Another Sunny Day in Even Paris and Rome…

7 Oct 2008

Well, for better or for worse the digg traffic has mostly died down. I got another 1500 visitors today but that should really be about it. Today was a pretty low key day, although there have been two very exciting new advancements in my day-to-day life.

1) The tube station near to my flat, which has been closed since I moved here for renovations, has finally reopened, cutting about 20 minutes off my travel time if I’m lucky.

2) The gym right around the corner from the office is offering membership for a monthly rate of 25 quid which is amazing and means I might actually be able to start working out.

Besides those points, however, today was one of the first somewhat low days I’ve had, well, since I got here (had to happen eventually, of course). I felt constantly behind at work, I could feel myself getting sick and, despite getting plenty of sleep the night before, I was utterly exhausted all day. I didn’t really think that much of it until I got home and saw the nicest email from my boss at my old company in Palo Alto asking if I could come back sooner to work for them (to learn, as he put it, all they know about usability and interaction design and to make me an online acquisition superstar). The parting comment about how lovely Palo Alto weather just about made me lose it all together.

It was so nice to hear from them, and although I can’t possibly image leaving London or Spoonfed until the end of next summer as planned, I have to say, some times after a long, tiring, somewhat sickly day, it’s easy to think about going home.

(Don’t worry, I’m in London for a while yet but what good is a blog if I can’t make the occational self-indulgent pity post?)

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.

Alice

5 Oct 2008

I have a pretty soft spot for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. I read it, of course, for enjoyment when I was young; I read it academically in a Victorian literature class; and I based my novel for my novel-writing course at uni on the original plot, creating a modern re-imagining of Alice set in the internet age (don’t expect to see it on bookshelves any time soon – it’s only half finished and I’m not sure when I’m going to get back to it).

I also really like Tim Burton. I think this started when my sister, and some ridiculously young age, decided that The Nightmare before Christmas was her favourite movie and deserved to be watched every single day for three months. Alan Venning and I think his newer films are pretty awesome too.

So imagine how excited I am to hear that Tim Burton is filming a live version of Alice in Wonderland with Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter. They’ve just started filming here in the UK (I missed the extras casting call by a few weeks which would have been fun!) and there have already been some leaked pictures of Mia Wasikowska, the actress playing Alice:

Although certain die-hard fans of the original are already nervously speculating about why Alice seems to be on a boat (a scene not taken from the text), I’m pretty excited to see how this turns out. As someone who has already subjected Carroll’s classic text to a modern reworking (and with no where near the skill or creativity that Burton is sure to manage) I’m just excited to see another take on one of my favourite stories.

Alice is set to be released in March of 2010, and the cast is also set to include Michael Sheen and Matt Lucas.  Helena Bonham Carter has also been seen around the set and is rumoured to be playing a role as well.

Want to take a look at more upcoming movies? Check out the heavy hitters of the British Film Festival to see what else is hot right now including (god save us) Hamlet 2.

More Travel

4 Oct 2008

Well, I’ve sufficiently recovered from my lack of French speaking skills while in Paris and therefore have decided to challenge myself with an even less convenient language: Dutch. That’s right, I’m off to Amsterdam the weekend after next (October 18th and 19th) and next weekend (the 11th and 12th) I’m heading to Bath in Western Britain.

While I have certainly felt the lack of travel the last few weeks, what really has spurred this mad dash to book up the next few weeks is the temperature. It is just so cold in my Top Floor Flat (and the rest of London unless you’re on one of the really deep tube lines during rush hour) that despite my best effort to get going this morning, I just couldn’t get going to Windsor Castle as I had planned. I didn’t have a train or entry ticket so I just couldn’t be bothered to bundle up and get out. Buying the tickets this morning made me feel both productive and like I won’t be able to bail out the morning of.

I’ll still make an effort to go to Windsor tomorrow but Sundays are my chores and shopping days which means if I lose my Sunday, I’m scrambling for groceries all week. In any case, I’m really excited about Bath and Amsterdam. I’m still getting final details sorted out (I was having some trouble with the National Rail online ticketing site to get my tickets to Bath, and I’m working on getting a B&B in Amsterdam) but if anyone has any suggestions for what to see in either city I’d love to hear!

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.