A couple of updates on the site

This morning, we uploaded a few changes to the site. There are two that I’ll briefly mention and then one that I want to discuss a bit more in depth.

1) Featured Popper: Each day, we will now have a Featured Popper on the site (below the Featured Clipper on the right side of the home page). We’re looking for ways to recognize users who consistently pop clips on the site. It’s currently difficult for them to get the appreciation they deserve, simply because popping is a more anonymous act than clipping. However, just as the site wouldn’t function without the great contributions of clippers, it also relies on people who pop the most interesting clips so that everyone else can have a better chance of seeing them. Adding a Featured Popper to the site each day is our first step in giving greater recognition to our poppers.

2) Who’s following who: Under each open clip (just to the right of the clipper’s username) you will see a little button that displays the number of followers the clipper has. Clicking this number will open a window that lists each of the users who are following that clipper. By making it easier for people to see who is following each clipper, we hope to also make it easier for everyone to connect with more users . The idea here is that if you know that a bunch of users who you like and respect are following a particular user, then you would likely be interested in learning more about that user and perhaps following his/her clips too. Over the next few weeks we’re going to try making each users My Clippers list a much greater focus of the site.

3) Ignore clippers: We have always taken great pride in the open nature of our system. Other than a few rare exceptions, we have tried to create a site that is completely in the hands of its users. Users contribute the clips…users pop their favorites for others to see…and users are free to add their own comments to any clip. Though we are very passionate about the concept of a completely open system without any limitations on user behavior, based on our observations of the Clipmarks site as well as other sites, we feel that it’s necessary to embrace some rules and boundaries in order to maintain harmony as the size of our user base grows. I anticipate this being an ongoing process where we do our best to react to site dynamics with measures that honor the idealism with which we started Clipmarks but also address some of the realities that come with a growing user base on the Web. As I indicated in this video clip, we have recently begun introducing a number of measures on the site aimed at dealing with this issue.

This morning, we added a little “x” next to each username in the comments section of each clip. If you click the “x” a little window will open that allows you to hide that user’s clip and/or comments as well as block them from commenting on your clips. Though these options can be used at each user’s discretion, I strongly ask of you not to use it to block people on the grounds that they disagree with you or who present views that challenge your own. It is through the presentation of differing views that we learn, so please, lets not use this as a way to censor those who don’t advocate our own way of seeing things.

We are offering this feature because of some consistent user complaints as well as our own observations that some comments on the site seem overly antagonistic. There have certainly been times when i have read comments on a clip and felt bad for the user who posted the clip because the comments seemed so inappropriately harsh. I’ve struggled with the decision of whether to simply allow this to continue because of my desire to keep clipmarks as open as possible or to try to curb it. Ultimately, we decided that each user should be free to make these decisions for themselves.

If you relate this to the Don Imus situation, our goal is to remove our own discretion from the equation as much as possible so that unlike CBS that chose to yank Imus off the airwaves, users will be able to make the choice about who they interact with on the site. Lastly, I’m hopeful that simply knowing that others can block you from commenting on your clips will spur people to maintain a greater level of respect for each other…even through their debates and disagreements. One suggestion/request I’d like to propose is to not use this measure immediately based on people’s past comments. Give this new system a chance to have an impact on how people comment and then use it when you feel necessary.

Like all of our work, nothing is permanent. If we come to believe this is a mistake or that there is a better approach, we will gladly make adjustments.

Improving Clip-to-Blog…

Have your ever experienced simultaneous multiple blogasms? Doubtful, but now you can! Today we introduced a pretty major upgrade to our Clip-to-Blog feature that lets you simultaneously post clips to as many blogs as you have. Also, you can save each of your blogs as part of your Clipmarks profile and then easily toggle to the one you want a specific post to go to. Bottom line, if you manage more than one blog, Clip-to-Blog just made it much easier for you to easily and quickly keep them fresh with new, interesting content.

A little downtime tonight

Wanted to let everyone know that we’re doing some work that requires us to take the site offline for around 30 minutes tonight at 12:30 am EST.

Derek and EricW are working their magic on some new Clipmarks features and need the time to put all the pieces together.

