Apr

9

2008

(0) Comments

Milestone Moment: Forums Up!

01:53PM by Hoc

Today, we’re proud to add a new application to our Ningin community, discussion forums! It’s fully integrated with everything else on our website and each new posts or topic you write will show up in your recent activity feed.

We’re looking for a couple of moderators to add to the ones we already have. Send me a private message if you’re interested.

Thanks so much to all the beta testers for their time and thoroughness these past couple weeks!

Apr

7

2008

(0) Comments

Bloggers, We’re Not Really Competing With You

10:29PM by Hoc

Some people say that the blogs we run for our communities compete with other blogs with similar topics. I say these people don’t entirely get the concept of social media and how it can be of value to them.

I’m sure you all heard of the maxim, “the rising tide raises all boats.” For our purposes, and taking Ningin our Asian community as an example, the boats are Asian media related sites and the tide is the total amount of traffic in the entire Asian media space. What we’re trying to do is raise that tide. And we do this by centralizing and organizing all the content in the space through all the different applications we build (wiki, forums, social news). Then information becomes easier to find and quality and noteworthy content rises to the top. Many of you know about Wikipedia, Digg, and Flickr and their tremendous influence in shaping web traffic. Our idea is to take the best things about them and use it to help to our communities like how they did for the internet as a whole.

Also, blogs are inherently a social medium. It benefits from interacting with not just users, but other bloggers covering the same topic. When you make a blog posting, you don’t just create content, you initiate a conversation. The conversation can continue on your blog via users comments or it can continue on someone else’s blog via trackbacks.

Another thing to consider is that blogs are generally more personal commentary then news reporting. Often they are news reporting packaged with personal opinion. So having multiple bloggers give their commentary on a news item only adds to the conversation ultimately giving more value to the readers. Unless your blog consist entirely of paraphrased AP newswire articles, I can see how you feel competed against. However, the competition you’re facing is Yahoo News, CNN, and NYTimes to name a few, not other bloggers.

Lastly, I don’t subscribe to the theory that reader attention is a zero sum game. Sure it’s a finite number, but it’s also a dynamic number. Readers come and go base on the quality of the content more than any other consideration. 

Apr

4

2008

(0) Comments

Useful Tips #1

04:55PM by Hoc

#1 I’ve been noticing that some new users are having trouble receiving their activation email. I’m going to use an educated guess and say it’s because of extremely indiscriminate spam filters. I can’t really blame those filters, one of my gMail account catches nearly 6,000 spam emails a day for me. (It was just last month when I was getting 4,000 spam emails/day. Who did I piss off?) Our activation emails go out pretty much the second you hit register. Depending on the quality of your email provider, it should take anywhere from 2 seconds to 2 minutes. Any longer than that, and it’s a safe bet that our email was caught in your spam or bulk folder. Instead of signing up for a new account with a new email address, we have a handy ”Resend Activation Email” link that’s prominently displayed on the upper right side of the registration page.

#2 This isn’t a new feature, it was around when we launched our blogs, but you can quickly email your friends and acquaintances of an interesting blog post via our email post link on the lower left hand corner of each post. We also have a handy print version of all our blog postings for those of you who like to print out stuff. All our applications have these links, not just blogs.

#3 Last but not least, there’s a lot of new users without avatars. I think the world would be much happier if everyone had an avatar. We have a pretty spiffy upload-your-own-avatar-and-crop system. As the name implies, you can upload any non-copyrighted, non-nudity photo via the “Photo” tab in your member profile area. Then crop it by clicking on the “Set Avatar” link. (Other reasonable photo restrictions may apply.)

Mar

31

2008

(0) Comments

Jetdrop Blog Launch Today

11:59AM by Hoc

Today we launch the Jetdrop blog for our gadget community! Similar to our Ningin blog, the Jetdrop blog is dedicated to providing commentary on happenings within the Jetdrop community and other news related of interest to Gadget enthusiasts. Jim Frost of frostbytes.com is the first writer to join our gadget blogging team (see photo). He is a long time technophile that’s a software programmer by day, a shutterbug by night, and a cyclist on the weekends. Anything that sounds cool to a geek, Jim will write about. More details about Jim can be found on his personal blog.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Jetdrop blog RSS feed and add Jim to your friend’s list so you can keep track of his activities.

Jim will be joined by another gadget aficionado soon. If you’re interested in joining our blog network and be part of a very fast growing community, you still can via this page.

Mar

28

2008

(0) Comments

External Submit API

08:35PM by Hoc

If you have a blog or other types of website, you can use our external submit link to have your users easily submit articles to any of our communities. Details on how to use this feature are outlined in our API page:

Ningin API
Jetdrop API
Ziggytek API

Really, the only difference is the beginning domain name. We’ll be happy to help you with any questions you may have. Just email support’@’mixrmedia.com or use our contact page.