The Venture Skills Blog

A while ago I discussed on Collective Thoughts some of the techniques for getting your site into News syndication services like Google News. One of the main area’s I looked at was images since then a few things have changed but the importance of good images and their uses have not.

What’s a logo image?

A logo image is the initial image in a post often it takes the form of a banner or image to determine category. It’s this image that is being picked up by Social Media sites for use, before going into specifics lets take a few examples;

My Own
Category Logos:

Banners:

ProBlogger
Category

Banner

Original credit Xdjio

DoshDosh
Dosh Dosh site makes great use of Anime to create unique logo’s for each post

Lorelle WordPress Tips
Lorelle uses category images on nearly all her posts

Logo Images and Social Media Sites?

Each site handles images slightly differently but lets look at the big two Digg and StumbleUpon;
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon has now like Digg started using images on it’s pages, both in the review page and peoples favourites. Normally these pictures are screenshots of the page but sometimes they are pictures from the page cropped.

As you can see Sebastian’s MSN crawler update bug has been cropped.

In this case the surface area of 250×165px was used in reality it’s more likely to have been 250×166.666~ or a ratio of 3:2.
The images when shown in favourites are 90×60. The ratio is determined on the width, so far I have seen 150, 175, 200, 250px as the base width.

Digg
Digg resizes images to 160×120 (4:3) or 160×160 (1:1) normally this is a straight resize but some images are showing sign of cropping.

Creating the Perfect sized image

So what would the perfect image for Social media look like size wise…

I notice a problem, with perhaps the exception of problogger community banner I don’t think any of us are close! so this leads me to…

Throw out the rule book

Images are going to be more important a striking image can make the difference between sitting at the top and bottom of the social pile. But the thing about striking images is they tend to not follow ratio rules or ideas of “perfect images” so ultimately this was perhaps my longest and most pointless post, I hope you skipped to the end first.

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A few things will kill a stumble, sending no traffic and sending the page to a quiet death. I present for your horror the StumbleUpon Graveyard and how posts are dragged down to its bowels, I will even provide tips to avoid such a fate.. Read the rest of this entry »

When StumbleUpon started integrating there results into Googles they effectively changed the way I search. If I’m presented with 10 results I am now more likely to click through to a site with a StumbleUpon review and in particular if it has a friends review.
I have an inbuilt trust of stumblers even if they are strangers over Google strange that!
Given the choice I value a Stumblers opinion more then any ranking factors
The problem of course when that trust is abused, If I do a search for credit cards I’m presented with 3 stumbleupon reviews on the front page. Now I have to ask myself are credit cards sites really interesting enough to warrant a thumbs up? Even if it’s the best deal? particularly if they have just one stumble? Read the rest of this entry »

Social Media users are becoming the stable bread and butter users of many blogs and professional link baiter’s but few people understand how diverse (or not) these groups are recently we have been putting our efforts into looking at not only how they interact with our sites but how social media users differ from “normal” traffic.
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Mailing lists, IM groups stumble me stumble you forum posts, do any of these schemes to maximise social media traffic actually work? Well lets find out…
How we do the tests
Myself and a team of caring slaves (researchers) pour over logs provided to us by website owners as well as our own sites, we submit and follow stumbles and Diggs as well as normal traffic. We then average out the traffic over several sites to create the graphs. Each graph is based on a minimum of 10 sites averaged. To try and minimise any bias we don’t include sites/posts related to social media or out of niche for the site. While we try to minimise as many variables as possible we are talking about live web sites which we don’t always control and are not always designed as part of our experiments in other words take the graphs with a pinch of salt and if your results are different don’t blame us!
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I think Stumbleupon has fantastic potential in its revenue generation the idea of sending users paid for targeted pages is probably one of the least intrusive methods of advertising about, most paid for stumbles are no more noticeable to the user then any other.
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In the course of an up and coming research we have been monitoring click locations of social users, the results will not surprise if you stop and think, but a massive amount of on page clicks by stumblers are located: Read the rest of this entry »

The Venture Skills blog made it’s first post one year today, the post stamps are incorrect by the way I was fiddling with them when testing the posts but this is the opening lines…
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Using Send To as a information centre

Most of you will be familiar with the Stumbleupon toolbar and in particular with the send to button we have discussed its uses before and when I first reviewed it considered it a fantastic tool to start a stumble however since then the “send to” has become devalued.
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My attempt at showing a working model for stumbleupon mathematics certainly got (is getting) a lot of attention with several questions being asked I thought I would at least try to answer some of them and pass some more generic comments.

If you haven’t read the stumbleupon mathematics post then this will not make much sense but to recap the proposed “simplistic big model”

(Initial stumbler audience /# domain) + ((% stumbler audience /# domain)+ organic bonus – nonfriend) – (((% stumbler audience + organic bonus) + N
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/stumbleupon-mathematics-for-stumblers/

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