Tim Yang’s Blog

I need some help with a project that I’ve been trying to get off the blocks for several months now. It’s called Nuposts.com and it’s a public hosted RSS aggregator. Basically if you’re a user, you can login and create a new publicly-accessible RSS aggregator page based on a specific topic. Let’s say, the topic is New York City. So every blogger from New York City will be able to login and add their RSS feed to the aggregator page and the latest items from their feeds will display on the page.

Eventually as Nuposts becomes more popular, each room will become a blogger community site for the topic of the page. Each room is like a blogring and meeting place for like-minded bloggers but with all the latest news from its members. If you want the latest news from the bloggers of New York City, just go to the Nuposts.com New York City page. Or if you want the latest about knitting, go to the Nuposts page where all the knitting bloggers hang out. Each room will eventually have optional community tools like forums and chatrooms and maybe even photo storage.

Nuposts, as a public RSS aggregator, allows anyone to create new rooms, as many rooms as they want. You can create rooms as specific as Chihuahua Fanciers in Johannesburg. And you can promote your rooms with built in publicity tools with the ability to search Blogger or Technorati to find other like-minded bloggers and email them about your new Nuposts rooms.

Nuposts has two kinds of target audiences:

Blog readers who are interested in a genre of blogs. They will be able to see which of their favourite bloggers has updated and be introduced to new bloggers of the same genre. They come back again and again to the room homepages to see what’s the latest in their favourite genre.

Second, Bloggers of a genre. Sharing in a Nuposts room reinforces their association with their chosen genre and they will be able to attract new traffic from Nuposts blog readers who are interested in their genre of blogs. They visit the homepage of their chosen genre once to tell Nuposts to get their RSS feed. But they will visit the forum again and again to parlay with other bloggers who blog about the same genre.

Right now, the project needs a couple programmers in PHP (or Ruby as the case may be) to help code the interface and the modules. I started the project off with a project description of the features, the timeline, the goals to be reached at each point of the project timeline and a wireframe of the homepage of each Nuposts room. It’s a big project. Really big. And the programmer who was working on the project had to leave because of work commitments.

I’m afraid there is no money. I have no funding. It’s all volunteer work until an angel comes along. If you’d like to help out, please do email me and I’ll give you more details and access to the project wiki. Thanks!

If you tried the Problogger Clean theme for Wordpress and you had problems with it, please do leave us a comment.

We have had some comments by email about problems with IE. But we’ve had inconsistencies with replicating the problem. The comments have revolved around the sidebar being misplaced in the single post pages.

If you have had this problem, please let us know the browser and platform you are using. A screenshot would be most helpful. Thanks!

I thought this was pretty cool. But I was expecting Microsoft to be the first to introduce this feature. Immedi.at gives you a bookmarklet which you click on when the website you want has a auto-discoverable RSS feed (or click on the bookmarklet when you are on the actual feed url). But I find it inconvenient that Immedi.at doesn’t save my IM settings so I have to re-enter them every time I want to bookmark a new feed for IM alerts.

immedi.at helps you to keep track of online information as it changes. It sends you an instant message whenever any RSS or Atom feed you want to monitor changes. immedi.at works with all major IM carriers including MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Jabber, and AIM/ICQ.

http://immedi.at/

This theme is based on my own blog design. But in many ways, this theme release is better (and with neater mark-up too). It has been tested on Firefox, Safari and Windows IE. Seven things are significant and quite unique about it.

1. Monetised

   This is one of the first Wordpress themes that comes with Adsense blocks built in. The adsense blocks have been tested to have optimised positions and optimised colours.

2. Featurised

   Unlike other themes which come sans-features, this one has built-in features using a single functions file that comes with the theme folder. So it does not rely on any plugins.

3. Corporatised

   It is a bit of a serious theme with a very corporate colour scheme, not usually the kind preferred by personal bloggers.

4. Search engine optimised

   Heavy interlinking for search bots to easily find pages. And page titles are automatically customised to the post titles.

5. Promotion optimised

   There are a few features that allow you to promote yourself and allow visitors to the site to share it with others if they find it interesting.

