphasized in the past. But at the same time, I feel a considerable amount of pressure and some incompetence even, working on a game when there is this deep history that I don’t understand, because I know that there’s a lot of challenges that have been solved and I don’t want to be reinventing the wheel just for the sake of doing something differently. If I’m going to change from game tradition, I want to at least know when I am messing with people’s habits and people’s knowledge.

Gillis: You mentioned a few examples in there. You talked about friction and intentionally building in challenge, which to some extent goes against the grain of what any good user experience designer is supposed to do, which is remove that friction and promote flow. Was that surprising when you came across these new challenges? And have you found that it’s been tough to go against some of the instincts that maybe you’ve developed over the years working on projects like Digg and Pownce, and some of the other work that you did with silverorange?

Burka: It’s been very, very difficult. I’ve had a really hard time wrapping my head around the idea that friction can be a good thing. In web applications, the overarching imperative always has been ease of use, and part of the reason for that is the Web being so young, and web applications are so damn hard for people to use, we’re only just emerging from the era where successful application is one that is not just simply useable by everyday people. Because up until now, that has really been the measure. Can my mother use it? Can my grandmother use it? These kinds of examples come up in meetings with web application people all the time.

So on the Web, we make things as simple as possible and we try to remove as much friction as possible. But in a game, you often try to do exactly the opposite of that. Much of the fun in a game involves solving puzzles and learning how to achieve objectives more efficiently. So you actually want to learn how to do things more efficiently. For instance, in our game we’ve got butterflies, and of course you need to massage butterflies to get butterfly lotion. And so we could make it so simply by clicking on the little fellow anywhere on the screen it would massage him, but that’s not fun at all. It’s useful and easy, and you could collect as much butterfly lotion as you wanted, but instead we make you work for it. So you have to figure out how to get within the radius of the butterfly and we give him an unpredictable path so it makes it hard to catch up to him. And then you have to massage him at just the right moment, so you’ve got to catch him in the sky. But there’s an element of learning and mastery to that.

I love the mystery as well, and that’s part of what makes the game fun. But at the same time, we’re always thinking that there’s a very fine line between what’s challenging and what’s frustrating. I want something to be challenging but I want you to be able to master it. Through work and through bending your brain a little bit, you should be able to figure out something and figure out how to do it more efficiently. But I don’t want something just to be unnecessarily confusing.

Gillis: So because you get to conceive of all of those things, in a sense you’re building both the world and the set of rules and constraints that you’re working in, and then you’re also designing the affordances and the ways that a user can actually engage in that world and interact. Do you find that frustrating, or is that part of the fun? Do you find it tough to deal with something that’s so potentially open-ended, because you could essentially make this game world to be anything that you wanted?

Burka: A game world can’t be just anything. We’re clearly building in rules—even just having gravity in the game, and you can only carry so many things in your pack. We set these constraints, and this is, again, part of what makes the game fun is the rules. In some ways, I find this really comforting, because in a lot of ways it’s very similar to Digg. We had a huge, passionate community, and we have basically set up a game with certain rules in it. So there are constraints. You can only digg a story once, but you can digg any number of comments, again only once. We don’t show how many votes down a story has gotten. We only show the votes up. But in comments, we do show up and down. So you add all of this together and it’s very much a game system.

It was actually funny that we’d have these debates about, “Well, our users are doing A. Is that fair or not fair?” Sometimes people at Digg would get upset that, “Well, so-and-so is a gamer,” and they use the word “gamer” as a pejorative. But we have built a game. You couldn’t deny it. So people were just pushing the limits of what you could do with the system. And in many ways, we ended up building features and building additions to the site, like adding an “Images” category, many of the revisions we made to the comments system—these types of things were done because we saw how people were playing the game in directions we didn’t expect, and so we adapted to fit that model.

Gillis: At the time, did you think of Digg as a game, or is this a new idea that you’ve had since working on Glitch?

Burka: We definitely thought of Digg as a game. That’s something we thought of well before I worked on Glitch. But after having worked on explicitly something that’s a game, I see many more places where explicit game ideas and interactions could play a much stronger role in something like Digg or Pownce. Even things like simple sign-up forms. When you go to Mint, for instance, the finance site, and you go down their sign-up form and it gives you a little indicator after each time you enter something acceptable within a form input—say your user name—well cool, that one’s unique. And then you get down to the next one and it’s a password, and it tells you how strong it is, and you move to the next thing and it’s “Yay! That’s good!”

