Kwoff Blog

Just a quick followup to yesterdays post about our new FF extension. We developed it for two reasons:

1. I’m a long time fan of Firefox and its associated extensions (delicious, tabplus etc)
2. A high number of visitors to Kwoff also use Mozilla/Firefox.

What can Google Analytics tell us about Firefox usage on Kwoff?

The first week of March produced the following Browser breakdown:

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Roll forward to the first week of August and Firefox has jumped to over 40% (and IE under 50%)

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Even from the solid base in March its a fantastic increase over a few months.

The Firefox 3 download campaign occured in this period and no doubt positively affected FF uptake.

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Firefox 2 vs. Firefox 3

Here’s the breakdown of FF versions in that August figure.

Looks like the campaign worked. Mozilla will be pleased.

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It must be all those discerning kwoffers that make the Difference

With the global uptake of Firefox said to be around 20% our figures tell a different story.

As mentioned, i’m an FF convert and naturally consider myself a savvy browser, i’d like to think that the average kwoff user is a little smarter than your average bear and we’ve all made the simple decision to use a superior browsing product.

Or, our visitor numbers are small and its all statistically irrelevant.

Apologies to any offended IE users.

Thanks.

Let me begin with a caveat - BETA Version only - so all willing guinea pigs please step forward.

We have ironed out some bugs in a Firefox extension to make ‘kwoffing’ stories a little easier.

Firefox users will be familiar with similar add-ons that enhance the functionality of their base browser via right click options, toolbar buttons etc.

What does the ‘Kwoff this!’ extension do?

It enables users to submit directly to Kwoff from any page on the web with a right click. As an added bonus you can highlight text on that page and it will autopopulate the ’summary’ during the Kwoff submission process.

Heres a snap of it in action below:

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Clicking on the ‘kwoff this!’ option takes you straight to the Kwoff Submit page and it prepopulates the URL, Title and uses any highlighted text as the description for the ’summary’.

Here’s the result of the process in the picture.

Note: If you are not ‘logged in’ it will take you to the login page and then back to the submit page.

Installation

As with any FF extension installation is pretty simple, You can click on it below and from their FF will deal with it appropriately.

After the mandatory restart you will find the “kwoff This’ option on display when you right click on any part of the page you are visiting.

Download

You can download/install the file by clicking here: kwoff.xpi - (allow popups if necessary/prompted)

You can also find it on the Mozilla Add-On page (still experimental - so login required)

Feedback

This extension, in all its testing, didnt cause any grief for any of us (i.e. no machine crashes), if you prove to be the exception, or if you have any questions please reply below.

Thanks

Duncan Riley is right to raise his eyebrows regarding the news that some niche social news sites in the US have cashed in to the tune of US$10,000,000 (AU$10,000,000) this week.

It seems to be well and truly disconnected from reality, however, as a sign that social news is a financially viable force its good news for us.

It seems like a good time to remind ourselves what we are trying to do with Kwoff?

Whats the Kwoff Objective?

Not that we have our eyes on some glittering cash prize, from the outset the goal has been to make Kwoff a financially self sustaining platform, but not a pot of gold.

This is as much common sense as altruism, the numbers of Australian media consumers online would never support a full blown Digg style enterprise.

Fortunately, open source tools, and increasingly affordable local hosting* combined with some sort of ad driven revenue means we consider Kwoff a viable shot.

If we’re right i believe we’ll have provided one of the elements that will tie old and new media together in Australia. That will be very satisfying, and its why Stephen, Greg and i agreed to kick the tin to get Kwoff up and running.

Of course, anyone interested in kwoff with the figure of $10,000,000 in mind can leave their credit card details in the comment section below.

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*Thanks to Web24 down in Melbourne for their help in recent weeks, I love them. We have one of their mid range servers and i’m very impressed with the level of service and related options (backup in particular) that they offer.

Should be up ASAP they tell me, fingers crossed.

Update 1: OK. As at 9.15am we are up.

Update 2: its 12.40pm and we are a bit flaky still.

Update 3: 2pm and the problem is solved (he says nervously)

I’ll be updating our ‘friends’ page this week to display a list of all those publishers who provide Kwoff links on their content.

I’ve been prompted to do so by two important additions over the past week.

I’m a big fan of the ABC’s Unleashed site, it’s a great forum for Australian conversation, the comments alone are a great read.

You can find a ‘Kwoff’ link on the bottom of published articles. Thanks to Bruce Belsham and Stephen Rapley for this.

We’ve also managed to snag a link on PerthNow, its great to be represented in the West. Thanks to the team at News Digital for their work on this one.

In other news, i’ve just found out the Pope is in town, amazing, i had no idea he was coming to Sydney :-p

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.

UPDATE:  Monday the 14th

here is the winner

Its a variation of this entry:

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.