We went to a party last night to celebrate the fact that our friends new child turned one month. Apparently this is a chinese tradition. Anyway it was great to catch up our friends and also all their children! Being surrounded by children of all ages is just so great, it gives people something to connect with each other about and lowers everyones barriers... it was a great night.

That's the catch cry of Scriptlance (www.scriptlance.com).
Want something programmed... just post the job and watch programmers bid for the work... selct who you want and then they deliver the program. Sounds pretty good - however I haven't tested it!
Want a YouTube clone... will only cost you about $500. See...
http://www.scriptlance.com/projects/1146369336.shtml

Every Minti (www.minti.com) member now has the ability to ask to be "friends" of other members. Just go to a members profile and select the "request to be a friend" link. If the member accepts the request then you are added as a friend on their list and vice-versa on yours. This means you can both participate in each other's friends forum. Feel free to request to be a Minti friend of mine - I will accept - and look forward to having a chat on my friend's forum page.

I spoke via IM to the founder (Markus) and owner of the free online dating site PlentyOfFish (www.plentyoffish.com) the other night and I am amazed at what he has achieved with so few resources. PlentyOfFish is Google's number 1 Adsense earner in Canada, earning over $10k per day.

Robert Scoble at Sobleizer.com rights a great post about PlentyOfFish here...
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/04/the-role-of-anti-marketing-design/

If you are looking for a date go to www.plentyoffish.com

Well done Markus, keep it up!

Here is Minti's most commented on article... 19 comments to date...
http://www.minti.com/parenting-advice/158/How-we-dealt-with-Baby-2/

We are getting close to our first 1000 votes on Minti articles. We are currently sitting on 954 votes for articles.

We have had our first article go over the 3000 visit mark!
You can see the number of visits on the bottom of each article.
Here is the article...
http://www.minti.com/parenting-advice/10/Getting-babies-and-toddlers-to-sleep/

The members pictures that we profile on the Minti homepage are the latest members to have uploaded a photo for their avatar.
So if you haven't uploaded a photo for your avatar yet and want to be on the Minti homepage.
Upload one now by going to your member area and either clicking "change my onlnie image" or "Me and My Family" in your left hand menu list.

Jigsaw (www.jigsaw.com) is an evil company in my opinion.
They pay people for other people's contact details.
If you are looking for someones contact details and you dont have them... jigsaw may have them... just pay them and they will give them all to you!

Duncan Riley sold 2 blogs in just 1.5 hrs.
He got 1k and 0.25k for the other. Not sure if it was an auction process, but if he had held out longer he could have got a lot more by the sound of things.
See his post here... http://duncanriley.com/2006/04/27/whats-a-blog-and-forum-worth/

Thank you to all who have sent feedback to us on Minti.

If yuo havent sent us any, then I want to hear from you! please add a comment or email me at: clay dot cook at minti dot com

I would like to show you a great example of what we are being sent... "hrs2004" an active Minti member (http://hrs2004.minti.com) posted us some great feedback, and has allowed me to display it below...

-- --

Hi there.

Here is some feedback, as requested. I have decided to do this via email rather than onto the blog, as I have now lost two mini essays and it has driven me nuts! One was my fault, the other was the system wiping the entire piece because I hadn't entered a title.

I like the site, although I'm not sure that I just like the fact that I can waffle on and give advice, which people might find helpful! The improvement to the "Latest Advice" section is very good. I like the vote count [ego again - I can see if anyone else has voted on my articles ;) ]

Right. I read what Wombat has written and will expand /add...

Tagcloud. I have never used it. I guess that shows how I view it. Perhaps it has it's uses, but they don't appeal to me.
I would much prefer to see a category search rather than the latest activity pane. That way I could have a general browse rather than see what has happened in the last few minutes / hours. As Minit gets more popular, the latest activity section will only tell me what may have happened in the last few minutes, but not give me any idea of the other things that have happened when I have been offline.

Members. There is an intimation that there are only 4 members! Perhaps clarify with "Some of our newest members" or similar?
I think that there needs to be a very clear explanation of all the different features on the site. How do you request advice / progress from nappies to crawling / become a "Mover and Shaker" / the purpose of the friends forum/ purpose of a blog/ what My RSS Subscriptions are (?), etc. I would like a link to this from the home page.

