Rachel alerted me to a piece of advice that was posted today and it already has 11 comments !!!
Join in the conversation here

As you may be aware we now score Minti member's rank. See here for my original post on member rank.

We are continuing to tweak the algoritm and you may see a big change sometime in the next week or two.

Currently it certainly is not perfect. I do not mean to pick on VILandDad but currently he is ranked 3rd in our entire community and he has only written one peice of advice, so this is not fair to all our other members.



The next big algorithm tweak will reward members for...

1. contribution to the site including advice, blog posts, comment posts etc...
2. quality of those contributions (ie: rating)
3. time since last logged on.

So if you are concerned with your rank at the moment, sit back and relax, hopefully with the next update you will be rewarded for your efforts

If not, let me know then

While I am on the topic of funny baby video clips (see my previous post on the baby fart here). Rachel thinks this one is a classic.
It is quads having a good old giggle with mum, while dad does a silly noise to set them off again, again and again!!!


Click image to see video.

OK I just read an article (this one) on Minti which made me remember this funny clip of a baby doing a baby fart. Quite funny if you have 10 seconds to spare


Click the image to see the video.

So I was told today that another teenage targetted Social Networking site received USD$15M in funding (led by Benchmark Capital).

Who? Bebo     

My first thaught was: Surely that market is overcrowded already?

• MySpace bought for USD$580M from Murdoch.
• Tagworld USD$7.5M in VC funding.
• Friendster who is flush with funds and VCs backing them.
• Tagged USD$7M from Mayfield.

Then I hear that bebo is doing just shy of 3 Billion page views a month (more stats here) and that they are concentrating on the UK market because the US market is sewn up by MySpace. At $2 CPM that is $6M revenue a month ($72M a year). Not bad indeed, assuming those estimates are accurate.

So maybe there's still room to open new social networks for teenages and target specific countries. So what about Australia? I heard MySpace will be targetting Australia very soon (see here).

Here are some graphs which are interesting...



MySpace dominates.




Take MySpace away and Friendster dominates.




Take MySpace and Friendster away and you start to see the others... looks like Bebo was smart to target the UK.

OK blog post times are all fixed now - the issue was that it was posting in GMT time instead of my local time.

Disclosure: Rachel and I own ineedhits - so this post is TOTALLY biased

I just wanted to say what a great job the team at ineedhits are doing. Yes yes yes... I know, I am very biased, but I just love ineedhits and am proud of what Jackie, Warren, Nancy, Denise and the rest of the team are achieving.

Note: If you weren't aware - neither Rachel or myself are involved in the day to day runnings. Jackie is the CEO and Warren was acting CEO whilst Jackie was recently on maternity leave.

Anyway... why am I so proud? Well... they just launched a bunch of new features on the site, and included in this latest upload was a new product which I have been hanging out for for quite some time. The product is M-Boost which helps you get your site included in MSN's index within 7 days. Enough of that because I am not trying to do a sales pitch!

They have come up with some really cool graphics for M-Boost...

I love the can !!


I love the tag line... Burst your way into MSN. Very cool.


Well done guys - looks really cool.

We had an overwhelming response to our two free Blogher tickets offer and it was a very very difficult decision as to who would get the tickets - we really wish we had booked a lot more so we could give them to all the entrants. It will be a feature for our efforts next year, that is for certain.

Some of the entries were really wonderful and we want to thank everyone who emailed us at Minti. Ultimately there had to be only two winners and we finally chose:

Drum roll please.... And the winners are....

Tracey - from maypapers.blogspot.com

And

Heather - from www.rookiemoms.com

We also have decided to give away a Minti Schwag (Minti bag and goodies) to 4 others who were close runners up...

Elizabeth from www.thisfullhouse.com

Susan from fridayplaydate.blogspot.com

Misha from wallpaperofmymind.typepad.com

Mrs. Chicky from ChickyChickyBaby.blogspot.com

Congratulations to the winners above and apologies to those who missed out this time, be sure to watch this space next year for a bigger and better prize pool!

I was amused to see a friend of mine posted on his blog today that MyHeritage thought he looked like Robert Patrick. Here is his post if you are interested.

So I thought I would check it out myself.

It seems that MyHeritage thinks (with a 60% match) that I look like the 4th official James Bond... Timothy Dalton.

The only problem is... I apparently don't look like him when he was in his prime... I look like him now! He is 60 years old and I am just 30!!!



Here are some other matches that I preferred

Just wanted to let you all know that we are aware that comments are apearing in the blog's RSS feeds.

This is not an industry standard and it will be fixed (so our developers assure us) with the next Minti release due out early next week. Please bare with us

We had another TechUncut Mashup last night.

Yes we have made it to event number 4

I wonder if we will get to double figures one day.

