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In a few weeks time I will be releasing a beta version of StumbleUpon Alerter to a selected group of private testers. Keep reading if you want to be one of the lucky people who get to try this new software before anyone else.
Many of you probably already use Digg Alerter, which has been described as "the tool" for the popular social networking site. Now I hope to bring my expertise to StumbleUpon.
Updated: The post originally requested for visitors to review our site in order to get on the prerelease list. As many have pointed out, this may be a little deceiving. So I have immediately removed the requirement. If you want to try out the new proggy all you have to do is post a comment :)
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On Australia Day we celebrated the wedding of the year, our wedding. Although my opinion may be a little biased.
Growing up my wife Annie was a volunteer surf life saver and always loved the beach. So the ceremony was held overlooking O'Sullivan Beach with the reception located a bit further up the coast at Christies Beach Surf Lifesaving Club.
Computers have always been a big part of my life and I wanted to include them in the wedding. We were lucky enough to have booked a venue that featured an overhead projector. I developed a program that displayed all of the guests photos taken throughout the day.
We wanted to give everyone the ability to easily upload photos
A lot of people at the wedding would not be familiar with computers and would not understand how to upload the photos. I needed to create a software program that is easy to use and required minimal interaction. It had to be a simple 3 step process.
The Solution: After purchasing a 31-in-1 card reader I developed a software application that automatically downloaded photos off any memory card. Guests simply put their card in the reader and waited until the green light stopped flashing, the program did the rest.
Only wedding photos would be displayed on the screen
The software needed to be automated, we didn't want anyone to be stuck on the computer sorting through photos all night. Unfortunately software is not able to determine the location of photos, so we had to work out some other way to automatically filter them.
The Solution: Our ceremony started at 3:15pm. So I made the software ignore any photos taken before 3:00pm or any photo taken on previous days. This ensured that the photos on the screen were only those from our wedding.
The Result
I'm glad to say that the software turned out to be a complete success.
All evening our guests were commenting on how much of a great idea it was and its ease-of-use. It also become a great talking point as new photos made their way onto the screen.
It was an excellent way for us to collect photos from different perspectives throughout our big day. The following day we were even able to look at all the downloaded photos and even keep some that we probably would never have seen.
Facebook friends can see all of the photos by clicking here.
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Over the weekend Adamant Solutions launched the brand new Wokinabox website - Featuring a brand new look, embedded tv commercials, local store finder and region specific pages.
About Wokinabox
Wokinabox provides people with tasty and healthy eating at a reasonable price. With stores in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, Queensland and New Zealand. The menu is a fusion of the various tastes of Asia. It includes Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, Chinese and Japanese dishes in the form of Wok Tossed Noodles, Soup Noodles, Vegetarian Noodles, Rice Dishes and the famous Skinny Noodles.
New Website Features
A Brand new look and feel - The website features a brand new design by Adamant Solutions based on the Wokinabox corporate image. Featuring vibrant colours and a navigation menu that uses incorporates the Wokinabox branding.
Full video and audio - This is a great way to showcase the latest Wokinabox promotions and commercials, with an emphasis on accessibility. The video will work on the majority of broadband connections available in Australia.
Region specific content - A visitor from South Australia will see different content than a Western Australian visitor. This is made possible with a brand new enhancement to the Adamant Solutions Content Management System that gives website owners the ability to create different content for each country, state or even city.
Local store finder - Finding the nearest Wokinabox store has never been easier. A visitor simply types their postcode and hits the "Search" button. Their closest store is displayed (along with contact details, address information, a photo and an interactive map).
More features to come - There are plenty of other features on their way, so keep a look out. Visit www.wokinabox.com.au for more information.
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Popular social news site "Digg" has a reputation for being a democratic news website worthy of competing with mainstream sources such as CNN. Both news sources focus on completely different "news worthy" stories, but a few months ago we were lucky enough to have our site listed on Digg and CNN within 2 days of each other. Now it's time to share the results with the world.
Formalities (AKA What is Digg?)
Digg is referred to as a "democratic news website" - Any member can publish an article or story, linking directly to the original source. The community then decides whether the story is worthy of being displayed on the front page (also referred to as a "Digg"). Once a story receives enough Diggs it is automatically promoted to the front page, where thousands of visitors swarm to the site at the same time. This has been called the Digg Effect and can also lead to crashing of web servers and melt-downs at power stations (well, not the latter).
You already know what CNN is, so I won't bore you with the finer details.
Digg Statistics
On the 5th of September a story linking to our website was promoted to the front page of Digg.com. Our site received a total of 76, 185 visitors over the course of 1 day (out of a total of 83,532 visitors), the bulk of traffic coming from Digg during the first hour or two of being displayed on the front page.
CNN Statistics
2 days later, on the 7th of September, the story was picked up by CNN along with a direct link to our website (I have been told this is highly uncommon). Within moments of being published on CNN our site attracted a whopping 377,606 visitors out of an amazing 438,840.
Lifespan
The next day we noticed a sharp decline in visitors from both sources. Digg referred just under 20,000 visitors while CNN had a much lower number at just over 4,000.
It took Digg 5 days to push less than 500 visitors our way. While CNN sustained its traffic for a longer period of time, taking 15 days to go below the 500 mark.
Interestingly enough the statistics show that CNN's traffic actually increased on the fifth day after steadily dropping over the first few days. We are not entirely sure why this happened.
It's interesting to note that CNN still refers an average of 300 people per day (even 4 months down the track), while we are lucky to receive the occasional visitor from Digg on a week to week basis.
Visitor trends
It was interesting to see CNN visitors who were interested in participating on our site. They spent more time browsing, commenting and generally spending more time than Digg users.
We have no ads on our site so I am unable to compare the often discussed lack of revenue from Digg visitors. However with that said, given that CNN visitors spent more time and browsed through more pages, it is plain to see that they are more likely to click on adverts.
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