Tag: atheosphere

How to use Reddit:Atheism and Increase your Readership

Db02 Comments

As I have taken recently a bigger interest in my blogging methods I have started paying a bit more attention to what services work and how. I have taken a special interest in what is related to Atheism and how the Atheosphere (which I’m hoping you’re a part of) can utilize them to increase our visibility.

To this end I wanted to raise your attention to the Atheism subreddit which has gone live a short 6 months ago, shortly after the creation of custom reddits was implemented. Within that short time it has acquired more than 15K subscribers which, if you consider that the most any subreddit has is 53K is pretty impressive.

Some of you may wonder how reddit:atheism has achieved this significant amount of users when The Atheist Spot is still struggling to get more than 5 votes on any individual post. The answer lies in usability.

Reddit is really simple and really minimalistic. Most things take just one click to achieve and you’ll be hard pressed to find anything requiring more than two of them. Indeed, a lot of care has been put to create widgets and bookmarklets that make voting and submitting as quick and painless as possible for logged in users.

How does this simplicity help?

First of all, as a simple reader you can just grab the bookmarklet(s), (put them in a folder if you want) and once you’re in an article worthy of your interests (not just atheism) just vote it up. If it’s on reddit you’re just told that it’s voted (without leaving the page!) and if it’s not, you can submit it with an extra click. How easy is that?

Contrary to digg (and clones) you don’t have to type a description or check for duplicates and pass through a 10 step process to submit. The only thing you need is the url and title which are automatically grabbed. If you have your favorite subreddits selected, the choices of where to submit are one of them, which make it a breeze to send to where it belongs.

As a blogger, all you have to do is grab one of the widgets and put it in the area of your choice. You can see mine on the sidebar under the “popularity” header. Not only does this allow your visitors to vote up/down and see how popular a post is but they (if they are good an loyal readers 😉 ) can submit it with an extra click of the mouse. There’s practically no reason not to have the widget somewhere.

How about increasing readership?

Until now I considered Stumbleupon one of my better referrers as I would get at least a 100 hits per time one of my articles was stumbled. However after using reddit for a while now, I think there’s a new contender. Since the 7th, I have had five of my posts sumbitted on reddit, of which just one passed 5 votes (none passed 20) and I still got almost 600 unique visitors and my subscibers increased by 1/3. Compare that to Stumbleupon in which I had five posted since the middle of July and it still only barely managed to exceed 600 hits.

To be fair, Stumbleupon had a much lower bounce rate but I was pretty much testing the waters in reddit and submitting anything. Which leads me to my next point.

Submitting

As I said above, my submissions above ended up with me just getting downmodded quite aggresively. Even the post I assumed would do well barely got 5 points. It became obvious that the reddit crowd is quite opinionated.
To tell the truth, I still haven’t found the winning formula (impossible in 2 weeks) but I have noticed that news usually hit the top but insightful posts tend to do quite well. This is good news for people like me who generally don’t just repeat the same content over and over. Hell, even my interview did ok.

One good tip is to provide some kind of image for your posts. As reddit grabs an image automatically, it usually grabs the first image in the page. If you don’t have a header image like me, the first one is usually the article related pic which should hopefully be related to your content. From personal experience I find that images tend to attract attention.

There are two other good things about submitting in reddit however.

1. You can submit to more than one subreddit at a time.

While news tend to do good in Atheism, in the small cousin subreddit of Freethought, blogposts and opinions tend to do quite well. If you submit to both and someone votes from your site or with a bookmarklet, both will rise in votes.

If you write something that might be of interest to different crowds (say, Atheists and Bloggers) you should submit to all the appropriate categories.

2. New posts are not hidden away

It is a classic problem in Digg and Atheist Spot (for me at least) that when one submits a new post, that is hidden away in a special tab reserved for upcoming stories. This means that unless your topic happens to hit the front page by the few(er) that view these submissions, you’ll rarely see any referrals.

Reddit does this differently, when a new post is sumbitted, it appears without a rank on the front page and can be voted up and down. Once some time has passed, the rank appears and you can see how well it does. This hiding of the rank and appearing on the front means that even if you get downvoted by the various trolls that lurk in reddit, you can still get some views and hopefully catch up.