Anyway it was a good night, we didn't bother with introductions, and we actually had an informal agenda. We discussed a number of new start-ups and other internet businesses/applications including the following...

1. Rapleaf
2. Sphere
3. Technorati
4. Ookles
5. PlentyOfFish
6. ScriptLance
7. Jigsaw
8. Elgg
9. YouTube
10. ZunaFish
11. Amiglia

Thanks for all that came, and a special thanks to Simon for flying in from Germany (or Switzerland? I forget)

Note: If you are the Founder or CEO of any of the businesses listed above and would like to know what the concensus was regarding your business, let me know and I will email you.

== RECENTLY UPDATED (23rd May) ==
See bottom of email for recent updates.

.....

Blogher update: I just found out that Blogher is sold out for the first day already!

As I mentioned the other day, we are giving away 2 tickets to Blogher for free here.

A few people have helped us spread the word about our free tickets by blogging about it (thank you so much!)...
* Mary Tsao's blog post
* Daily Dose of Denise
* worker bees blog

If you have a blog please help us give away these tickets by blogging about our post here.


== UPDATED (23nd May) ==
We have had more people blog about our blogher tickets. Thank you to everyone!
Here is some further Blog posts that have helped us spread the word...
* mothergoosemouse
* Sugar Lips
* Ninja Poodles
* IzzyMom

RapLeaf has just launched and it looks like a very useful site - I hope they gain scale and people use them.

It enables people that have had dealings with others online to grade that person... much like the eBay member score... except it is relevant outside of eBay.

Lets say you buy something off someone online, and you are happy with their service, you can give them a positive RapLeaf feedback. Over time people will start to build good or bad RapLeaf reputation scores.

There is a good podcast/interview with the Founder of RapLeaf here.

Bottom line: This is the best web business in my opinion to launch in the last 6 months that I am aware of (apart from Minti of course ).

If you are going to meet someone for the first time, buy something off them, or sell something to them, then make sure you check out their RapLeaf score and see if they are trustworthy people.




To the founders of RapLeaf - well done!

Come on everyone, I haven't recieved a single request for the tickets we are giving away to Blogher !!

We are giving the tickets away for free (there is NO catch). Click here to see the details.

Please help us spread the word about this

I am beginning to like Sphere more and more.

I wrote a critical blog post here about it.

Why do I like it now?

1. Because the search results are ranked by "relevance", and not "date" like Technorati.
2. When I doa search for "minti", relevant info comes up. Where as on Technorati if I run the same search crap fills the search results page.

Note: Sphere is a search engine for blogs (and so is Technorati)

UPDATE 22nd May: Just wanted to make it clear that we will be updating the algorithm over the coming weeks.

...

We now display what Rank each member is in the community from 1st to last (which is currently 423rd). To see the full list click here.

Currently our top five ranked members are...

1. wombat68
2. mammyrebs
3. hrs2004
4. rachelcook
5. npatrick

Below is a small snapshot of members listed in rank...

We also display your rank on your advice...



Considering also posted a blog post about member rank here.

Note: We will continue to tweak the algorithm behind the member rank over the coming days/weeks/months... years

=======
UPDATE: Winners announced here
=======




We ( Minti ) have decided to give away 2 tickets to Blogher '06

If you want one of these tickets just send me an email to blogher@minti.com with a paragraph of why we should give you 1 of the 2 tickets.

You don't even need to be a member of Minti !!

Note: We will be choosing the 2 winners on Thursday the 25th of May 2006... ie: yes very soon! I will email the winners and also do a blog post around that date announcing them (if they wish to be disclosed).

Other info...

1. the conference is in San Jose
2. on the 28th - 29th of July 2006
3. you do not need to be a female
4. we will not be paying for accomodation or flights etc. We are just giving away 2 seperate tickets.
5. you do not need to do anything for Minti

Rachel from Minti is also going to Blogher - so be sure to say hi if you are attending. Here is a post about Rachel attending.

=== Update ===

If you can't be bothered emailing, feel free to just add a comment to this blog post why you should get one of the tickets.

We have decided that Rachel is going to attend Blogher '06

Blogher is a conference for females that like to blog. It is in San Jose. Check it out here.

Rachel will be wearing a Minti shirt so make sure you go up to her and say "hi"

If you are also going to Blogher - let us know in the comments below or by sending Rachel a message.

We now have Minti gear... cool  Minti shirts, bibs, baby gear, bags etc
Feel free to check it out and maybe even by some for yourself, your partner, your baby or your friends

Here is a link to " the Minti store".

Below are some of the cool items you can buy...









Here is a link to another blog post about this

I mentioned on the 5th of May we had uploaded a bunch of new features... but I didn't have time to describe what they were.

