WorldTechLogic blog reviewed Minti today here.
They were nice to us, as the vast majority of blog reviews have been 

Here is a quick roundup of some news I just read.

1. Google will soon be putting ads within YouTube videos and sharing the revenue with the YouTube member.
2. Yahoo! will soon be putting more ads on their Search results pages, to increase their revenue per search. This project is called Panama and will be launched a month before schedule.
3. Robert Scoble (nice guy) has got frustrated with the big gadget blogs not linking to him. See here and here. He then shows us his traffic from the stink he caused didn't make his traffic jump (see here). I think it actually did slightly... look at the last 2 days in the graph.
   
4. A social network around Health/Wellness launched recently. See here.
5. Search Summit is coming to Australia (Sydney) and Andy Beal is one of the speakers. See here. I believe ineedhits is also attending but wont be speaking.
   
6. MyBlogLog widget is starting to slow down some of the bloggers site. See here. They have recently been acquired by Yahoo! so I am sure they will throw some more power behind the servers soon.
7. Booble.com (a adults only search engine... apparently) has been refused a super bowl ad. I am sure this publicity is helping. They apparently were willing to pay USD$50M. See here.
   
8. ineedhits interviewed on WebMaster Radio. See here.
9. WIkipedia has been spammed by people creating links to their own sites from wikipedia articles. So that have implemented a "nofollow" rule for all the search engine bots. This basically means spammers will not get any link benefit. See here. This should largely solve the issue.
10. Looks like I'm not the only guy with an email issue! See here. At least I only have about 170 emails now.
    
11. Mashable launches with a new look. Sorry Pete but I much preferred the old look. See here.

This is my first roundup - nice and easy - may do this in future.

I blogged about LinkedIn the other day.
Am super impressed with the service and have been a member since 2005 but havent started using it much until very very recently.
They really have scale now and the network is nice and deep.
I just found out the have raised a further $13M.

Unfortunately we have found another member trying to cheat the Minti ranking system. That member has been penalised in rank severely. Please do not try to set up multiple accounts. Our system detects it and warns us of the activity.

jenlemen and Kristen our our latest members to hit gold!
Now we have 4 Gold Minti members!

I have a Gmail account and it is getting spammed to death.
The Spam filter is catching some but no where near enough.
Does anyone else have this problem?
Does anyone know how to fix the Gmail spam issue?

Are you online to do business?
If so you have to be a member of LinkedIn. They are really scaling now and have become a very useful site.
Want to link up with me? Just do a search for "Clay Cook Minti".
TechUncut Score: 4.5/5

As you all know Minti's Q&A section is very popular.
For general Q&A, Yahoo! Answers apparently owns the market. See my blog post here about it.

Are you a blogger?
If so you should check out MyBlogLog.
I just blogged about them here.

I have yet again decided to do my TechUncut blogging back here on my Minti blog.
The reasons why are here.

Rachel and I had this on New Years - very nice indeed.
It's a magnum too

lexiw is our latest Roomba winner.



Well done 

Hi Minti members,

Has anyone here used Swapthing.com before?

If you have I would love to hear your experience. Please either send me a private message or post a comment to this blog post :)

If you haven't heard of them maybe you want to check them out?



Thanks,
Clay

It looks like Hitwise (a traffic stats company) has been monitoring our growth!

Below is a quote from their blog post here...

My second example is Minti, a social networking website for parents. Minti incorporates a number of web 2.0 properties designed to attract and engage users such as shared user parenting advice. If managed correctly, seeding content topics such as products around the home designed for children could establish web 2.0 retailing on Minti.

Dubbed as the "Myspace-for-parents", Minti has had steady growth since its launch in March 2006 and in December more than doubled its market share from 2.2% to 4.5% between weeks ending 2 December 2006 and 16 December 2006. Minti ranked at #14 amongst local websites in Lifestyle - Family for the week ending 13 January 2007.

Hi All,
We should all have this button on our keyboards!

(Note: Thanks to OzBinky for this image)

Kristen has posted her answers here to my "Featured Member request".
Check them out... they are great!

Have been a little slack lately for foto friday, so today I am 1 hr early (in Perth)

Here is Codi on Christmas day with Scoop (Bob the Builder Truck), and Dorothy the Dinosor (The Wiggles), and his Lightning McQueen t-shirt (Cars the Movie)...

It's been over a month since I last nominated a Featured Member !!!

I have selected Kristen as our latest Featured Member.

The questions Kristen has been asked to answer are...

The current list of questions are as follows....

1. Starting with name, location (dont be too specific), how many children (and ages).
2. How did you find Minti?
3. What's your favorite thing or feature at Minti?
4. What's your favorite thing about being a parent?
5. What has been your biggest parenting challenge?
6. What worries you most about parenting ? (education, health, mental development, physical development, teaching manners, etc )
7. What's the best parenting advice you've ever gotten from someone?
8. What were your babies first words?
9. What is your favorite song?
10. What is the funniest thing you or your child or significant other has done or said?
11. Using just one word sum up Minti.
12. What is the best piece of advice you have got from Minti?
13. How do you deal with your Minti addiction?
14. How does your family deal with your Minti addiction?

Previous Featured Member's blog post ...

1. Izzy
2. hrs2004
3. TheMentorMom
   
4. cheleinkal
5. wildrose
6. lindterbean
7. Tracey
8. pfallerj (hasn't yet answered questions)
9. mcm
10. MomtobeKim
11. jenlemen

If interested in history - check out the first post here to read more about what "featured members" is all about...

Recently we have had to delete and ban a couple of members for breaching Minti's Terms of Service and also the Code of Honor.

The specific members had created multiple accounts to vote up their own advice.

Our system alerts us when a member signs up another account and then we monitor those specific accounts' activity. 

Please do not try to artificially increase your Minti rank. Minti is not about trying to get in the top 20. Read this article here.

Well done Tracey - you are our second member to hit GOLD!!

We were alerted to a bug last week that allowed people to log out of their account and vote numerous times on the same piece of advice. We believe some members were trying to vote up their own article and vote others down.

We believe we have fixed this duplicate anonymous voting bug. We have also removed all duplicate anonymous votes that occurred prior to us fixing the bug. For example this article had over 500 votes, but since the bug fix it has 34 votes, so the duplicates have all been removed.

No one should be able to vote multiple times on the same article now when they are logged out of their account.

Note: It is quite likely in the near future that we will not allow votes from non members.

Q&A is very popular on Minti.
Minti members have now helped answer nearly 1500 parenting related questions.

Holidays are over and it's back to the grind!
Just kidding... how can I call this a grind
Anyway 1.5 days answering emails in my inbox and still 214 to go.

Just to let you know, we have added more copy to the "write advice" explanations to make it clearer what we intended for the advice article area. Hope this helps.

Here is the explanation...

A few important points to be aware of...

• Your article must be parenting advice. Will your advice help parents be better parents?
• To read Minti's editorial guidelines click here.
• Please remember to respect copyright rules. If you are using someone else's content then ensure you have their permission and that you reference the original source.
• How much should I write? It's up to you, however 50 words (approximately 5 lines) is generally considered the minimum.
• What advice should I write? It's up to you, however you may like to see what people are requesting here. If you are still stuck maybe write advice on the following topics... pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, babies, early childhood, schooling, tweens, teenage years and beyond.
• To see examples of great articles click here.
• Your article must not breach Minti's Terms of Service or our Code of Honor.
• Looking for more tips on writing great articles? Try here.
• If you are wanting to post a question, you are in the wrong area. You need to go to Q&A.