Another interesting thing is that the front page is not just the top posts but rather the order is decided by time and votes. Thus, as time passes, a post starts dropping and can only be buoyed up by getting voted on. Eventually there’s no one else to vote and it drops off, but until then it’s quite possible for a post to hang around in the middle of the page for a day or so, even with less than 10 votes. For blogs where we might get our normal visitors over the span of two or three days this is especially useful.

Solidarity

As I mentioned above, there are troll that lurk in reddit and opinions can differ quite a bit and as a result we may need at least a bit of solidarity as Atheobloggers. I make it a habit now to always vote up articles of bloggers where the widget is displayed (and the article is voted), unless I outright disagree. The more of us that register and do this, the better all of us will do. Since voting up is so quick & simple, I don’t see why we shouldn’t.

To be continued…

This post is starting to get a bit long winded with all the things I want to say so I’ll stop here. Look for the next (and hopefully last) part of this series where I’ll explain how the commenting system of reddit gives some unique opportunities for extended dialogue, the fun of memes, karma, maturity and various other little tidbits.

Poll: Why aren't you self-hosting your blog?

Db04 Comments

I’ve noticed that many bloggers in the Atheosphere are quite prolific and popular, but instead of doing what most would expect, that is move to their own domain and manage their own hosting, they either remain in free hosting services (like the Atheist Ethicist) or just get their own domain but remain hosted (like Atheist Revolution). To my continuous surprise, there’s quite a lot of them.

This intruiges me and I would like to know the reasons why you belong to the above group. To this end, I’ve started the following poll [1. If you choose point 7, I’d love to hear why in the comments] [2. Note that you can select 2 choices]:

[poll id=”2“]

Now rest assured that there is a method to the madness . I am not just doing it for my own amusement but I will actually utilise the results I get for your benefit.  I will reveal the how and why in one week, once I have (hopefully) enough answers.

if you are an Atheist who has been blogging for a while, has even a medium audience and still uses a free blog hosting (wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal etc), please take the poll. You can make up to two selections and your answers and comments will affect my follow up post.

I would really appreciate if you spread the word to others in the Atheosphere that might not read this, so as to increase the sample.

Cheers!

UPDATE: I replaced the 6th question (currently 0) with “Other” please use that if the current choices don’t represent your reasons.

6 reasons why you shouldn't obsess about your Technorati Authority

Db04 Comments

The goodsIn recent days I’ve seen post after post (after post after post) of atheist bloggers writing a page full of links and putting it on their weblog. I was mildly amused at first but seeing people continue to do it, I decided to write a short post on why this is not only useless, but may actually harm you. First of all…

The goods
CC License: the ryan king

In recent days I’ve seen post after post (after post after post) of atheist bloggers writing a page full of links and putting it on their weblog. I was mildly amused at first but seeing people continue to do it, I decided to write a short post on why this is not only useless, but may actually harm you. First of all…

1. Who Cares?

I’m always confused on why so many people hunt this precious authority in the first place.  I can honestly say that I have never, ever found a blog from its authority. Nor have I ever rated a blog from it. Hell, I haven’t even had my opinion improve by noticing how much authority a site has.

Your technorati authority is an ego stroke, plain and simple. Nobody gives a rat’s ass about what anyone else’s authority is but his own.

On the other hand, do you know what makes me more interested in a blog?

2. Subscribers

When I see that little feedburner icon showing a decent number of subscribers I always think something like “If so many people have subscribed to her, she must have something interesting to say”.

What makes you more interested.

  • Seeing my Authority?
  • Or seeing how many subscribers I have?

Alright, alright, you caught me. I don’t really have that many subscribers (I’d wish). These are actually vjack‘s but I borrowed them to make a point [1. Btw, does anyone consider it insane how many subscribers that man has! He must be faking it somehow…I’m certain of it! :P] .

Your subscribers are much more important than your authority and you shouldn’t sacrifice the former for the later (see point 4)

3. Punishment

When you make posts like these you may assume that you are selflessly helping others bloggers get a better authority (see point 1) but what you have to have in mind is that both Search engines and Technorati are not idiots.

When Google sees a new blog having 300 links one after another, little bells start ringing, gears start turning and sooner or later you start suffering the results. Some of you might not care but seeing as you don’t really achieve anything with it, why do it?

If this kind of thing worked, do you know what would have been at the top positions? Splogs. How difficult to you think it is for 10.000 of them to join a blogroll and jump to the first places?
Don’t be annoyed that you can’t game the system. Be happy that the system cannot be gamed.