Well... I finally found some time and posted some detail about the new changes on the Minti Blog.

I will post them again here...

Here is a list of some of the main changes...

• New homepage design.
• Popular advice makes its appearance on the homepage.
• Latest activity is expanded on the homepage.
• Need Votes is now in top navigation bar.

You can now add links and images to your blog or friends forum posts. Example.

Easier star voting on comments. See comments on this article.

Far easier to upload an image as your avatar. See people's images on the Minti homepage.

Your avatar now appears at the top of your articles of advice. See at the top of this article as an example.

Ability to write a personal note when inviting a friend.

Initial phase of daily summary email completed. Members will soon be notified of advice they are watching etc.

More sorting on advice page.

• Popular advice.
• Most recent advice.
• Advice needing votes.
• Most viewed advice.

Visits are being tracked and displayed for profile views (example), blog post views (example), article views (example) etc.

We continue to innovate at Minti, please let us know what you think about the new changes and others you would like to see.

Feel free to comment below or email me direct at clay dot cook at gmail dot com.

I have heard that Ookles is meant to be Flickr for parents... but I have been waiting for months for them to go live. It says coming soon, but I am starting to doubt it.

If you are the Founder of Ookles, please let me know when to expect it to go live. I heard you on a podcast and it sounds interesting!

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://embed.technorati.com/embed/wq7rzey5w9.js"></script>

Well done to Wombat68... you are our first member to reach Rank 4

We seem to have added to many itmes into the green menu bar at the top of Minti.
According to some members they now need to use the bottom scroll bar on their browser to see the right hand side of our web page.
Does this happen to you? Please let me know if it is happening to you, and also if you know what screen settings you are using that would also be great

I would be interested to hear what others think....
From 16 mths I just can not believe how interactive our little boy is becoming. He is now 20 mths old and it is just the most amazing age that I have experienced so far.
Does it get even better?

We had another great meeting today to discuss upcoming development on Minti. Looks like we will be concentrating on a daily activity summary email for all our members, amongst other things. This should be out in a week or two.

Your Minti friends forum will be private soon.
We agree with your feedback and have decided to include this in the next update.
Only your Minti friends will be able to see your friends forum and comment in it.
If you dont know what a friends forum is here is an example... My Friends Forum (currently public).

You can now upload photos into your blog posts and comments on friends forums.
Like this one
from here.

UPDATED: If you want free photos just use flickr (all you need to do is reference the page you copied it from, like I have above). Here is the flickr link... http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/tags/baby+smile/

We launched a whole bunch of features today.
I have been busy testing them out.
Am off to bed!
Will provide some more info later

We expect to be testing a new update tonight... and all things going well it will go live sometime tomorrow.

Thank you to everyone who commented on my previous post here...

http://claycook.minti.com/blog/771/Does-Minti-take-a-long-time-to-load-for-you/

Keep the feedback rolling in!

I have some updated information...

It appears that the majority of the issue is some routers between our web server and the user. For example, for some people in the US, Minti is being delivered to them [not due to us you should know ;)] through an unstable router. This router (and maybe) others is having severe packet loss, which means our server has to keep trying to deliver the information over and over again. This results in latency increasing from juist 0.3 seconds to over 3 seconds just to connect etc...

Here is a trace route to someone in the US where their is severe packet lossage...
HOST: www.minti.com Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. dsl-202-72-132-141.wa.westne 0.0% 10 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.8 0.0
2. gi5-1.perth.westnet.com.au 0.0% 10 1.2 1.4 0.9 2.3 0.5
3. vlan385.o6ssc76fe.optus.net. 0.0% 10 2.5 2.4 1.9 3.7 0.5
4. 203.208.148.69 0.0% 10 212.1 217.4 211.8 264.9 16.7
5. unknown.Level3.net 0.0% 10 210.5 210.6 210.4 211.2 0.3
6. ge-0-0-0-55.gar1.LosAngeles1 0.0% 10 211.2 211.3 210.9 212.4 0.5
7. p16-0-2-1.r21.lsanca03.us.bb 10.0% 10 211.6 214.4 210.9 239.9 9.6
8. p16-1-1-3.r21.dllstx09.us.bb 0.0% 10 245.9 245.8 245.3 247.2 0.5
9. xe-0-0-0.r20.dllstx09.us.bb. 0.0% 10 247.5 250.0 247.2 261.1 5.4
10. p16-3-0-0.r00.miamfl02.us.bb 20.0% 10 288.7 287.8 287.3 288.7 0.4
11. p4-0-3-0.r00.bcrtfl01.us.bb. 80.0% 10 303.8 303.9 303.8 303.9 0.1
12. ge-1-1.a02.bcrtfl01.us.da.ve 10.0% 10 302.8 302.4 301.9 302.8 0.3
13. www.alertsite.com 10.0% 10 307.0 306.0 302.6 307.1 1.9

You will notice that hop 10 through to 13 has severe packet lossage causing major issues.

