Innovation and New Cool Stuff
Just a scratch-pad of some sites which may be cool to some, and some techniques to make a site cooler.
Sites
The Hao Hao Report is a bit like Digg, but for the Chinese related webspace.
There are loads and loads and loads of websites that seek to 'introduce' someone to living in China. Many of them are OK, few are great. One with the potential to be great is Lost Laowai (either this was a spin-off of haohaoreport, or the other way around). Writers can join, write a high quality piece about China, and they're rewarded for it by getting all of the AdSence revenue from their pages. To directly reward writers for writing is a nice idea in an age of questional motivations behind the founders of 'community' sites (someone else writes the content, the owner gets the advertising revenue). Just in it's infancy, it would be interesting to see how this goes.
Chinalyst is a very very simple idea, and uses CMS coftware perfect for the task. The gap was there. Similar to the haohaoreport, but instead of being digg-like and getting users to submit and vote on content, it carries everything - for every blog submitted by a user, Chinalyst automatically fetches every story by RSS/XML feed. To find out more, check out their FAQ.
Techniques
There are widgets at the bottom of all stories on this site. Clicking on one of those widgets allows a user to add the corresponding story to their bookmarks on del.icio.us, submit it to Slashdot, etc (basically any kind of mass-aggregator). They're useful for some readers, don't take up too much space, and add some colour variety(!). They can also draw in traffic, if a story from here gets posted to Slashdot, for example, that's thousands of views in minutes.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Furl
Google
Yahoo
Technorati
hao hao
Slashdot It
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