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They said they’d teach me to be rich

13 Jan 2009

One of the things I like about Twitter is that I can choose to follow and read the updates of people with similar interests that I might otherwise never come across.  When they make updates, sharing ideas, news and links, sometimes I find incredibly valuable information for myself.  This happened today when one of my Twitter friends posted a link to a young entrepreneur’s scholarship hosted by the blog I Will Teach You to be Rich.  The scholarship is decribed:

The I Will Teach You To Be Rich Scholarship for Social Innovation is an annual $2,500 award for anyone in their twenties who has demonstrated entrepreneurial excellence and is planning a socially innovative project. The award can be used for a special project, service initiative, founding a company, creating a community organization, or any other entrepreneurial venture that scales to help others.

I’ve decided to apply even though I’m sure there will be some stiff competition given the buzz I’ve heard about the scholarship.  The application is due in a few days and it’s been interesting to consider my answers to the questions “what are your milestones for success” and “how will you get others interested in your business”. This is also an excellent opportunity for me to spend some more time developing an idea I had during the holidays for a new company based upon a number of my interests and that I think might appeal to the nature of the scholarship.  Wish me luck, the semi-finalists are announced Feb 2nd so I’ll keep you updated.

Googleworld

23 Oct 2008

It’s been an incredibly hectic week that sort of peaked last night with a super late night at the office.  But on Tuesday I had a chance to go to a very interesting lecture at the Institute for Contemporary Art called Googleworld.  I’ve done a full write up on Spoonfed.

Tonight, it seems, I’ll be present for the foretelling of the end of society as we know it. I’m learning of our decent into an Orwellian future where our every move and thought is read and recorded. The cause of our downfall, and the subject of tonight’s lecture, ‘Googleworld’, at the ICA is none other than Google, which, despite a cuddly logo and a name two letters away from ‘giggle’, is poised to control the world.

Read on…

London Eater

15 Oct 2008

I’ve somehow accumulated a number of followers and friends in the blogsphere who are pretty accomplished foodies – I’m not sure if it’s my incessant need to post about what food I eat or just the fact that food makes for a great topic for conversation but I’ve been receiving a number of comments and pingbacks from some bloggers whose recipes, photos, restaurant reviews and food guides put my little food posts to shame.

One in particular, and one of the first London foodie blogs I started to follow, is Kang at London Eater.  In one of the first times I stumbled upon the London Eater blog, I discovered one of their quite professionally done restaurant reviews and was pretty much hooked (it was for Spanish tapas restaurant Cambio De Tercio).

Between restaurant reviews, recipes, wine guides and organising meetups between London food bloggers, London Eater keeps  busy but I have to say my all time favourite review was for this incredibly unique restaurant called Dan le Noir where, and I don’t want to spoil the brilliant review for you, you eat in complete darkness with no idea of what you are eating.

So if you’ve noticed a bit of an increase in the foodie posts here on The Top Floor Flat lately, it’s not just that I need to start travelling more – I’ve been completely inspired by the great bloggers like London Eater that really know their London food.

Yum.

You Digg?

6 Oct 2008

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a quick rundown of StumbleUpon, one of the main social bookmarking sites out there and a tool I use to promote both my blog and Spoonfed while I’m at work.  I generally have prefered StumbleUpon because you’re almost always guaranteed traffic to your site, in some form, regardless of how popular your page is.  More popular pages get more traffic, sure, but even if not one other person gives you a thumbs up, you’ll still see more visitors.

On the other hand, Digg.com, another incredibly popular social bookmarking site which allows users to share their favourite bookmarks and vote on the best ones by “digging” their favourites is very different.  The most popular stories, the ones that get so many votes that they appear on the front page of digg.com get, I was told, a huge boom of traffic but stories that get a few dozen or fewer votes generally don’t get any traffic at all.  Therefore, I knew it was important to continue to submit Spoonfed and The Top Floor Flat stories to digg, but I didn’t really anticipate much of a return.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered first hand what a front page digg.com story can do when my post about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland movie not only got over 1000 votes on Digg as a popular story, but appeared on the digg.com homepage! Two hours and 20,000 visitors to my blog later, I still saw no sign of an ebb in the traffic flow – huge boom of traffic indeed!

I couldn’t believe it… I had more visitors to The Top Floor Flat than I’ve ever gotten in the history of all website I’ve ever run.  Then the server broke (sorry if you tried to access the blog and it wasn’t working yesterday!).