Here is a trace route to a location in the Uk where no packet loss occurs...

HOST: www.minti.com Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. dsl-202-72-132-141.wa.westne 0.0% 10 0.2 0.6 0.2 0.8 0.2
2. gi5-1.perth.westnet.com.au 0.0% 10 2.4 4.1 0.5 28.7 8.7
3. vlan385.o6ssc76fe.optus.net. 0.0% 10 2.2 26.8 2.0 167.5 51.7
4. 203.208.148.69 0.0% 10 210.8 212.1 210.8 220.8 3.1
5. unknown.Level3.net 0.0% 10 209.8 210.2 209.4 211.6 0.8
6. las-bb1-link.telia.net 0.0% 10 209.6 220.8 209.6 316.6 33.7
7. dsl-bb1-pos7-0-0.telia.net 0.0% 10 244.1 244.1 243.8 244.7 0.3
8. nyk-bb2-link.telia.net 0.0% 10 291.2 291.7 291.2 292.1 0.3
9. ldn-bb2-pos7-1-0.telia.net 0.0% 10 367.6 367.3 366.8 367.6 0.3
10. ldn-b3-pos9-0.telia.net 0.0% 10 365.3 365.5 365.2 365.9 0.3
11. jnt-110793-ldn-b3.c.telia.ne 0.0% 10 367.7 367.6 367.3 367.8 0.2
12. po0-1.lond-scr4.ja.net 0.0% 10 359.9 377.7 359.9 476.4 37.4
13. po0-0.lond-scr.ja.net 0.0% 10 356.7 356.7 356.5 357.0 0.2
14. po1-0.london-bar1.ja.net 0.0% 10 363.9 363.7 363.4 364.1 0.3
15. ulcc-gsr.lmn.net.uk 0.0% 10 362.1 362.4 362.0 362.9 0.3

Hopefully someone in the US fixes those routers :)

In the mean time we intend on Monday to look into the number of images on our site and remove any non critical ones :)

Would still love to hear your experiences with the load time of Minti.

Just recently sphere (www.sphere.com) launched.

They are a blog search engine.
I have had a "25 second" look into them and although that is not very long I am not all that impressed... except to say that when I searched for "minti" I was pleased to see relevant results came up :)
I am wondering why people would use Sphere, when they can just use the leader Technorati (www.technorati.com) ?

Here is why (according to Aphere)...

Here's what you get when you use Sphere:

1 An easy-to-use, intuitive search engine.
2 Great search results, with posts ordered by relevance or time.
3 Customizable time frames (play with our custom range filter, the grokiest feature in our site).
4 Related mainstream media, books, photos and podcasts right next to the results for a complete picture of the conversation.
5 Profiles and stats for each blog listed.

======
Updated
======

One thing I think they have done well is the "submit a blog" link on the bottom of the page. nice and easy!

====================
Udated Again (13th May)
====================

I am beginning to enjoy Sphere more. You can sort by relevance (rather than time) in regards to search results and they list featured bloggers by topic.

Is anyone going to this? http://meshconference.com/

Looks like an interesting conference if you are into Web 2.0 stuff.
Let me know.
By the way: It starts in 12 days time.

Some more info...
* They expect about 350 attendies.
* Here is an attendee list ... http://www.socialtext.net/mesh/index.cgi?people
* There are still tickets left.

We have not yet set up a Help/How to/FAQ page for Minti yet, so Rachel's blog is becoming a quasi Help/FAQ page.
See it here... http://rachelcook.minti.com/blog/

If you are into building internet businesses... here is an interesting podcast.

It's about PlentyOfFish.com a free dating site that apparently is growing in leaps and bounds.
The podcast only goes for 30 mins so its nice and short...
http://2webcrew.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/05/03/2web-crew-8-markus-frind-of-plentyoffishcom/

Another cool podcast if you missed it is our very own Matthew Macfarlane (Co-Founder of Minti) talking about Minti and capital raising etc...
http://2webcrew.thepodcastnetwork.com/2006/04/28/2web-crew-007-matthew-macfarlane-from-minti/

We have been told our pages have a lot of graphics etc on them and are taking a while to load.
Can you please tell me if they are taking a while for you???

I know someone going through their second IVF at the moment. It looks like it wont be successful.
What a stressful time it is for them.
Hang in there - we are thinking of you! - xoxoxo

We plan to upload a new update in a few days time. Some of the changes are due to member feedback... thank you to all who emailed/contacted me via various means :)

If you haven't sent any feedback... get cracking!
Either comment here or email me at... clay dot cook at minti dot com