We’ve been threatening to open up a new ‘front’ here at Kwoff for months now.

Its a blog designed to deliver the previous day(s) kwoff’d news with a bit of humorous commentary and images pulling it together.

Keeping with the ‘Kwoffing’ theme Its been unofficially christened the ‘Hair of the Dog Blog‘ and we are just putting the pieces together now.

We’ll use wordpress and also allow people to subscribe via html email.

Should be up and running in a few weeks.

In the meantime we have looked to 99designs for some inspiration and launched a Monty Python* inspired contest:

The response has been fantastic, here are three of my favorites:

1. And the best cold beer is…..

2. Note the eyes on these characters…

3. I think the bloke on the left here is Edmund Barton!

Please let us know your thoughts on any of these, or any others in the original contest (which ends on Monday)

Have a good weekend.

*apologies to Michaelangelo.

One of the early decisions we made about the Kwoff platform was to open all links to items in new windows, it was based on some feedback from a pretty small group at the time.

I think we should revisit this function having just read this article in Smashing Magazine - note: the link opens in a new window

It decisively comes down in favor of no new windows, with the main (excelent) argument being that it takes the decision away from the user.

Before we launch into any changes i thought i’d ask opinions. Please let us know if you have a preference via the poll below.

Todays Poll:

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Simple voting guide below:

Yes = (Change we can believe in)

No = (Status Quo)

We can flick the switch depending on which way ‘the collective’ decide

Thanks.

Both Kwoff and the MayneReport team made it to PubCamp Melbourne yesterday and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Jed invited me to participate in the Panel Discussion and i was immediately initiated into the world of online interrogation via twitter.

Bronwen Clune asked if i thought i could replicate the success of Crikeys email subscription model if we launched today, i ummed and ahhhhd and replied it was ‘the only model i knew’, this was generally shouted down but we’ll have to wait and see if the MayneReport can keep this model alive.

Thanks also to Duncan Riley for reprising Kerry Packers Bondy line with “theres only one Christian kerr in a lifetime” - I wholeheartedly agree.

New Challenge - Drag online twitter activism into the next corporate AGM season

On occasions the panel sounded despairing of journalisms prospects in the emerging media landscape, i tried to end on the bullish note that the future really is bright for those of us that can embrace all that New Media holds (and that bloggers can hold Shanahan to account!).

Congrats to Jed and thanks to the entire team responsible for the event, well done.

Do ya best.

Stephen.

Thought i’d highlight something of a ‘buried’ feature today. (Thanks to Mariov for using this recently)

You can use standard html image tags within the story description to include an image in any submission:

How is it done?

Its fairly simple to do this using a line of html in the story description when submitting the item.

On the submission page in the field used to ‘describe’ an item you can place the code and the specific image URL (you can find an image URL by right clicking on any image and looking at ‘properties’.)

Here is the actual code used to create the look of the submission you can see above.

Setting the size of the image is important as the columns Kwoff uses to display content limit the useful size of any image. As a guide, don’t use any image wider then 250 pixels.

Of course you only need specify width if the natural image is greater then 250 pixels wide, if its ‘thinner’ dont worry about limiting the size.

Why use this?

Its a useful feature for highlighting a submission that may contain an image (picture = 100 words etc).
It does distort the look of our page a little but in doing so it adds color (which a few people have said our minimalist site lacks).

Anyway, there you have it, any questions?

You can now tune into a Kwoff ‘Published’ feed on twitter.

Anything that makes the left hand side of the Front Page gets pushed out about every 15 minutes (so on occasions you may get a double whammy)

It includes a link to the published article itself.

Anyone interested can follow us by searching at the top of their twitter login page (see below)

Thanks to twitterfeed for enabling this.

Happy twittering.

We’ve buried some ads throughout the site, thanks to Google Adsense. Its an experiment in positioning revenue generating components within the Kwoff format.

You can see them on the ‘Story Page’ that users can find by clicking on ‘more info’ from the Front Page.

A typical story page below (with the ads circled):

Ad Relevance

The ads should relate to the content on that particular page.
The story in the screengrab above relates to a US Democratic election race and its produced the ad to the right.
‘Pearson on Obama’ looks like a hit to me. The second ad has some syntax issues but its their money so good luck to them.