Those kinds of things, you can play with those and make them feel much more game-like. We’ve asked you to do something, here’s a quest for you. Fill it out and it gives you that game-style feedback. “Yay! You’re on the right track. You’re doing the right thing. You’ve almost completed your quest.” Those kinds of things can be very, very powerful and I’d love to give much more satisfaction, a lot more joy to something like even hitting a Digg button; right now it’s such a tepid experience.

Gillis: Gaming ideas and principles and, in some cases, patterns, are becoming a popular topic in interaction design. Do you see this as a trend that will continue to grow and gain steam?

Burka: I’m really excited about this movement. I think the idea that web applications are now becoming mature enough that we can start thinking about joy, and about surprise, and making a much more rounded experience than just one that’s useable, I think that’s really exciting. And then you see people like Dan Cook—who’s actually working with us a bit on this game—he’s got a blog called The Lost Garden, and he did this famous example fairly recently, maybe a year ago, where he turned Microsoft Office into a game. He made the argument that a system like Office is a very complex system and everybody just uses bits of it, but they all use different bits of it. And in order to introduce people to the whole scope of what’s possible in such an application, you can use game mechanics to get there, to give people a rich experience and a rich knowledge of an application. If people haven’t seen it, you should really look it up. The Lost Garden, that’s his blog.

What’s really interesting about this is going to be in ways where we see this kind of stuff done in ways that aren’t so explicitly a game. I remember listening to a talk at a conference a few months ago that was going around the Internet, where someone was talking about how we’re going to turn the medical system into a game and how the DMV should be like a game. That stuff is awesome and I think some of it has potential, but there are a lot of places we’re going to see game ideas put into applications in ways that we’re not going to see it and say, “Hey, that’s just like a game.” So it’s going to be in much more subtle ways and much more disparate ways than building a full integrated game into an application. Giving satisfaction when people do things.

Gillis: How do you stoke your creative process? What influences and points of reference do you find yourself coming back to?

Burka: I play a lot of games, so that’s not a bad place to start. But we may be seeing a lot more, particularly in the more traditional web app sphere, where people are doing these playful, usually very simple things that make interfaces much richer. On PhotoJoJo, for instance, which is this really nice photo store, if you go to one of the product pages, there’s a little handle on the page and it says, “Do not pull.” And, of course, everyone pulls it, right? It actually anchors you down to the information about the product. It’s such a simple thing—a little bit of JavaScript and a funny-looking little button, but it adds to the brand a lot and makes it more fun to use their application. It’s not just, “OK, I’m going to check out with an ecommerce store.” It’s satisfying.

Huffduffer, for instance—Jeremy Keith’s site—has a signup form and it’s written like a mad lib. “I am _____” and then a blank to fill in your name, and “I like blank,” and it tells you to fill in a band. It takes such a typical form, but it just changes the shape of the form and changes the context. It makes it much more playful. And apparently, that’s had a significant impact on their signup, which is fantastic. That’s the overall goal, right?

Gillis: How do you balance the rational, thoughtful process of thinking through these things with the artistic, more explorational part of your process? Do you find there’s a tension between those two, or do they fit together? Does one inspire the other? Is there a pattern?

Burka: Josh Porter posted a quote, it must have been about two years ago, that was actually from the Shakers in New England, and it said, “Don’t make something unless it’s both necessary and useful. But if it is both necessarily and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.” It mirrors so closely what my process is with design. It’s to consider whether or not the product itself makes sense, and then consider how to make it useful for somebody. And then after that it’s, how can I make this not only useful, but can I make it beautiful? In the sense of a game, how can I also make it beautiful? I love the word “joyful”. I think making an interface joyful is the ultimate of what we can achieve.

Gillis: So you’re trying to create moments of joy in what you’re designing?

Burka: In the last year or so, I’ve started taking that aspect much more seriously. Yeah. Absolutely. I’m not trying to just make the world a better place. If it’s good design, it’s good for business, and I think it’s something we should all strive for

Gillis: I think a lot of people, especially new people to the field, would probably be interested to hear how some of these opportunities happened for you. It seems to me like you’ve taken risks. You started your own shop, you’ve joined startups, you’ve moved into new territory that would seem to stretch your comfort zone. What has guided the decisions you’ve made, in terms of your career over the last decade or so?

