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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Do you have a question, perhaps you been trawling the forums, and your question has gone unanswered, maybe your not sure how to word your question or your afraid you would be laughed at?

We want to help and will be running a weekly column where we will try to get you the answer, and if we don’t know the answer we will try and find it for you. So what sorts of questions can or will we answer?
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If you are serious about social networking (and not just studying it like me!) Then you need friends and do you know what all 100 Top Stumblers and 98/100 Top Diggers have in common?

That’s right they all use an avatar picture…
An avatar image is a strong visual brand and identity that people quickly associate with a person many bloggers know who Darren Rowse is, simply by the picture he uses as his avatar, Lyndon from SEO Cornwall is another good example with his distinctive red background. The power of brand and visual identities is simple people notice you. Recently I had a conversation with MegT an Australian Blogger (its her avatar shown) We had both started to notice that every where we went we bumped into each other, now we have interests in similar niches but the reason we noticed each other was down to the fact we both use the same avatar in every location and by doing so we both have recognisable profiles and a sphere of trust.
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Like our Previous Stumbleupon vs Digg article this is based on statistics gathered from various sources, including clients, ourselves and friends and just about any one we could beg. However unlike our previous piece we had a much smaller data set as we only counted stumbles and Digg that brough 200 or more unique visits. Further more the data set was reduced simply by the fact we didn’t have the mouse tracking scripts enabled during the majority of our experiments however the data set is large enough to use so here goes…
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Oh yes welcome to another sarcastic Friday round up, this week has been a little farcical for many aspects of the web.

Digg Eats itself

Unless you have been sitting under a stone you can’t help but noticed that Digg community had a bit of a bad time last few days, you can read the full story on my own blog, though by far the best commentary is coming from Greywolf.
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I am a Digger, not a prolific one, I don’t spend all day on it, I’m not a “top” digger just Joe Blogs normal.
I am a Stumbler no power account here just an interest in Stumbleupon and until they took it away a healthy but not amazing audience score.

Therefore I am uniquely qualified to give you this guide as I am in the same boat as you when it comes to leverage traffic from these sites.
The statistics in this post is based on server logs, and Google Analytics data from a range of web sites over the last 4 months, most of the posts had minimal traffic from either source, it includes data from 2 front pages on Digg and what I’m dubbing a “super stumble”. Various people have contributed data so a big thanks to all of them including Nick, Olaf, and Ash.

A final note, these are stat’s we have collected and personal thoughts, think of it as a rule of thumb, for example advertisement you may get a front page Digg and make thousands with a good advert but I’m not sure you could do it 9 times out of 10.
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del.icio.us
Now we are very lucky at Venture Skills to be able to pull on a copywriter for our clients (but I’m cheap scate so you get me for the blog) most sites are not so lucky, however there are hundreds of tutorials on writing good Linkbait out there some go deep into branding and how focus your users on pages and sites, some look to women magazines for help. What ever your method this is article is about what to do when it fails…
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Its been a short break but here is the third part in our Create a site like Digg with no programming series, the first two have been two of our most popular posts so hopefully this third one will be well received.

In part 1 we set up a basic site that mimics Digg, allowing users to submit stories and people to vote up an down the story, part 2 saw us expand this with a range of modules, taking the site in different directions. For part 3 we are going to discuss how to categories the site and develop a taxonomy system.
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In Part 1 we managed to make a very basic Digg clone with no programming in this part we will continue the no programming feel and add some more modules to our project, this is not an exhausted list by any means just an example of some additional modules. The next part of this series we will look at organising all your links again without code and themeing.

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One of our clients wanted to create a social networking site similar to Digg, it will go live just after Christmas but in the process we have learnt a lot about Drupal and how sites like Digg work.

What’s Digg?
You may have been sitting under a rock for years and not no anything about Digg.
Digg is a user content driven site, users submit links to article and sites that interest them and other uses either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The most popular sites get onto the front page and can have literally thousands of hits this is reffered to as the Digg effect.

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