4. Annoyance

Have you had the situation where you see a new post from your favourite blog in your aggregator, opened it and was treated to a page full of linkspam? I know I have.

Have you had the situation where you see a linkback, get all excited about it, follow it back only to discover a linkfarm? I know I have.

It is simply annoying. Don’t treat your loyal readers like that.

5. Relativity

There’s millions of blogs on the internetubes at the moment and  thousands of them are vying for this all-important technorati authority. What most don’t realise is that people don’t care who’s on the top 10 (it’s usually tech blogs and lolcats) but rather who’s the authority on the subjects of one’s interests.

Technorati can’t tell you that.

6. You’re doing it wrong

Do you know why blogrolls are generally not counted by search engines and technorati? Because they are irrelevant. A Blogroll is there to show others who else you are reading or find interesting. A generic blogroll like the Atheist blogroll is something that you are not reading. You know it, I know it and Technorati knows it.

Why is it irrelevant? Because nobody uses the damn thing. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have followed a blogroll link and the same goes for the number of times I’ve had a link to me from a blogroll. If people don’t use them, why do you expect automated ranking to consider them?

Pretending this is not the case by posting your blogroll at various places and hoping they don’t notice is just wrong.  If you do want to help other bloggers do it right.

  • Link through the main article. A link through the body text counts 100 times as much as a blogroll link. This in not only because of google algorithms but because there links are used by your readers. They are useful.
  • Link to actual posts. Linking to the main page of a blog is not very helpful and most people just bounce away. If you want to do the most good, link to the permalink of a specific article you liked and that others might also enjoy.
  • Link often. There’s not better way to drive traffic to your favorite blogs than by linking to them in your articles. Point people to insightful posts they make or comment on something they write. Not only does this improve their authority, but it helps them be discovered.
  • Don’t overdo it. Linking to 100 different blogs in one month is much more efficient than linking to 300 blogs in one day.

A final word

Before I close this post I want to make sure that I haven’t given you the impression that blogrolls are not useful. Indeed a short blogroll of someone I like does make me click the links to see what I might discover. It is the humongous lists of hundreds of links that just make me blank out.

For example, the Atheist Blogroll is at the moment at 760 individual blogs! This number is pretty much unworkable for humans without extra tools but it does not mean it’s not useful otherwise.
However boosting the technorati authority is not one of them.

If you have any objections to these points or want have another one to mention, feel free to post them in the comments.

15 Resources for Atheist Bloggers

Db07 Comments

blogosphereI thought I’d compile a list of resources for Atheist bloggers which might be useful for new members of the Atheosphere or might have been overlooked by the old ones.

Joining and utilizing these services should give you more exposure and interaction. Of course it’s not a magic recipe but if you have good content that fails to get noticed this should help.

Participate

This is the first and most important tip I can give you. If you want more exposure and readers, the best thing you can do is be a part of the Atheosphere. Don’t assume that just by writing on your own blog people are going to flock to your brilliant writing. Well, it might happen but it’s going to be much more easy if you return the favour.

How do you participate? Just read what others have to say and then comment if you have something interesting to contribute. Bloggers are generally delighted to receive comments, even it it’s the occasional “well said” and if you seem to become a regular at someone’s blog, they’re bound to visit your site to see who you are and what you’re all about.

If you want to refute, analyse or improve on what someone else said, don’t leave it as a comment. Trackback instead from your own blog. Write a normal blogpost and aim a link at what someone else has written (don’t aim at their main blog unless you have to. Go for the permalink.) A trackback is sure to make the author of the original post follow it back to see what you wrote.

Finally, if you find something particularly good or interesting, do not shy from voting, sharing, redditing, digging or anywhere else he has been submitted. Indeed, subscribe in all of these services beforehand so that it’s easy to vote up people with interesting ideas. Simply, do as you’d like other to do with your posts 😉

Atheist Blogroll

This is the classic first stop for most atheist bloggers. Joining the blogroll will not give you much more than visibility at the many blogs that have it displayed. Unfortunately since technorati changed their algorithms, appearing there does not help your authority.

The Atheist Blogroll is however a resource that some of us use as a way to create or organise other services for the Atheosphere.

Planet Atheism

Many people subscribe here for their daily news reading. By joining, you’ll appear at the feed reader of many pairs of eyes so there’s not reason not to. Unfortunately lately I haven’t been able to get in contact with the admin so hopefully this is still being administered.