Sorry for the downtime. We’ll get the site back up as quickly as possible.

- Adam

Friday the 13th proves to be bad luck

At around 9pm EST friday night we began to notice odd behavior on our servers. Shortly thereafter, our web site went down. It quickly became clear to us that this was a Denial of Service attack…meaning that someone was intentionally trying to take down the site.  We have a very robust back-end, so we knew this had to be some massive attack to have this kind of affect. Well, it turns out that it was a distributed attack coming from many thousands of computers around the world that were all attacking the site simultaneously. Thankfully, we were able to isolate the source and begin to choke it off. This got the site back up and running.

I want to apologize to anyone who was inconvenienced by this. We don’t yet know who did this or why, but hopefully it is behind us.

eric

Introducing ClipSearch

This is a big one for us. So far, Clipmarks has relied solely on user-generated tags to power our search. But after a number of requests from our users, it finally sunk in, “why the heck aren’t we letting people do keyword searches based on the content inside of clips?” Talk about the easiest, most powerful way to keep track of the stuff you find online! Just clip things you find and have them automatically added to your own keyword searchable library. Each clipper is literally filtering the web to their liking and should have a search engine that lets them easily sort through it all. Brilliant! Well, today I am very excited to announce the introduction of ClipSearch!!

ClipSearch doesn’t only apply to each user’s library of clips. It also powers the search in the public library of clips on our site. So, anytime you want to find clips about something you’re interested in, you can find matching ones regardless of whether they have matching tags.

And in a tip-of-the-cap to StumbleUpon, we wanted to let visitors to the site jump around from topic to topic, without knowing what would come next. So we’ve introduced the “Surprise Me” button. The idea here is that you don’t always know what topic you’re interested in, but you’d like to explore until you find one. It’s just like turning on the tv and not knowing what you want to watch, but using the remote control to change the channel until you find something good.

In addition to ClipSearch and Surprise Me, we made a couple of other changes to the Clipmarks web site…

1) Live update: The list of results no longer updates in real time unless you want it to. We’ve started to worry lately that the list is moving a bit too quickly (accidentally clicking on the wrong clip title became a too familiar occurrence for us ). But, if you want the live update on, just switch it on in the lower-left corner of the Clip List and check the “remember this” box in the window that opens.

2) 40 instead of 100: Each set of results now lists 40 clips instead of 100. The reason for this (aside from slightly less load on our server which will speed things up a bit) is that we just think 100 choices is too many to make. It’s like those chapters in a book that are so short and sweet you just feel good reading them. I would much rather read 5 chapters that are 6 pages each than one 30 page chapter. That’s kind of the thinking behind the change to showing 40 results at a time.

3) 3rd Line: Instead of showing who the latest user to pop a clip was, the third line of each clip in the list on the home page now displays the clipper’s original remarks. The main issue we’re addressing with this change is the desire to give greater attention to a clipper’s remarks, as we believe they play a big roll in defining a clip. Another reason for this change is some feedback we’ve received from users who said they often held back from popping clips that they thought deserved to be popped because they didn’t want to be perceived as taking over the home page clip-list. While we certainly hope people still use discretion when deciding what clips to pop, we don’t want to make anyone feel tentative about having their name show up too much. I have to admit, I’m very uncertain and nervous about this change. But, one of the beautiful things about developing something on the web is that you can always react quickly if you change your mind or make a mistake. So, we’ll be watching and listening closely to see what kind of impact this has.

I hope you like the changes we’re introducing today. FYI…if you need some tips on doing a ClipSearch, visit this page.

Ready to get surprised? Try it now:

More soon.

– eric

Eric’s thoughts on the “Clipmarks way”

I wanted to speak to our users about the type of communication that’s been taking place on the clipmarks web site. I hope that we can continue to be an example of how people from around the world, with different points of view on all sorts of topics, can communicate with each other in a collaborative, respectful way.

clipped from www.youtube.com

Introducing Clipmarks 2.0

Clipmarks 2.0 is officially live. The past 18 months has been an incredible experience. Thanks to all of you who helped us get to this point by making Clipmarks a part of your lives.