Burka: It’s funny because I’m not a huge risk-taker. I’m not into totally extreme sports or anything like that. But, on one hand, I haven’t been afraid to just go out and build things. At silverorange, for instance, one of our big breaks came from working with Mozilla on Firefox and the mozilla.org website. And that came about because one of our guys, Steve Garrity, sat down and wrote a letter to Mozilla—an open letter on the Internet—that said, “Wonderful software. You’re branding is terrible. You won’t succeed unless you address this.” And somebody from Mozilla contacted him and said, “Well, if you think it should be fixed, you should fix it.” We’re like, “Shit! We just volunteered.”

So we went and worked on that, and that turned out really well. With something like Digg, we just started off as a normal project, but it was really exciting and seemed to have some potential. And then I got more and more involved in it and started pouring my heart into it. And eventually that became something really huge. So I wouldn’t say, “Say yes to everything,” but just go out and try as much as possible. If you don’t have awesome projects in your queue, go off and just build something new. If you’re just a designer on your own, go re-design and make the best banking site you can imagine. I think it’s so great for honing your skills and for flexing your muscles and showing what you can do. That kind of work—learn by building—I think is so important, more important than going to a design school or studying human interface design or something.

Gillis: Is there anything in particular you look for when you’re considering a prospective project or working relationship with a new partner?

Burka: Just its potential. Is it a good project? Is it doing something half decent for the world and does it have potential to be something wonderful? If it’s a limited idea that could be great within a small niche, then that’s okay. You never know. Glitch could have 30 million people doing all kinds of crazy social interactions in a couple of years—something like Digg. I remember the days when Digg was exciting when we got over 1,000 diggs on a story. That was nothing back then. We had very, very small traffic. But the potential was there for that to be a huge idea.

Gillis: So what’s next for you? Are you thinking beyond Glitch at this point yet, or are the possibilities endless at this point?

Burka: I’m definitely not thinking past Glitch; this is a huge project with a huge amount of potential. We’ll see where it’s at in a couple of years. I’ve never known more than 12-14 months ahead where I’m going to be. It’s all working out, and I anticipate it will continue to work out.

Gillis: Thanks for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it and I just want to wish you the best of luck with Glitch and all of your other projects and everything you’re up to.

Burka: Thanks so much. It was really great talking with you.

About the author(s)

Daniel Burka is a web designer living in San Francisco. Currently, he’s the director of design with a startup called Tiny Speck and for several years he was the creative director at Digg. He grew up in PEI, Canada, where he was one of the founders ofsilverorange. Aside from obsessing about interface design and CSS selectors, he’s a frequently-falling rock climber, a lazy cyclist, and an often out-of-bounds disc golfer.

David Gillis is an Interaction Designer at Teehan+Lax, a Toronto-based company that helps clients define and design great user experiences in the digital channel. He is a regular contributor on the Teehan+Lax blog and you can follow him on Twitter @davegillis.

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New plugins

CleanCodeNZ Exclude Pages Plugin hides pages from navigation or other purposes using custom fields.

CleanCodeNZ Favorite Posts Plugin uses Google Analytics API to get the stats of favorite posts of your WordPress blogs and list them in a table.

Custom Metadata Manager provides an easy way to add custom fields to your object types

Updated plugins

AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button helps people share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, Digg, Delicious, and well over 100 more social bookmarking and sharing sites.

eShop is an accessible shopping cart plugin for WordPress, packed with various features.

Events Manager is a full-featured event management solution for WordPress.

GD Star Rating allows you to set up a rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog.

Update: There is currently a problem with the official plugin directory where some plugin downloads may return 404 (not found) errors.  The issue should resolve itself within the next 24 hours.  More details are available here.

Tweet

We have two tracks over two days plus a third day of workshops where you can choose from one full day in-depth session. It’s a jam packed show with amazing speakers, content, parties and networking opportunities.

Speakers include:

• Gary Vaynerchuk – Vaynermedia
• Jason Calacanis – Mahalo
• Kevin Rose – Digg
• Aza Raskin – Mozilla
• Tom Preston Werner – GitHub
• Twitter
• Tara Hunt
• Plus loads more!

We’ve worked really hard on the content for the show, enlisting the help of Joe Stump (SimpleGeo) and David Recordon (Facebook), who have both helped curate a fantastic schedule. They will work closely with the Carsonified team and speakers to ensure that the content  is up to date, relevant and flows perfectly.

It’s going to be an awesome show, so grab your ticket here.

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