The mo'Times

Articles of interest about mo'time, the blogosphere, culture and society

The Blooker Prize

I ran across "The Lulu Blooker Prize" page the other day and thought it might be of interest to some of you.  Lulu (in no way affiliated with Mo'time) is an online self-publishing service for books, CD's and DVD's and is sponsoring a prize for the best "blook" or book based on a blog. Here's how they describe it:

"The Lulu Blooker Prize is the world's first literary prize devoted to "blooks": books based on blogs or websites, awarded in three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comics.

The Lulu Blooker Prize is sponsored by Lulu, the world's fastest-growing provider of print-on-demand books, including an increasing number of blooks. However, the judges are independent of Lulu and no favor will be shown to blooks published on Lulu.

Entry to the 2006 Lulu Blooker Prize is now closed. The short-list for each category is announced here, and the winners will be announced April 3, 2006. Entry will soon open for the 2007 Blooker Prize. Keep an eye on our blog for all new developments, or sign up today to receive news of the 2007 Blooker."

Happy blooking. I hope to see some Mo'time blookers up for the prize in 2007...

posted by: howard at 12:58 | link | comments (1) |
blogosphere, international

Home (page) on the range...

As you can imagine, a chunk of software like Mo'time that is designed to help people meet each other, publish their stuff, share it with the world and discover new ideas will always be a work in progress. Watching how people use it, while keeping an eye on how the technology is holding up under pressure, is a learning experience for us -- and one that we take very seriously.

As in the past with the advertising discussion (which we are now using as a guide for balancing the ad/subscription issues according to your feedback), I would like to get your ideas on the direction that we'd like to take the Mo'time user interface.

The recent adjustments of the Mo'time home page (after login) were mainly organizational, but we believe that we took a step in the wrong direction and wanted to get your reaction.

The elimination of the most recently updated posts list, replacing it with links to the somewhat haphazard Mo'timeNow page, made the home page more of a control center for your blog and less of a piazza where you can have a snapshot of what's happening.

So the idea is this: make the control panel section of the home page much smaller, yet more intuitive and essential. We can then use the greater part of the page to design a cleaner and easier to read version of Mo'timeNow. So, you'd always have a list of who's online, latest blogs and photos, latest subject tags, the featured post and the latest post of this blog... PLUS, of course, the essential control panel to get into your own blog.

In this way you will get an immediate feel for what's going on as soon as you login to Mo'time -- who's around and the latest stuff to see and read...

Is this too abstract of a discussion without an accompanying graphic to look at? Anyway, I thought I'd try to lay out some of our thinking to see what you think about it. 

Well?

posted by: howard at 01:26 | link | comments (12) |

Moving things around

If you're reading this, you may also be scratching your head and wondering what's going on with your Mo'time home page (when logged in). Right?

We are slowly, and piece by piece, adjusting the interface to add more features and change the architecture around to make more sense. In the process, paradoxically, things may make less sense as we go about our business.

Once again, we humbly ask for your patience and understanding as we assemble the new bits. I will let you know when things have settled down and then will explain everything to you in more detail!

posted by: howard at 16:56 | link | comments (15) |
news, updates, beta, features