There are two big things to tell you about. The first is you can now clip videos from YouTube and other video sites. The second is you can now instantly post clips to your blog. We’re calling it Clip-to-Blog and it makes blogging what you find on the web so easy that EricG is even thinking of bringing his blog out of retirement. You can also blog any clip you find on the Clipmarks site.

As well as being able to clip videos and Clip-to-Blog, we’ve enhanced the Clipmarks browser add-on even further. First, you can now highlight and clip multiple sentences, making it easier to capture the exact pieces of the page you want. You can also blog and email what you clip without saving it first.

We worked hard to make the whole clipping experience more intuitive as a whole. To start, we turned what was a four button extension into one button that fits nicely in your browser. You also get a nice thin top bar when you go into clip mode that lets you choose whether you want to save, blog, email or print what you clip, lets you turn the orange lines on and off, and counts how many characters you have clipped so you can see whether or not you’re within the publishing limit.

Which brings us to another new thing. With this new release, to save a clip publicly on the Clipmarks site or post it to a blog, it must be under 1,000 characters. We spent a long time discussing the best way to set this limit and came to this decision in keeping with the core idea of Clipmarks being about capturing just the best parts of pages. We know some of you have been uncomfortable with this idea and we hope you will understand that we are doing this because we truly believe it is best for the future of Clipmarks. There is no limit if you want to save clips privately.

The site has also been redesigned. We hope you like the new look and navigation options. When you’re logged in, one thing you’ll notice is your very own Clipmarks keypad on the top right of the page. It gives you quick access to your clipmarks, the clipmarks you pop and comment on, as well as your favorite clippers and topics.

So there you have it. We’re really excited about this one and hope you are too. To get clipping with the new features, install the new Firefox add-on (the Internet Explorer version is coming very soon). To learn more, watch the demo or see the How-to-Clip page.

Hope you enjoy the Clipmarks 2.0 experience.

A little downtime tonight

Hi everyone,

We’re working on making the site faster and have to do some work that requires taking the site offline for an hour or so tonight at midnight EST.

Sorry for the downtime, if it wasn’t 100% necessary we wouldn’t be doing it. We trust that the speed enhancements that follow will make it well worth it.

Web site update

Just a quick post about a couple of user interface and design changes we just uploaded to the clipmarks site.  The most important change is a substantial redesign of the clip list.  The redesign was aimed at giving much more breathing room to each clip title, making it easier on the eyes and the brain to scan through the list.  Also, we added a time and activity bar  to the header that lets you know how long you have been on a page and how many clips you’ve viewed and popped in that time.  Since Clipmarks is aimed at allowing people to consume information about more topics in less time than any other site, we figured we’d let you know specifically how your time is being spent.  We’ll likely add a close button to it soon for times you don’t want it there.  One other change worth mentioning is that the number of times that a clip has been viewed is now displayed in the lower-right corner of each open clip.  The “expand link will be brought back soon (for now, if you want to expand a clip, double-click inside it).  There are bunch of other little things related to this upload, but that covers most of it.  Some MAJOR (and i don’t use that term lightly) new features are coming soon.

5 Keys to getting a clip popped

In light of some of the recent conversations on the site about the poppable character limit, I’ve been thinking about some of the factors that influence whether a clip gets popped.  It seems to me that there are 5 basic factors that play a role in a clip’s “pop-worthiness”:

1. Give it a clever, compelling title.  This is the first step in peaking someone’s interest.

2.  Upload a profile picture.  Doing so shows a certain level of committment to the site and also humanizes the clip.  Both of these factors tend to increase people’s interest in viewing a clip.

3. Clip enough to make an interesting point, but not too much that you lose people’s interest.  Remember, it’s a clip, not a summary.

4. Earn a reputation for high quality clips.  Once this happens, your clips will likely be viewed by a lot of people simply because you are the one who posted them.   Plus, you’ll likely be added to lots of “My Clippers” list which will definitely increase exposure to your clips.

5. Tag effectively.  This will help make sure that people who are searching for clips about a particular topic find your clips.  If you think your clip falls into one or more of the right-side topics, then tagging it as such will help it be seen.