Posted September 5th, 2009
You may have noticed that SwingVine has had a few brief outages over the last few days. We wanted to let you know that we’re aware of the problems and actively working on them. We’ve been experiencing some connectivity issues with our datacenter that hopefully will be completely resolved by Monday. We’ve also been working on some surprises behind the scenes that we think you’ll be blown away by, and that we’ll share with you next week, but that may have contributed to the instability.
Stick with us and let us know if you see any problems.
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Posted August 23rd, 2009
We’ve been working for a while now on Swingbot, a fearless automaton who helps add data to SwingVine.
Now you can see one of Swingbot’s first new capabilities: it reads Wikipedia. For casual users, this means there’s a lot more data on the site. In fact, we’ve gone from 170K to 1.3M topic pages on SwingVine. For contributors, this means less time entering mundane data (like all 20 tracks for an album) and more time doing fun stuff, like leaving opinions or sharing content.
One note: When you view certain pages, you may see a waiting screen for a few seconds as Swingbot grabs information about the topic in real time from Wikipedia. This only happens the first time you look at a specific page on SwingVine and helps us conserve valuable computational resources until real users like you demonstrate interest in a piece of content.
We hope you find the new data useful. The only question now is: What will Swingbot read next?
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Posted June 23rd, 2009
First, the runner-ups in the Malika Hype Up Contest are:
*
Richard S. from
Van Nuys, CA;
* Eric C. from Hayward, CA; and
* Chris H. from Irvine, CA.
Each of the runner-ups will receive an autographed photo of Malika.
And now for the grand prize winner (drumroll…). The grand prize winner goes to Amber A. from Pittsburgh, PA! Amber will receive a phone call from Malika, a $50 Best Buy gift certification, and an autographed photo of Malika.
Congrats to all the prize winners and thanks for participating in the contest!
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Posted June 23rd, 2009
Congratulations to our Get Fitted for Summer Giveaway contest winners! It was a very close call for the Fashion Ensemble prize but after over an hour of deliberation, the judges awarded the $100 Moksha gift certificate to Victoria K. for her ensemble entitled MoMA. The $50 Moksha gift certificate went to Melissa N., who also submitted an awesome ensemble entitled Heyoka.
Happy shopping and have a great summer, folks!
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Posted June 2nd, 2009
We just released a few features to streamline some of the most common tasks on the site: viewing videos, searching, and contributing.
In the multimedia arena, SwingVine now automatically loads YouTube videos for music, movies, and TV shows without requiring contributors to manually embed these videos. Now you’ll never be more than a click away from viewing clips of your favorite new content.
For search, we now support inline results to get you to the page you want even faster.
And for contributors, we’ve greatly reduced the amount of work needed to create compelling new pages. Whether it’s from the new inline search box or from a details page, contributors can use our new wizard dialogs to walk through the various steps of creating a content-packed pages with dramatically fewer clicks (it used to take up to 5 clicks to add an artist to an album; now it’s just one extra click to do this for a new album). These wizards also incorporate Google image and video search results automatically so you can add lots of multimedia to new pages in one seamless step.
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Posted April 28th, 2009
We pleased to announce that we have partnered with one of the Bay Area’s hottest up-and-coming artists, Malika, to bring you the Malika Hype Up Contest.
The contest is simple, click the hype button for Malika on SwingVine or on Malika’s MySpace to show her some love and you’ll be entered to win an autographed photo of Malika.
Want to win even bigger? Use our sharing tools to embed Malika’s Hype Up Widget on your MySpace or blog and help promote for Malika by getting your friends to click the hype up button. Make sure you sign in before embedding the widget so we can give you points for promoting.
Malika’s top promoter will win:
• A phone call with Malika herself
• A $50 Best Buy Gift Certificate
• An autographed photo of Malika
Check out the Malika Hype Up Contest Page to learn more.
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Posted March 31st, 2009
We’re proud to announce our first ever contest for Seattle-area users. Sponsored in conjunction with hip local fashion boutique Moksha Clothing, entering the contest is as simple as signing up and following Moksha Clothing’s profile. Really, it’s that easy.
Here are the full details.
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Posted March 31st, 2009
Have you ever wanted to create buzz for a new fashion trend that people haven’t caught on to yet? Or maybe you’ve wanted to get the word out about your favorite TV show that isn’t getting its due? Well we’ve got news for you… We’re pleased to introduce our new Hype Control, a voting tool that lets you “hype up” anything on SwingVine. Simply click the “hype up” button for all of your favorites as you browse SwingVine, and you’ll help propel them to the top of our rankings. With this feature, you now have complete control over what gets to the top of SwingVine.
Another cool aspect of the hype control is that you embed it directly into your blog or website. Say you’ve discovered the next great book, by embedding our widget on your blog you can not only inform your readers of your discovery, but also increase engagement by allowing them to actively hype it up directly from your site. And you get the added benefit that the widget links back to a SwingVine page that you have full control over.
What better way to demonstrate this new tool than by finally answering the age old question…Which Star Wars film is best (Prequel Trilogy? What Prequel Trilogy?) Sign-in and hype up your favorite:
Some other highlights from our latest release:
• New Categories – Due to popular demand we’ve added “TV” and “Tech”. Now you can add and promote your favorite gadgets, websites, apps and TV shows. No more writing “(TV Series)” on Movie pages (yeah, we noticed).
• Redesigned Homepage – You’ve made so much kick-ass (can I say that?) content that we had to put more of it directly on the homepage. You can also refine and sort directly from the homepage, making it a great place to drop in and browse.
• New Leaderboard – To shine the spotlight on some of our die hard users, we created a new leaderboard at the bottom of the homepage.
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Posted March 1st, 2009
Yes, we’re displaying some Google
ads now. We know that there are many sites out there that have loud, annoying, and crowded banners and pop-unders, so we’re trying to minimize the number of
ads on SwingVine and present them in a way that is not visually jarring. We also know that we can’t blend these
ads in completely with the aesthetics and content of the site, but we’re hoping that you find these
ads relevant at least once in a while.
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Posted February 22nd, 2009
We recently pushed out a few new features and enhancements and thought we’d call them out here on our blog. Some highlights are:
• More Sharing Tools – You can now share with non-users via email, and post your favorite pages to Facebook and MySpace.
• Improved Site Performance – Many of our high traffic pages now load much faster
• Longer Edit Window – You can now edit your descriptions, reviews and vines for up to a year.
• All Page Types Support Media – ‘Nuff Said
• Improved Search – No longer need to include diacritics (accents, umlauts) in searches. For example, searching for “chloe” now returns the brand Chloé
And as always we’ve tried to fix a few lingering bugs that you guys have pointed out in your feedback. Hope these changes improve your SwingVine experience.
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