We’ll keep working on Ad relevance as not all those placed are matching the content perfectly.

Worthwhile?

This is part of the attempt to keep Kwoff afloat. We need to cover costs and, ‘Allah be praised’, make a profit*.

The ‘Story Page’ is the least visited part of the site yet in a promising start we’ve made $AU10.54 in the first week. At that rate we’ll sink, but we’ve got a number of ideas that should boost that number.

I’ll tell you about one of them next week.

Next Steps?

We’ll try and figure out the best balance/mixture of ads over the next few months.
Once we have it right we’ll enable ads more extensively (They will remain ‘unobtrusive’, promise!).

Thanks,

Dan

* BTW WTF is ‘Cash Flow Positive’

We rolled the dice at 99designs.com to see if we could spruce up the look of the original Kwoff logo.
I’d been introduced to the service via a Smart Company story by Amanda Gome here.
Heres our specific contest. It was a great experiment from a creative perspective and i’m sure 99designs will go far.

Heres the winning logo:

We’ve changed the colors throughout the site to match. There were a few other colors and tweaks to the design that we might cycle thru over coming weeks.

Let us know what you think. Should have kwoffed it earlier now that i think about it.

Thanks

Dan

After a fair bit of ‘testing’, we’ve decided to upload our new ‘Popularity’ rating system to the Front Page.

Previously, we’ve presented the ‘Top Today’ stories on the left hand Front Page column, this has its flaws as it means a story breaking early will be harder to ‘overtake’ later in the day.

Now the ‘Popular’ column on the left hand side will reflect the item that has received the most recent votes, over the last minutes/hours.

While it means items will no longer be ranked by votes in ‘Ascending’ order, it should represent what has captured users interests at any given time. We hope this makes Kwoff a better place to visit.

Here’s a look at what to expect (note the lack of a ‘chronological’ and ‘Vote tally’ order)

In short, it now means if its at the top its been receiving the most ‘up’ voting attention by recent Kwoffers.

Most interestingly for us, both ‘Up’ and ‘Down’ votes factor into the new equation.

Its likely to tax the server a bit more also, so apologies in advance to anyone experiencing some slow responses.

This has been a ‘Holy Grail’ for us and we hope it improves the site usability, we expect to continue tweaking this for a while, please bear with us while we get it right.

Thanks, Dan

We’ve changed a lot on the site since Christmas and while there are still a few to go I thought i’d highlight one new feature that is up and running nicely.

We have long known that Search Engine Optimisation is one positive side effect of listing material with Kwoff. A well written and popular article is good for our own search relevance and for the article itself.

This results from a combination of how we present information to search bots and how larger media websites link to us (BTW some more ‘kwoff this’ links coming from popular destinations soon).


last week we took a big SEO step and now ping all major/relevant Australian search engines as soon as something has been submitted.

This not only increases the speed with which an item is recognised, but, via our sitemaps optimisation, it increases the quality of the link as viewed by the search engine itself. Overall the result equals better SEO for ourselves at Kwoff, and for the individual links submitted.

We are trying to measure a weeks worth of submissions under the new format and things do look better. I’ll try and put these results into a presentable format and blog soon.

In the meantime, keep Kwoffing for your own SEO sake!

Dan

11.30AM Sunday Update: Some people are reporting that they cant access the site, our host co tells us it may take a few more hours to update for everyone. Click here to visit

We managed to get the new version into the air over the weekend. And it seems to be holding up well.

Changes

As well as the two column layout mentioned in last weeks post, we are phasing in up/down voting, at the moment the ‘up’ vote works as before, if you click on the down arrow the story will fade away.

We are toying with the idea of allowing a down vote to subtract a vote (at the moment it just ‘fades’ the story out), but have not yet gone with this, will let you know when/if its about to surface.

In the meantime please let us know what you think. We are in the process of producing a animated tutorial (up later this week), but we hope most users will find the new interface intuitive enough not to have to read too many instructions.

Thanks for everyones patience here and thanks also to Steve and Hami from a coding perspective - it seems we got here in the end.

Dan