Archive: Year: 2007

Over the weekend, 10Questions got Dugg, big-time. Here’s what happened: it looks like the site became a focal point for the same thing that New York Times Magazine columnist Virginia Heffernan noticed about the top-discussed video on YouTube: the roiling argument over religion’s influence on society. Friday, we got the first signs of something developing when NoGodBlog.com, which describes itself as a “free service for atheists” put up a posting suggesting a quiet battle over the video question “Is America Unofficially a Theocracy?” The blogger wrote, “We used to be in 7th place, but thanks to a church group trying to vote down the video, (an email confirmed this) we have been stuck in 13th place for quite some time.” Other bloggers...

10Questions.com had 1,300 unique visits yesterday, with about 6,000 page views. Even with that lower level of traffic, the number of votes on the site continues to grow at a healthy pace, with another 2,000 tallied yesterday. Also, it looks as though the tweak we made yesterday, of setting the home page to default to showing users only videos that they hadn’t yet voted on, had the effect of spreading votes downward through the whole pool of contributed videos. Of the 142 questions currently on the site, 27 have at least 500 votes each. On the other end of the spectrum, the fewest votes on a video question is 34. We think these are both indications that people are browsing widely...

We had 1500 unique visits to 10Questions yesterday, with about 6,500 page views. The ratio of new visitors to returning visitors continued to be quite promising, with about one-in-five visits coming from folks returning to the site. We’ve tallied more than 53,000 votes from nearly 17,000 participants, and the number of video questions on the site now stands at 142. David Colarusso, 10Questions’s co-creator, continues to add new features, and today we changed the home page slightly to hopefully help return visitors find and vote on more videos. As of now, the default setting of the home page will only display videos that you haven’t yet vote on. (The option remains to click to see all videos, if you want to...

Things calmed down a bit on 10Questions yesterday, after all the MySpace/MTV/Obama attention on Monday, with about 2400 unique visits in all. Videos keep coming in at a healthy pace, and participants added another 2000 votes to the tally. Another promising metric: about one in five of our visitors has been to the site before, which shows that an ongoing community of participants has been forming. We’re continuing to work on making the site more useful and transparent, and starting today added a “History” link to each video that allows anyone to see the daily tracking record of votes for or against a video since it was uploaded to the site. See this link for the voting history on the “Corporate...

Well, we've had quite a weekend, ever since we announced that the top question as of 10am today would be asked of Senator Barack Obama during this afternoon's live MySpace/MTV dialogue at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA. Participation on 10Questions.com has surged, with the total number of voters topping 15,000 (that's up about 9,000 from Friday), the total number of votes hitting 46,000 (up 19,000) and the total unique visits for the weekend at 17,000, more than ten times Friday's traffic. What happened? Several different advocacy campaigns, each on behalf of a particular question, joined in the conversation. A new video asking about net neutrality was posted, and from what we understand, MoveOn.org sent out an email to about 60,000 of...

Veteran adviser to the nonprofit sector and technology guru Vince Stehle today announced his new venture, LoremIpsum.com. The site will provide filler content to web developers worldwide for free, and make money off the volume of users expected to flock to its services. Said Stehle about his new venture, "We've been watching this sector for a long time, and we noticed that literally thousands of web sites in need of this service." He added, "Often they use low-grade industrial filler, but LoremIpsum will provide only the best content, vetted by our team of industry experts." As part of the launch, Stehle provided a partial sample of content that will be provided to potential clients: Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit....

Breaking news: The top community-voted question on 10Questions.com as of 10 AM EST on Monday, 10/29 will be asked in that day's MySpace/MTV Obama dialogue, which is taking place at 1:30 EST at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA. The forum will stream live on MySpace.com, MTV's ChooseOrLose.com and MTV Mobile, and will air at 7 p.m. ET that evening on MTV. The audience will also be able to participate by MySpace IM and by rating Obama's responses in real-time on the web. It will also be translated live into Spanish and broadcast on LaVibra. We'll have more details on this soon....

I apologize for the lateness of this update; I've been at a conference all day (and no wifi!). We’ve been working on tweaking the 10Questions.com site to make it easier for people to find video questions of interest to them. First, if you look at the tabs that run across the middle of the home page, you’ll find a new one that says “Blog,” which will take you to these blog posts. Second, just below that to the left, you’ll see a link saying “List.” If you click on it, it will take you away from our grid layout for questions and instead show you about 30 videos with a thumbnail photo, their title, the user’s name and their voting...

The Republican National Committee just launched a new online game called Scariest Democrat, a Halloween-themed contest attacking the Democratic presidential field that invites visitors to "click on the Scariest Democrat." Complete with creepy sound-effects, the site drew 65,000 visitors by 4pm on its first day, and RNC e-campaign manager Cyrus Krohn told Marc Ambinder that "nearly 9,000 people had spent the time to give the RNC their e-mail address in order to vote." (The winner, by an overwhelming margin, was Hillary Clinton.) But Josh McConaha, the Democratic National Committee's internet director, isn't impressed by these numbers. He compared the RNC's latest push to a recent online letter-writing campaign the DNC did around the S-Chip bill, and his numbers suggest the...

Nine more videos were added to 10Questions Monday, bringing the total to 56. We were flirting with hitting 20,000 votes from nearly 5,000 users, and attention was spread widely across the site, with even the least viewed videos earning at least 25 votes. We had about 3,000 unique visits, with top referrers being Hugh Hewitt, MSNBC, Digg, the New York Times, Huffington Post, Crooks and Liars, Balloon-Juice.com, organic Google search and PoliticsTV. Newer videos are moving up to the front page regularly, with questions touching on how to pay for the Iraq war, how to classify the "war on terrorism," and asking whether "America is unofficially a theocracy" leading the pack. YouTube user kameny's question about warrantless wiretapping has the most...