Overview
Our Twitter integration is live today; it allows kachingle.com, each Medallion, and every Kachingler to tweet automatically.
Users need to link their Twitter accounts to their Kachingler account and Medallion(s). Details below.
These principles guided our design and implementation:
- tweet conservatively – e.g. at the beginning err on the side of fewer tweetable events rather than bombard Twitterville with automated tweets
- use the Kachingler’s @twitterusername when available
- integrate just enough to be interesting and give us a platform from which we can learn and get your input on how we should enhance the functionality
The Kachingle Online Community Meeting on September 16, 2010 will be devoted to a discussion of our Twitter integration.
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We’ve implemented our second social widget on Kachingle.com: “Who’s Most Like Me Here“, a.k.a. WMLMH.
Our first social widget is the one here on the right “Who’s Kachingling Whom” ->
Our new WMLMH widget displays to Kachinglers who they are most similar to with respect to other Kachinglers on a particular site or blog.
For example, on “Carta” and on “Mama is…” my soulmates are:
Cynthia’s WMLMH on Carta
Cynthia’s WMLMH on Mama is…
I can use this information to find other blogs or sites that are likely to be appealing to me.
For instance, if I click on the link to Heather Cushman-Dowdee I go to her “Sites I Visit” page and discover additional great content that I wasn’t aware of such as “Hathor the Cowgoddess“.
So, all Kachinglers can do the same exploration by visiting the pages for the sites or blogs they are kachingling at Kachingle.com. Just go to www.kachingle.com and either find the sites you are kachingling thru a search of AllSites, or simply login and you will be placed on your “Sites I Visit” page.
We are eager to get feedback from Kachinglers on the WMLMH widget so that we can improve and expand it. Right now the matching algorithm is quite simple — we will make it more comprehensive in the future. And most importantly we will productize the widget so that Kachingle-enabled sites and blogs can place it right next to their Medallion.
Our Medallion engineer, Sharon, solved a tricky CSS3 problem regarding text truncation. She just started her blog, In Silico, and shared what she discovered in a recent blog post. All nitty gritty engineers are invited to review and comment!
CSS3 text truncation and ellipses: even in Firefox, and without the styling constraints
A few weeks ago I reported that the peak daily Medallion views had reached 750,000 and predicted that they would reach 1,000,000 in July.
Some very good news — at the end of the June we had three days with >1,000,000 Medallion views!
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All of us here are very happy to tell you about the new home page for http://www.kachingle.com which went live a couple of days ago. The new design features a live newsfeed of kachingling activity, an improved video player and the Bunny Button. Most importantly we expect this version to more directly convey the nature and benefits of Kachingle with a bit of style and humor.
The New Homepage
The Bunny Button
After several months of Kachingle being publicly live, here are the results!
- Peak daily Medallion views: 750,000
- Average weekday Medallion views (last 2 weeks): 365,000
- Growth rate: doubling every month
- Expected date to reach 1M peak daily Medallion views = July, 2010
UPDATE IN JULY: Kachingle Medallion Views reach 1,000,000 at end of June!
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Kachingle founder Cynthia Typaldos has been traveling in Germany and Austria this week, and has been interviewed by several blogger and journalists while meeting with Site Owners and others in what has become a booming market for the concept of using social cents to support your favorite content.
Here are links to some of Cynthia’s interviews:
Austria
- BarCamp Vienna: Presentation
- Virtual Discussion in Salzburg
Germany
- MediaTalk in Munich in Journalist academy with Bern Osswald (he wrote http://www.pin-blog.eu/medienoekonomie/revolution-durch-lousy-pennies), PodCast
- Social Media Club Breakfast in Berlin “feels like home in Silicon Valley”: video
- SocialBar Berlin: Presentation
- E-Book-News (which sports a Kachingle Medallion on their site) Interview
- Golem.de (news site for IT professionals) Interview
- Mediengespräch “social payment” event in Munich: Markos Media podcast, Bernd Oswald’s coverage post
Cynthia will write her own blog post soon with lots more details about the trip and these and other meetings. She will also thank the wonderful hosts of these meetings and all the people that attended, or interviewed, or participated in some way! We got lots and lots of feedback about Kachingle that will help us continue to grow and improve our service.
While there, she also announced the lowering of the fees Kachingle collects for processing Pay-Outs to Site Owners (now only 15%, with Kachingle covering all PayPal costs), and the lowering of the threshold for receiving a Pay-Out to $3.35. Why that specifically odd amount? It’s the price of Cynthia’s favorite drink at Starbucks! We figure Site Owners social cents Pay-Out should at least buy them a grande iced latte.
Because of the traction and interest in Kachingle in Germany, Austria (and Switzerland), I am planning a trip there to meet in person with the many bloggers, site owners, press, etc.
These are the dates:
- 28th May – arrive in Frankfurt, Germany
- 29th/30th May – Meet & Greet in Vienna, Austria
- 30th May – Meet & Greet in Salszburg, Austria
- 31st May – Meet & Greet in Munich, Germany
- 1st & 2nd June – Meet & Greet in Berlin, Germany
- 3rd June – Meet & Greet in Hamburg, Germany
- 4th June – Meet & Greet in Cologne, Germany
- 5th June – Meet & Greet in Frankfurt, Germany
I hope to meet many of you if not all of you! I am really looking forward to having in person conversations.
More information about these events will be posted soon. Write a comment here if you want to meet up!
Also feel free to contact me directly at cynthia AT kachingle.com, in German at deutsch@kachingle.com or on Twitter @kachingle.
Cynthia
Kachingle is pleased to announce that our Medallion is now in German!
For readers who have their browsers set with German as the primary language, the Medallion will now be served up in German instead of English. If you are one of these readers you will see the German Medallion right here on our blog.
In another Medallion enhancement, we have created a WordPress plug-in for the Medallion. For details on that please see Kachingle Medallion now available as a WordPress Plugin
The German Market spoke to us!
We want to thank the many early adopters of Kachingle in Germany, Austria and Switzerland — these sites include blogs, travel magazines, musicians, political and economic group blog, a major newspaper, blogs about passions e.g. trains, celebrity watching, art, architecture…the range is enormous and the quality fantastic.
Special thanks to Carta.info, our first German language site, and vorwärts.de, our first German newspaper site.
Given all of this interest by German language sites/blogs it was easy to make it a priority that they should have the Medallion in German to attract more Kachinglers and encourage more content and service providers to join. We also carefully listened to the German bloggers who wrote about Kachingle and helped to spread the word. Thanks for all of the attention and analysis — we look forward to your feedback on the German Medallion.
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