Carnival of the Godless

You should use the Carnival to give some of your most interesting posts more visibility. Every two weeks these are compiled into a grand carnival and presented to the world. Posts submitted to the carnival generally get around 200 views from my experience. Not much for someone already estabilished but a nice boost for the more invisible of us 🙂

Atheist Nexus

Join the Nexus and then also join the Bloggers group to find other like you. Taking part in the forum discussions is also a great way to find blogging material to write about. This is what I’m doing anyway 🙂

Technorati

Go there, claim your blog and grab some widgets. Technorati is great at giving you some accurate stats about your popularity. Many prefer the authority widget (or bragging widget as I like to call it) but for me the simple linkcount widget is enough and a nice way to see how many people have found your post interesting enough to link back to it.

Once you join Technorati do not forget to favorite your…well, favorite blogs. Bloggers love when you do that and you may be rewarded in some way 😉

You can find me here.

Twitter

This has only started getting more popular with the Atheists lately. Most use it to notify about their new blogposts but it also serves as a handy public channel for quick discussions. I’ve had many a quick answer as well as some good notifications for events of interest. And, hey, you can’t go wrong with befriending God and Satan either 😉

You can find me here and I’ve also created a delicious tag for all the atheists in twitter. Use it to quickly populate your contacts and then tag yourself.

MyBlogLog

You can pretty much see this on every blog nowadays and most people use it for the same reason, to have the nice little avatars of their recent visitors. I’ve honestly yet to find another function to it as for statistics wordpress and google analytics give me much more powerful tools and for free. Nevertheless, that widget is quite nice as you can easily discover who reads you and perhaps find some interesting new blog from there.

Still, if you find any other great use except for the visitors widget, let me know 😉

You can find me here.

Facebook Blog Networks

If you’re on Facebook and like me you don’t like to add friends you don’t actually know, the Blog Networks should be a nice alternative to show your support for your fellow atheist bloggers. Join, add your blog and join the network of the blogs you’re reading meticilously. Leave a comment and strike up a connection.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here as well as my profile.

Scoutle

This is the newest blog helping tool I’ve found. As I understand, it is quite new as well but it has some promise. I’ve blogged about it recently so I won’t repeat what I said but I think it would be a good addition to your sidebar as it’s automated and the more Atheists that join it now that it’s still new, the more visibility we’ll gain in general.

You can find the Division by Zer0 here.

Blogged

A nice way to get a rating for your blog. If your blog is not already in you can add it and in due time an editor of the site will give it a rating. It does not stop there of course as people who read you can rate and review your blog which should give you that warm fuzzy feeling. Return the favor and then everyone is happy 🙂

You can find my profile here.

Voting Services

There’s a bunch of Popularity services that many atheists use to improve their visibility. You probably know most of them already but just in case, I’m going to mention some of the more useful ones.

It is in all of our best interests to join these social networks and vote each other up. We have 750 Atheist Blogs at the moment and if just 200 of these people were active on the voting services, the atheist voice would be hitting the headlights every day. It is a sad fact that between all of us, we are still invisible.

Reddit

I found that there is a reddit devoted to atheism just recently and it seems to be quite active. I wasn’t using reddit that much before but I started just for this. The good thing about reddit is its usability. A post that has the reddit buttons (like this one *wink*wink*) can be voted up or down just with a simple click which should make the action so painless that you have no reason not to do it.

Also, even if the buttons of reddit do not exist on the blog template, by putting the bookmarklets on your toolbar, you can vote without leaving the page either. Don’t forget to be bold as well. If the article is good enough and has not been submitted, do so yourself.

The Atheist Spot

Another voting system especially for Atheism. This is quite new and still in the process of building up a readership. It’s not as easy to use as reddit but it is certainly less abused. With the addition of the handy social buttons it becomes a bit of an easier process.

Stumbleupon

You may not think it but Stumbleupon can give you significant traffic if enough people vote your articles up. The same also apply for other people who have their articles submitted. Since stumbleupon has a limit on how many times one can submit a specific site, the page author cannot do so for every one of his articles. This, if you read something interesting, press that “thumbs up” and if it’s not there, submit it.

I don’t know about the rest but I’m delighted every time I see visitors coming from stumbleupon in a new article. I always go and thank the one who submitted it 🙂 Remember that an post on stumbleupon gets more visitors depending on how many people have given it the thumbs up. My Firefox article of one year ago got 2000 visitors in the first 2 days and I’m still getting visitors now to it (just because someone voted it up again recently). So if you see something in there, give it the thumbs up.