Today, the traffic has slowed but is still incredibly high.  The article has been reposted on a number of blogs, the link was picked up by several movie sites, and although I was just blabbering about how much I enjoy Alice in Wonderland, I seem to have struck a chord with internet readers.

I may have to review my view on digg.com.  It clearly is a different sort of marketing tool – and I don’t anticipate many of the people who read my Alice post coming back to the blog.  But it’s exciting to feel so popular online, even if just for a few days.

Now I just need to upgrade my servers and get a Spoonefed.co.uk story to the front page of digg.

School of Everything

4 Oct 2008

I mentioned about a week ago that some of the Spoonfed team met up with the awesomely entitled London startup, School of Everything. Now that I had heard about them from my boss, had a chance to take a quick look at their website, and seen their blog post about teapots, I decided it was time to take a better look at the site and the see what I could learn at the School of Everything.

Here’s the run down: School of Everything (SoE from now on) has the brilliant proposition of allowing anyone to teach anything to anyone else. From their About Us page (which seems to have some formatting errors on the page but it might be my computer), “Everyone has something to learn. Everyone has something to teach.” Instead of limiting their userbase by trying to be city specific (not necessarily an illogical option but regardless one they decided not to take) they have members from all over the world, making it likely that you’ll be able to find someone nearby – although whether or not they want to teach what you want to learn is yet to be seen at this point. As a student, you can connect with teachers and read their profile, course descriptions and background. As a teacher, you can define your area of expertises, set your hourly rate, and advertise your classes all for free. The site is still growing and has only been in its current incarnation since Sept 1.

First impressions:

To begin with, I had to admit their homepage could use a bit of sprucing up – it wasn’t the most visually engaging thing I’ve seen on the web. Fortunately my main criteria was met in that it was easy to navigate, understand, and find the signup button. I also liked the homepage feature where I could see “new faces” with some of the most recent registrants (and either everyone adds a photo or SoE has cleverly chosen only to show users who add a photo). There was a tag cloud that had “Recent Subjects” although I would have preferred to see a list of what people had recently signed up to teach, and maybe a few lines about their offered courses.

Registration and profile setup:

After the simple signup process (I love startups – no one has the username Meaghan yet), I was ready to start adding subjects to my profile. I had signed up as a student, feeling that even if I did want teach Londoners how to make chocolate cake, shop on a budget and blog, I just wouldn’t have the time.

From the profile page, a simple text box allowed me to enter any subject I wanted to learn. I quickly discovered that typing a few letters would give me a drop down box of suggestions (so, typing baking gave me the options of baking, cake baking and home baking) that others had added. This did make things a bit confusing – for example, I tried to enter “piano” and saw half a dozen options including Piano., classical piano, piano and piano lessons. I picked a number of popular subjects (yoga, cooking, piano), some less popular ones (marketing, swing dance) and then created a new subject I wanted to learn (time travel – just testing the system here!).

As soon as I added a new subject, it appeared in my profile along with the number of other people who wanted to learn and the number of teachers available. This is a fantastic feature, and I really appreciated knowing right away that there was no one registered for the site who could teach me time travel so I didn’t have to waste my time searching the site or hoping to get contacted.

Finding a teacher:

Clicking on the number of teachers brought me to a page of everyone registered as a teacher of that subject. I started with piano which had an encouraging 70 teachers but discovered that this listed all teachers on the site – not the ones in my area (to be fair, there were 27 in London so I’m set if I want to learn piano). For the smaller subjects, however, such as marketing, of the 13 instructors only two were in London.

Upon selecting one of the teachers, I was taken to their teaching profile which listed all of the courses they could teach. From here, I had the option of bookmarking the teacher as a contact (although it took me a while to figure out where this saved him – into the contacts pages of my profile) or messaging them to, presumably, set up a lesson.

Thoughts and future features:

I really like learning stuff so I was pretty much guaranteed to like this website. It’s got a lot of potential and what it really needs at this point is enough of a userbase to make it legitimately useful. I can also see the opportunity for encouraging very niche subjects to gain a following (I didn’t see any Chessboxing classes yet!). The other thing I’d like to see with SoE is a simpler option for setting up lessons. Give the teachers a calendar on their profile and let people fill up time slots (this would need some form of confirmation but could also let others see how popular a teacher is). What about reviews and performance reports? Can students get report cards on their profile? Can teachers get recommendations?

Right now, SoE is a bit of a glorified Gumtree or Craigslist for teachers. But it has all of the tools in place to be a great resource for, well, Everything. I’m really looking forward to seeing this site after a few thousand more Londoners sign up. Who knows, I might even find someone to teach me time travel.

Check out The School of Everything.