Friends Forum. I was wondering the whole point of this. I have seen some fairly admin / domestic type comments in the friends forum, which don't seem to add to the site. I can read things on all of the friends forums (I think) yet can't add to some (like Wombat's comments) because I am not a friend of his. Could there be an open and closed option? Perhaps a general forum for all to be able to post on, and the rest limited to chosen friends. Also with the Friends Forum, is there a way that I could be alerted if there is new activity in my Friends Forum? I only happened to notice by chance your request for feedback, two days later. A third point with regards to the Friends Forum is that after I saw KatiePiatt's thread about the Marathon, I added some comments because I could easily find it from latest activity. After that, it took me a little while to find out where it was. This might be solved with the explanation page.

Articles. Could there be a spell check option? It might make for some better reading! Could there also be a method of deleting any articles that I have started and then changed my mind about? I'm stuck with a few that I no longer want and don't intend to finish / publish.

The email function. Could there be a search feature for Username from this page to save opening another window or trying to find the person and the going back to the email page.

I can't remember what other things I had thought of - you should have read the marvellous words I wrote last night! So, for me a big thing would be getting the system to not delete comments if you forget to add a title! I will no doubt remember and will annoy you with that, too.

In reply to your emails which I have been planning to reply to, thanks for sorting my ranking out. I wasn't worried, but couldn't work out what the criteria were to progress. I was referred to this site by ******, who is something to do with web technology and read some magazine or somesuch listing new sites ( or something like that). I have a slight personal interest in that I am looking to devise a very small scale paper directory of websites / info for parents and parents to be, and so will get you some advertising in the Uk as soon as the kids let me sleep enough to get my brain into gear!

Good luck with the site, and I have a few more articles in mind to add. Think that's it for now...

Minti had a strategy meeting today and it was good to see we have a clear direction/focus.
Thanks to everyone who attended.
Also thank you to everyone who has sent in feedback to us. It helps shape Minti ! if you haven't sent any in yet feel free to add comments to this blog post or emil me at...
clay dot cook at minti dot com

Elgg (http://elgg.org) looks like a great site if you are building a project/website/business and want blogs and to discuss project topics etc. There are also far more uses for Elgg.

Can you tell me if you use the "Tag Cloud". I am getting feedback from some users that they do not use it and see no use in it.
Please let me know if you like it or dislike it.
Note: We are introducing categories in the near future also.

Matthew (Co-Founder & CFO of Minti) was interviewed in a podcast last night and it is already online. It's the best podcast I have listened to, and I have listened to a lot, but I may be a little biased.

Anyway - it is definitely worth listening to if you are interested in hearing about how Minti started and where we intend to go.

Just go to the following link and press the play (triangle icon) button...
http://2webcrew.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/04/28/2web-crew-007-matthew-macfarlane-from-minti/

Here is part of the intro they have on the page...
We discuss Minti, Matthew’s previous ventures, launching Minti, and other topical issues like: is it a good time to start a web 2.0 business, how to determine growth projections, and the potential business models outside of Google Adsense.

This blog is so much faster than my Wordpress version that I use for TechUncut.com
I think I will probably stop TechUncut and just make this my personal, minti and techuncut blog all in one :)

I played tennis today and got an absolute bath :(
Oh well - better luck next week.

Facebook (facebook.com) has 85% or more of college students so there is not much room to expand there!
They are expanding into the high school segment as we thought they would.
See Michael Arrington's post here...
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/26/facebook-goes-beyond-college-high-school-markets/

had a big development meeting yesterday.
We have quite a few changes you will notice over the coming weeks.

If we lived in the US we would likely go on this blogging conference cruise.
Some big blogging identiities will be speaking.
James (Jim) Turner is organising this event.
Check it out at... http://www.blogonomics.net/

Codi says THANKS to Market United (www.marketunited.com) for buying him a "born to be blogged" t-shirt :)

Its very cool.

See here if you want to buy one for your shild or just see what it looks like....
http://www.cafepress.com/buy/born+to+be+blogged/-/
pv_design_prod/p_totrocket.53650215/id_11940495/pNo_53650215/fpt_/opt_/c_/pg_

Note: Paste the URL together - I have had to brake it in two peices!! :(

Are you aware that we display the visits your advice recieves?
If not check out the bottom of your article's page.
Typically you will receive between 20 - 30 in the first 24 hrs.
One is near 3000 visits already.
Here is a related post I wrote on the Minti Blog... http://www.mintiblog.com/2006/04/26/your-advice-visits-are-rising/

We had a great night last night at the TechUncut Mashup.