Another way to help is join the network of atheists in stumbleupon. Not only will you find many great articles from there but the more of us that are there and vote each other’s sumbissions, the more visitors all of us get.

You can find me here.

Blogger’s Choice Awards

I’ve already written about this in depth so I won’t repeat it here. I will only mention that there has been very little activity on this front and it’s a pity. The same things I said before about mobilizing the Atheist presence on the Internet applies here too. Consider that the Atheist Nexus at the moment has 3000 members but the highest rated Atheist blog has had just 24 votes.

PMOG

This is not strictly a bloggers resource but I consider that it has great potential to increase visibility to blog articles, including the ones that were written a while ago. It also has the potential to make your web surfing a bit more enjoyable.

Epilogue

So here ends my little tour of the resources I use for my daily traves in the Atheosphere and beyond. I hope that I’ve given new bloggers some starting points and old geezers some ideas that might not have considered before. If you have anything I have missed myself, I’d love to hear it and perhaps update this small list.

Cheers!

Aiding the Atheist Blogroll

Db05 Comments

Like any good atheist, I’ve been trying to keep myself in the loop by monitoring the Atheosphere. Unfortunately, due to the sheer quantity of such content (At the moment, the Atheist Blogroll is at more than 700 individual active blogs) it has always been a bit overwhelming.

I’ve tried using Planet Atheism, but I quickly realised that it is tracking only a limited amount of blogs (certainly not as many as the blogroll).

I then registered to the all the Atheist blogs through the OPML for a while but that was just overwhelming, not to mention time consuming (to update the folder each time a new blog was added). I then tried simply registering to the Google Reader tag that Larro is maintaining and that was a bit easier but I still had the problem that the quantity of the posts was overwhelming. With more than 1000 posts a month it is simply impossible to find the good ones. I even tried using other services like Reddit Atheism, and Atheism Spot but these have generally very low output and generaly partisan-y.

The Bashboard of AideRSS
The Bashboard of AideRSS

In the end I just decided to see how I could fix this and fortunately, I happened upon AideRSS. After a bit of struggling and some firefox restarts (simply because of the amount of ram all the scripting ended up consuming) I managed to get it organised and ready for the godless.

How does this help? Well instead of simply seeing each and every post people are making, many of which will be not be very relevant to your interests, you can choose to limit the items you see to only the ones that have been more “popular” or succesful.

‘Ah’, I hear you say, ‘Won’t that just mean that the popular bloggers out there like will hog all the spotlight, even more than they do now? Small blogs can rarely get 5 comments on a post where, Pharyngula would be hard pressed to get less than 20.’

Have no fear. This is where the beauty of this particular system is. The posts you see when you filter by popularity, are not the most popular posts compared to other blogs but compared to other posts in the same blog. Thus while I may, on average, get 1-2 comments per post, a post that gets 10 will be considered good and one that gets, say, 30 will be well on its way to “best”. Also, since it takes into consideration diggs, del.icio.us bookmarks, linkbacks etc, you may get “popular” even without any comments at all.

This way, even though my post got 10 posts while Pharyngula’s got 100, we are both simply “good” since, compared to ther of our own respective posts, these are simple “higher than average”.

This does not mean of course that you should stop using Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon etc. On the contrary, you should keep using them because the popularity of each post is using (Well, not at the moment, but very soon I’m being told) ratings on these services as well. The only difference is that this popularity does not stay in the respective service but it helps people who use AideRSS to see the more interesting posts.

So how can you get in into that action? There’s a few ways.

  1. You can grab either the Atheist Blogroll Good posts of the Best posts OPML files that I’ve created and import them into your feed reader of choice. The Good posts will give you more content as the bar is lower.
  2. You can simply subscribe to my own Top Stories that I’ve set up on my account. I will try to keep this updated with new additions to the Atheist Blogroll.
  3. If you’re using Google Reader, just grab the plugin and you’re done 😉
  4. If you’re using NewsGator, just set your Sort Order the AideRSS Postrank.
  5. You can create an account with AideRSS, grab the original Atheist Blogroll OPML [3. Will become outdated on the next blogroll update though] and the use the import function there. Once the feeds are insterted in your account (it won’t take long as they’ve already been analyzed with my import) you can change the filter settings to what you want and grab you own customised feed. You’ll have to update your blogroll manualy with this method however. However now you can select some on low filter and others on high.