6. Stickitised

   Ok, that’s not a real word, but it simply means particular attention was paid to the internal navigation. Links to other posts are placed prominently and throughout all the blog pages to invite visitors to click on them.

7. Prioritised

   The positions of the sections, colours and font sizes have been prioritised to the immediate communication needs of the first time visitor. The theme is space sensitive and is thus very content focused, keeping much of the important details at the top or near the top of the fold.

And those are also the reasons why the theme is called Problogger Clean. If you choose to use this theme, please do email me or leave a comment about it on the support forum. We’d really like to see how you use it so that we can get more ideas on improving themes.

Proceed to download Problogger Clean or view the documentation.

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I just received an email telling me that Openomy.com has launched. Openonomy gives its users the ability to store files of up to 1 gig total on its servers. (There’s no copyright policy on the site that I found so I assume it can be used to store all kinds of video and audio files.) You can add tags to them to describe each file.

But Openonomy isn’t just a file system with tags. If it was, it would just serve as your own private online file catalog. Openonomy also allows its Ruby-savvy users to write applications to manipulate and present the tag data from your file system as well as the file systems of other users. It’s kind of like Ning.com in that sense, but only with the ability to manipulate file tag data.

Watch this space. On Wednesday, Ozh and I are releasing a new Wordpress theme. But this one is made for bloggers who are interested in having a monetised blog — the theme has Adsense ad positions and colours built into it (I think it’s a historical first, but I could be wrong). It also has numerous functions built into it too. It comes out on Wednesday.

Research shows that most online retailers are expected to offer free delivery this Christmas. So if your online shop isn’t giving free deliver, try shopping elsewhere.

A survey by Shop.org and BizRate Research suggests 79% of online retailers will offer free shipping with conditions such as a minimum order.

In order to help advertisers make up their mind about using Adwords to promote their products, Google has provided some very useful consumer data for the usage of search engines according to industry. I was particularly interested in the search engine usage for travellers because I have a mate who is setting up a travel portal and I’ve been advising her to use Google Adwords to get to the top SERP.

Google Advertising

This week, I’m testing out the new PhpBMS software. It’s an online system into which you enter all kinds of client details, including meeting schedules, deadlines and invoicing. It’s not bad for something which you want to use for viewing important client details at a glance. And it uses AJAX too.

http://kreotek.com/products/phpbms/

Back in 1998, there was a very popular website called Adcritic.com that tapped into the idea that people actually like seeing TV commercials. They showcased new commercials, mostly from the US. The site became so popular that when it closed down, it became the poster child for Popularity Meltdown. Bandwidth costs money and video takes up a lot of bandwidth. Adcritic later rose again, but in a paid subscription model and never regained its earlier popularity.

The next generation of video content sites like iFilm.com learned from the Adcritic case and created partnerships with bandwidth providers. But video content sites became anathema to venture capitalists. Until this year.

With the increasing popularity of high quality digital video recorders and the rise of the mobile phone video recorders, video blogging started becoming the in-thing. The year of the video bloggers began in 2004 (or arguably somewhat earlier) as people began making their own video content and posting them on their blogs. Then sites like Youtube.com and Video.google.com burst onto the scene earlier this year and things never looked better for video blogging.

Now that I’m in the advertising industry, I wanted to re-look into TV commercial blogs. There were none. Advertising blogs up till now focused on posters and press ads and photos of ambient media — cheap low-bandwidth-sucking images. One of the issues was that there was no reliable video hosting that was cheap enough for the lone enthusiast to afford. But with user-submission sites like Youtube and Google Video, fans of TV commercials now have free and reliable hosting resources to make highlight their favourite commercials.

So I made adblog.wordpress.com, a brand new TV commercial blog. It showcases the commercials that I like, culled from sites like thespecspot.com, viralx.com and adforum.com. The videos are hosted on these sites and I blog links to them. Or else, if I find the video on other sites, I upload them to Youtube. (Nice thing about Youtube and Google Video is that they generate thumbnails of the video from screenshots.)

There is so much TV commercial content floating all over the internet right now that I can post about four commercials a day and still have left over content for the following day. I hope you enjoy the commercials as much as I enjoy blogging about them.