Richard Chipper (and wife Nikki) and Marc Loveridge from MarketUnited.com.au came along, Richard Giles from www.richardgiles.net, James Tauber from www.jtauber.com, and of course Rachel my wife (member name: rachelcook).

I hope I haven't forgotten any one!

We talked about a fair bit of technology including... craigslist, netvibes, myspace, tech conferences and some other stuff.

Marc has written a post here about it: http://considering.minti.com/blog/638/Techcrunch/

[Posted this at www.mintiblog.com also]

Please let us know your views on how we can improve Minti for you.

Simply add a comment to this blog post, use the contact us link at the bottom of the website, or email us at… support at minti dot com

* What do you like about Minti?
* What don’t you like about Minti?
* What should we add to Minti?

because we are unable to manipulate the html in a blog post we are unable to claim the blog at technorati and other blog search engines. this is not very good :(

Richard if you are listening - we need to talk about this ;)

test post

I am claiming this blog in technorati so I need to create this post to prove to them that I own the blog... http://technorati.com/claim/wq7rzey5w9 Technorati Profile

testing a new service that is watching my blog to see if it alerts me when I add a new post.

Matt - sent me a great email the other day about how someone has created images for all these flame warriors. Very cool - I am sure we will experience them on Minti and maybe I am even one of them already.
I hope I dont come across this one any time soon... http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/furioustyper.htm

The homepage is here: http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/index.htm
The first warrior starts here: http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/bigdogmetoo.htm
Just click "next warrior" link to see the rest :)

There are 2 great blog posts from our members today that are creating a fair amount of activity! :)
Check them out and join in the discussion...
1. Marathon and Englend discussion: http://katiepiatt.minti.com/blog/567/MarathonMedicine/
2. Eco Friendly Cribs & INvesting for yuor children: http://matthew.minti.com/blog/593/Eco-friendly-crib--rocker--basinet/

I may be going to the BlogHer conference (www.blogher.org) at the end of July. Let me know if you are attending...

Minti has an 'official' Minti Blog.
It is at http://www.mintiblog.com
Check it out :)

What fun this is!!!
The new features are great and really make this site addictive!!! :) :( :P

I went to the footy tonight and my team failed... again.
They played about 20 minutes good football.... in a game that went for about 180 minutes.
How do they expect to be premiers when they only play to their potential for under 25% of each game???
I blame the coach - he needs to coach them the following...
* kick is the first option (handball second).
* kick long.
* when close to goal - kick at it! Dont stuff around.
* run and break through the lines.

I have been extremely concerned recently about Codi's eyes.. his Strabismus seemed to be getting worse. We decided to stop using the patch for a couple of days and his eyes have made a massive recovery! Fingers crossed this continues :)

Board Meeting today... sorry can't tell you what was discussed - but lots of ideas suggested, keep them coming!... well done to the directors and advisors! ;)

I have other blogs i contribute to...
* TechUncut - analysing Web 2.0 websites/businesses... www.techuncut.com
* MintiBlog - the official minti blog... www.mintiblog.com

We launched a bunch of new features today (some listed below). Hope you like them... feel free to provide comments :)

* personal member homepage ie: http://claycook.minti.com - every member gets one!
* personal blog
* friends list
* friends forum
* more interactive homepage
* discussion around requested advice
* member personalised image - upload yuor own image of yourself if you want or use an avatar
* input your childrens name and ages - this will help with future features

I think that's about it - feedback please!

UPDATED: I have posted (and including screen shots) a lot about the new features on the 'official' Minti Blog. I will paste in the URLs below...
http://www.mintiblog.com/2006/04/22/upload-an-image-for-your-minti-avatar/
http://www.mintiblog.com/2006/04/22/minti-discussion-on-requested-advice/
http://www.mintiblog.com/2006/04/22/minti-has-a-new-homepage/
http://www.mintiblog.com/2006/04/22/minti-members-now-have-friends/
http://www.mintiblog.com/2006/04/22/minti-now-gives-you-a-blog/
http://www.mintiblog.com/2006/04/22/member-page-url/

this is my first blog post at http://claycook.minti.com/blog
it is just a test post :)