So you’ve got quite a few capabilities to work with this already. If you are getting as overwhelmed with news and posts as I am, hopefully this will help you cut down on the clutter. Plus, if you join AideRSS you can get the stats for your own site and see with one look which of your posts are the more popular. You can see the Division by Zer0 here for example.

Hope y’all find this as useful as I did 😉

PMOG: An unforeseen boon to the atheosphere.

Db06 Comments

Fellow Atheist, did you recently notice a sudden flux of visitors from blog posts that are not seemingly linking to you? Is so, this is because I’ve been playing around with a new online game and I’ve chosen some of your articles, that I consider interesting, to insert into the playfield, so to speak.

But even if you were not one of those few bloggers who’s posts I’ve chosen for my initial experiment, please bear with me and read the rest of this post. It might be interesting to you.

What I’ve discovered is a very new and fresh on-line game which does something novel. Instead of making players actively participate in the game, like all othe browser games, and as a result require a level of attention that not everyone can afford; it turns the concept on its head and makes the whole internet the playing field. This name of it is PMOG and I think it might have the capacity, if used right, to help the blogosphere and especially the atheosphere, become both more contextual and fun.

I will not go into the details of what PMOG is or how it’s played but I want to explain why it has such a potential.

if you set aside than silly mine pranks and random fooling around with friends, the game’s true power appears in the form of missions. Basically what missions are (at least currently) is a collection of links to various pages in a serial format, along with a short description provided by the player who built the mission. This seemingly simple concept, allows something that is sorely missing.

You see, we currently have so much content produced every day that it is night impossible to find the truly interesting posts.The atheist blogroll is closing to a 1000 active blogs and it will only keep growing from there. I’m currently subscribed to almost all the blogs in the blogroll through an aggregator and I have to wade through a lot of uninteresting and repetitive posts every day just to find one or two that say something worth reading (for me).

Yes, I’ve prioritized a few blogs where almost everything written is interesting but I truly feel that there are underdogs out there who’s thoughts remain untapped while the big hitters like Pharyngula draw all the attention. Sure, places like Challenge Religion and the Carnival of the Godless help to cut through the mud, but their posts always seem disconnected from each other.

My idea then, is to use the mission capability of PMOG in order to create ad hoc “carnivals” that follow a theme and can also provide a customised commentary from the organiser in the form of pointers or clarifications.

This will have two effects that I can initially see:

  • We have cohesive groups of posts that do not depend on a computer algorithm or people belonging to the same group. Thus I may have a mission about ethics and link to people who are members of the atheosphere (generally Atheist blogroll or Planet Atheism) along with ones who are not but have something relevant to say and most of us would miss.
  • Given enough of us participating on this and allying with each other, we can push our missions to the top of the pile. This provides us with access to eyes we could not reach before.
    Already, one mission on morality that I’ve created which hit 4/5 stars rating, generated 50 hits to my article which is almost as much as a CotG. If you consider that this game is still very very new and attracts people outside atheism as well, there is true potential to increase readership on the articles that are worth it.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg as well. Using items like portals for example, we can utilize our distributed power to create a network of relevant links. Imagine for example someone visiting the Expelled official website and the first thing that pops up is a 5-stars Expelled Exposed portal that the owners of Expelled cannot remove. As the popularity of the game increases, this can only grow more powerful for us, which is an even better reason to join in early.

Currently most missions are the random favorite sites each player has which just as fun (AKA not) as surfing on del.icio.us and makes the overall quality very low. I believe that if we can start improving this quality through the blogosphere, with better descriptions and interesting (underground or not) articles, we can easily take over.

Finally consider that the game can only become more interactive as time goes on. It will not be too long until we can create missions with riddles, votes and whatnot.

In any case, this was my little idea for the day. You can see the two initial missions that I’ve created as a proof of concept. For them, I used the items I marked as shared and starred in my google reader (It pays to do that sometimes).

Hopefully, I’ve managed to convince at least a few of you to try this out just in case it’s worth it. In case you do, please add me as an ally so that I am aware of you and we can run & rate each other’s missions.

One last thing. Currently the game is under a lot of load from a recent sudden popularity hit so you might run into the occasional slowness or outright failure. Also, I failed to mention it until now but it requires Firefox and a special extension in order to play it.