Up for Review

A Different Kind of Game

Posted on April 11th, 2008 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

I’ll be honest with you and confess that I have never really liked video games. They always seemed like such a waste of time to me. Usually, the players do the same thing over and over and over again and there really isn’t that much skill or brain power required to press a couple of buttons at the right time.

But then, thanks to game producer Matt Wolf, I found out about alternate reality games. (more…)

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Passing the Passport Challenge

Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

I love to see new places, but I really hate the hassle of getting ready to travel. I have to clean the house, pack, stop the mail, book hotels, apply for a visa and sometimes I even have to renew my passport. Renewing my passport is definitely a task that must be done since I can’t go to different countries without it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the process.

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Iz walk’in on Air! New Macbook Air

Posted on January 15th, 2008 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

Macbook air

Intel Core 2 Duo processor
2GB memory
80GB 4200-rpm PATA hard drive1
Built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi2 and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Ships: 2-3 weeks
Free Shipping
$1,799.00

Solid State

Intel Core 2 Duo processor
2GB memory
64GB solid-state hard drive1
Built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi2 and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
Ships: 2-3 weeks
Free Shipping
$3,098.00

1 comment.

1 comment.

New Youtube interface

Posted on December 17th, 2007 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

I know it’s not our usual fare but youtube has a new interface that’s pretty sweet. I’ve only been able to get it to show up on Safari using a mac while in full screen mode. I had a friend try to look at it on his Vista machine using firefox and it didn’t come up for him. I haven’t had time to look to see if there is anything in the code. It might only be on certain sections of youtube. Who knows.

For the record, This is the video I was watching when I first saw it.

Here is a screen grab

So basically the menu comes up with related videos in these floating bubbles and whenever you hover over one of them it expands to that video’s related content. So, after hovering over the image in the bottom left this is the screen shot I got

Its pretty cool how quickly you can span several different videos to find related ones that look interesting. I kind of wish it would give a bit more time hovering before expanding because you could very easily loose the video you were looking at because related content is popping up all over the place.

They are color coded based on what level they are are pushing from. All in all pretty cool, a little cpu intensive but pretty cool

Post a comment if you’re able to duplicate this menu and put your OS and browser, oh and feel free to post your opinion.

Conditions on the observation box

OS: OS X Leopard
Browser: Safari 3 (nightly build webkit)
Window: Youtube video was maximized to full screen mode.

1 comment.

1 comment.

Redacted aka a goof

Posted on October 1st, 2007 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

Followup on blogrush says:

Sorry, did I mention that you’re probably contributing to some blackhat SEO? Save the link that you’re clicking on and then click on the actual link, notice a difference? Me too.

While it initially appeared that there was some nefarious linking going on we have not been able to duplicate this phenomenon. Our bad.

Probably just clicked on different links or something. If anyone can reproduce this, let us know.

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Follow up on Blogrush

Posted on September 28th, 2007 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

Oh snap, did we say we’d follow up the next day? Well, no one’s perfect.

Webd360 added in his comments that the conversion rate was pretty low for the Blog rush application. Something that doesn’t surprise many of us. After all, who has the incentive to provide a good link? Think about it, this isn’t SEO people, this is regular old marketing.

If you want people to click on the links in the Blogrush blog roll then you should

Summation

Not only is it a pyramid scheme in shape but also in design. Of course, it is free so it’s not like you’re loosing money by trying it but you are giving your free support away.

Sorry, did I mention that you’re probably contributing to some blackhat SEO? Save the link that you’re clicking on and then click on the actual link, notice a difference? Me too.

1 comment.

1 comment.

The Blog Rush - Not the Gold Rush

Posted on September 18th, 2007 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

Skeptic at best, that’s the preface. Blogrush promises to increase blog traffic exponentially (sort of) by getting bloggers to add a widget to their blog that carries five other blog’s headlines.

How it works

If upforreview.com were to put the widget in the sidebar then five other blogs, in the same category as upforreview.com would have headlines running in the side bar (kind of like feed burner). The blogs that show up have “blog credit”.

Blog Credit

Blog credit is basically how may impressions or pageloads the widget has a day. So upforreview.com probably has a gazillion pageviews a day but we’ll say it has 30 just for simplicity. Each time the page is loaded upforreview would gain credit to be shown in another sidebar at least that many times. So 30 pageloads a day = upforreview showing up on up to 30 other blogs a day. Get it?

Maybe not, you can always watch the video:

So basically it’s an online pyramid scheme

Not much to add on to that… Let it sink in. We’ll follow up tomorrow.

2 comments.

2 comments.

Challenges of social media

Posted on August 3rd, 2007 by reviewer.
Categories: Social Media.

Anyone who’s ever taken the time to read digg or other related user content driven sites has noticed that it’s not what news used to be. Slashdot has long been notorious for POV and headlines that exaggerate. Digg has the common problem of nonsensical descriptions.

The problem is really a lack of editors. Without a single standard to hold a social media site to they will be subject to a pantheon of grammatical styles, mistakes and diverse writing techniques.

On any given day you can look at the top ten stories on dig and at least half of them will have non descriptive tag lines and titles that tell you almost nothing about the story. Wikipedia is another social media site that doesn’t have this problem because they have a standard to which they hold articles. They have employed editors to watch for trouble and one of the most dedicated fanbases ever assembled.

Here’s the catch 22 about the whole thing. Digg’s style is amateur and yet the users keep voting for these stories. Just like in a free economy you’d think that the users would stop voting stories up that didn’t make sense but it doesn’t happen. Apparently digg users are happy with the backwards style.

Summation: The problem with social media is the same thing that drives it and makes it popular, people.

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