Breathe in… Now Release

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

OK, so I said we'd been MIA for a bit, busy on projects and whatnot and we're very excited about two coming in for a landing today. I'll touch on that here in just a sec, but first something I've been neglecting to recognize…

WordPress Had Some Work Done

In the midst of the hustle we skipped right over posting about the release of WordPress 2.5. Kudos to Automattic and Happy Cog for the wonderful administration facelift. Expect to see our full thoughts on the upgrade in a future post.

With the upgrade of WordPress the WordPress.org website also received an update. A section of the homepage is dedicated to a rotation of companies with sites powered by WordPress. I’m very excited to say we have several of our projects in the rotation. See below…

That eBay logo is a new one for us… as this week we were able to launch the official eBay Corporate Blog (eBay INK) as well as the eBay Insider Blog (both of which are cnp_studio/Voce joints). The others – PlayStation (PlayStation.Blog) and Yahoo! (Yodel Anecdotal) are previous releases that continue to grow. You can see more about each of those in the portfolio.

Posted in New Site, Social Media, Who We Are, WordPress | Add a Comment »

Veni, Vidi, Voce - We Came, We Saw, We Partnered
Sony Gives Back to WordPress

Wednesday, February 6th, 2008

It seems that we've got a recurring theme in our portfolio. That is, development on social media projects for some really big brands. They're a product of the amazing vision of our good friends at Voce Communications mixed with the talent of our developers here at cnp_studio. IMHO we've made some beautiful music together and thanks to the incredible people involved we get to share some of that with everyone. Now, where to start?

Partnership

You know what it's like when someone gets you and you get them? You get one of those "Where have you been all my life?" feelings? That's what it's been like working with Mike, Josh and the others at Voce on these projects. To say they understand the industry is an understatement which is why I'm extremely excited to announce that we're officially partnering with Voce for all things social media. Consider the gap between strategy and implementation bridged. This really is only a formality for what has already been a great relationship. We're stoked to make it public. Read more from Voce's side of things here.

Plugin Release

So for PlayStation.Blog we've done quite a bit of customization to the WordPress install on the site. We use several existing plugins on the blog including WP-Polls, WP-Cache, WordPress Download Monitor and others. A couple of needs though left us without a plugin to fill the void. So, we created our own. And it's because of the great people at Sony and Voce that we get to release these plugins back to the WordPress community. Sweet.

Image-Rotator Plugin

If you look at the homepage of the PlayStation blog you'll see a main image header that they use to promote any number of things. We had originally created a simple manager to allow them to quickly upload these images and set a URL where the image should link, but they wanted to take this one step further and release it back to the community. Who were we to argue? So with some tweaks we made it into the plugin that you can read about/download here. Install it, add the line of code where you'd like the rotation to appear and you're set (oh and don't forget to add some images).

Author Comment Reply Plugin

The threaded comments plugin existed, but nothing that limited it strictly to authors replying to comments. Our fear, especially in the case of the PlayStation blog, was that the threaded comments would get out of hand. That, and it's not a discussion board, so we wanted to avoid that feel. This plugin allows authors to keep their response tied directly to the comment they're replying to without having to put the "@name" in order to reference back to previous posts. If you have a high volume of comments on your blog you'll find this one helpful. Read more about and download it here.

Posted in Development, Social Media, Who We Are | Add a Comment »

New Site: Yahoo!’s Corporate Blog, Yodel Anecdotal

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Friday was a fun day spent at the Yahoo! campus in Sunnyvale, CA launching the updated Yodel Anecdotal. Myself along with Mike and Josh from Voce Communications got together with Nicki Dugan (Yodel's Editor) to add some more cowbell.

Things started with a meeting on the redesign back in late July 2007 and led to what you see today. Some of the updates included in the upgrade are:

• Updated Design: A completely new look was created and a big thanks to Jeremy for yet another great one. This helped to allow for now more room within the post body as well as a wider sidebar. We feel that it gives things more room to breathe.
• E-mail Subscription: In addition to the RSS feed available an e-mail based subscription to post updates is available
• Tagging: Tagging has been added to help better identify content. Now Nicki has the fun responsibility of going back and adding tags to previous posts on Yodel. Fun!

Pete and Sean took care of all CSS as well as WordPress integration. Mike developed the Image Rotator plugin that you see at work in the header of the new blog (more on that coming soon).

