Easy Webbers

My favourite social news media site, Newsvine.com, has been “relaunched” today!

Call it a redesign. Call it Newsvine 2.0. Call it whatever you want, but today Newsvine is proud to announce the first major overhaul of our site since launching a little more than a year ago. It’s an exciting thing for the team and for the now 600,000 people who visit the site every month because it not only provides a hugely enhanced front page but also showcases a lot of the great technology we’ve been building behind the scenes over the last several months.

The biggest change you will notice is the front page. You can now add modules and boxes and all kinds of things in a true web 2.0 spirit. You decide how you want the front page to look like. This is great because I know a lot of people, including me, who have complained that the Newsvine front page has been too much centred on USA and their local news.

Other new features include:

• Modules!
• Local Headlines and Weather
• Newsvine Live
• The News in Pictures
• Newsvis
• External RSS Feeds
• Newsvine Group Showcase
• Top Seeds from Source
• Super Widescreen

The last feature there called “Super Widescreen” is something users with big screens will love (and yet again something that includes me). It let’s you make the front page bigger in width to “whopping 1300 pixels of width”. Lovely!

Read more about the new features and the brand new “Evergreen” at the official Newsvine blog.

Neil Patel on pronetadvertising.com talks about how too many social bookmarking icons will confuse and distract your readers.

I guess the question is, why shouldn’t you be giving tons of options to your website visitors? It may seem like a good idea at first, but your ever so curious visitors will end up clicking on random buttons which will take them to sites that they are not familiar with and then they will not bookmark your content. Even your most tech savvy readers don’t have accounts at most of these social sites, so why drive them to sites where they will not bookmark your content.

The blog post is really basic common sense. So if you feel you have too many icons go read it! But, before that I would just like to add one thing. If you use the AddThis bookmark and feed buttons your readers and visitors can easily choose which social bookmark site they want to use. They just need to choose the “Please don’t ask me every time” option.

AddThis.com offers another way for your readers to bookmark your posts to a social bookmarking site or subscribing to your feed. You can find a few other alternatives here, here, there is another one here, here and I think you can find a few more if you use our search. Don’t worry, I have tested them all and they work great.

A special thing about AddThis.com is that if you sign up for a AddThis.com account you can see statistics about what your visitors bookmark on your website, and how often. Pretty neat!

http://www.addthis.com

This is pretty cool. My favourite website Newsvine.com has rewarded it’s users with some of their advertising revenue. The more popular your article or seed is at Newsvine the more money will you get.

…the sole determinant for earnings right now is page views times ad revenue per page view.

And the top earner at Newsvine earned over $400 in one month. That is nice.
Newsvine uses the advertising company Federated Media.

Reddit.com has released three different buttons that can help you spread the word about you website or blog.

Does your blog or website use social bookmarking buttons. If so, are they effective? And which ones perform the best?

http://reddit.com/buttons

This is probably going a little too far with the social bookmarking links, but here is 44 different social bookmarking service buttons and a little code generator for you to use.

But for the love of god, please don’t place all of them on your website. Just go for the big ones.

http://social.front.lv

If you want a little easier way to offer your visitors a way to add your site to his or hers bookmarking site you can replace all the buttons to just one button: Replace all your different “Add to” buttons with one button.

I guess I have taken on another addiction although this one is free and very interesting not to mention helpful. For those of you who are not familiar with the tool bar Stumble Upon well you are in for a real treat. I actually don’t know what I would do without this feature being installed on my PC. It helps me find all kinds of free stuff and lots of them are related to site building and enhancement. You wouldn’t believe how many sites that I have found that offer goodies for Webmasters. What it does? Well actually it surfs the web for you. It is a free tool which lets you browse, review and share great web pages while meeting new people. Well that is a short version of what it does but you can choose the categories that you are interested and in a just a click Stumble Upon takes you from site to site in the topics you have chosen. What else does it do that I like? You are able to click whether or not you like the site and the sites you like are kept in your favorites. If no one else has viewed that particular site then you can write your own review so other stumblers can see what it’s all about. I am not one to promote anything but this is one worth more than a mention. Do yourself a favor and get Stumble Upon and before I finish this post see what others are saying about Stumble Upon.