Here's some shots of the old site as well as the new for comparison. As always, you can also check the portfolio for more info on the project.

Old Yodel

New Hotness

Posted in Design, Development, New Site, Social Media, WordPress | Add a Comment »

Your Blog Shouldn’t Be Your Personal Exercise In Communism

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

I ran across an interesting article in last month's Wired titled Mr. Know-It-All: Is it OK to ban someone from posting comments on my blog?

From the article:

A personal blog is pretty much an autocracy, so you're technically free to ban whoever rubs you the wrong way. But going all Joe Stalin on your commenters — even the ones who annoy you with their nit-picking or wacko views — doesn't jibe with the Internet's spirit of openness. The best blogs are supposed to be a conversation. And anyway, if you're going to publish what you write, accept the fact that the responses are going to be neither 100 percent positive nor 100 percent civil. Journalists have known this since the invention of the letter to the editor.

The article goes onto say:

And if a racist, abusive, or otherwise abhorrent guest is putting a damper on your shindig, you're well within your rights to kick the hooligan to the curb.

A blog is supposedly a conversation, right? By censoring your comments its the equivalent of standing in a room, expecting everyone to hang on every word you say, only to plug your ears and scream "I'M NOT LISTENING!" when someone has a response. You open up a forum for people to give their opinion, and when they do, you slam the door in their face if you don't like what they have to say. People will ask themselves "why did my comment get censored?" when they really should be asking "who is this person to even censor my comment...?"

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for removing spam comments, and banning abusive, racist, repeat offenders. But I think a warning should be enacted first or some sort of "3 strikes and you're out" - not turning on "Moderation" and clicking "Reject" to the first person that rubs you the wrong way.

Over time, I would imagine that readership would decline. The amount of comments received in a month, or a week or a day takes a dive. Not because the amount of comments being rejected increases, but because people stop bothering attempting to leave comments. It's a one-sided conversation - if you can even call it that - where the only comments that get approved are in line with the author's views or idea of what a comment should be.

If you're willing to write pieces that draw and attract some sort of response, either positive or negative, but not willing to share those responses - then maybe blogging isn't for you.

Posted in Rants, Social Media | Add a Comment »

BarCamp Orlando & BlogOrlando… We’re Going!

Monday, August 6th, 2007

It looks like September is a good month for blogs and developers in and around Orlando, Florida. Registration opened up today for BarCamp Orlando so Sean and I hopped on that (Pete and Mike are still clearing their calendars), but then it prompted me to also register for another "un-conference" coming up in September, BlogOrlando.

More on Barcamp

BarCampOrlando is a bi-yearly event to bring together people from different technical backgrounds to share and learn from each other. There will be people who know Java, .NET, Ruby, PHP, and other technologies coming together for a free all day event.

It's a day of developers sharing with other developers. There is no specific format for the day, but you are asked/expected to talk about something relevant and of interest to you. We'll definitely be contributing to the conversation and now starts the challenge of exactly what it is we'd like to talk about.

More on BlogOrlando

BlogOrlando is now in its second year and according to their site

We hope to bring together a good cross-section of folks to discuss blogging, podcasting, public relations, social media, citizen's journalism and other related topics

Josh has put together a nice list of session leaders which has us excited for a solid day of blogs.

So will we see you there? The price can't be beat on either event (they're free)!

Posted in Development, Social Media | Add a Comment »

User Generated Content - The Mullet Strategy

Sunday, July 29th, 2007

Personally, I can't resist a good mullet reference (especially when you can tie together mullets and user generated content). Perhaps it's the abundance of mullets in our area (Polk County, Florida).

From BuzzFeed - The Mullet Strategy:

The biggest sites on the web are all embracing the "mullet strategy" - business up front, party in the back! User generated content is all the rage but most of it totally sucks. That is why sites like YouTube, MySpace, CNN, and HuffPost are all embracing the mullet strategy. They let users party, argue, and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay because the best way for web companies to grow traffic is to let the users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can wistfully admire their brands.

Posted in Random Stuff, Social Media | Add a Comment »

Social Participation on the Web

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Forrester Research, Inc. recently published some figured on social participation on the web (i.e. Blog readers, blog authors, blog commenters, etc) and the percentage of these people using Apple vs. Dell. Note to inactives, people are talking about you.

Here's how the data breaks down:

Posted in Social Media | 2 Comments »