YouBundle

Announcing Revenue Sharing!

Well this is the most exciting time because as of March 31st 2009,  Revenue Sharing for the YouBundle userbase is now active.

Wait.   What does that mean?

It means that you can put in your Google Adsense, Amazon Associates and eBay Partner Network codes into your profile page and we will display Ads with your code a certain percentage of the time.

What this means is that you can earn extra money from doing the thing that you love best.   Bundling!

We also allow you to add your Google Analytics code so you can track your Bundle in your own stats area.   for more information you can visit the YouBundle Revenue Share information page or watch the video below.  When you are ready to get started, simply go to your profile and insert you codes and start Bundling

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Introducing HOTTY the HOT Bundle Bot

I want to take a moment to introduce you all to HOTTY

She is our new Hot Bundle Bot.

What she does is analyzes the content and interactions with Bundles and determines which Bundles get promoted to the front page, followed and can forever be found in the youbundle.com/hot/ drilldown

She takes 38 criteria into account in making her decisions.   If your Bundle is Bumped by her that means it has been promoted to the front Page.

If you want to know more about HOTTY,  then you can visit her profile and leave her some nice words at

http://www.youbundle.com/u/hotbundle

Bundle On!

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follow no follow no follow follow

There have been numerous questions over the recent time peroid regarding YouBundle links to outside sites and the follow/no follow tag.   After some research and testing we are pleased to announce a cohernet policy for the moment on following links.

It is quite simple,  link pages are no longer followed, however any Bundle that is promoted to the HOT page will have all of its links followed directly from the Bundle page with anchor text intact.

What does this mean for all you Bundlers out there?

Well it means that Bundles that go HOT and promoted to the Front Page will get followed.   How does a Bundle go HOT?

Well we have a algorhythim that determines this, however we can give you a few pointers

• Make sure that there is a wide variety of sites within your Bundle covering the topic and being an authoritative resource.   Ie.. a Bundle with your site and the squidoo lens and ezine article linking again to your site would not suffice.
• Make sure you have a thumbnail!   We like thumbnails
• Get traffic to your bundle and lots of Bumps.   If you have the above criteria and also lots of traffic and Bumps, there is a good chance it will go HOT!

Generally it is not that hard to have a HOT Bundle.   Just approach the topic with the mind of creating a useful resource rather than promoting a single site and watch what happens.

Thats All

ps…  stay tuned as very soon we will unveil a new program which will allow you to earn an extra income from Bundling!    It will be fun!

Bundle On!

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New! HOT Bundles on Home Page

As some of you can see, sometime last night we changed the Bundles that were displaying on our Home Page.   Previously we had it so that ANY Bundle that was Created or Updated automatically got Bumped to the top of the Front Page.   This was a great way to start out.

Now we have implemented a slight change to encourage daily viewers of our homepage.    The Front Page will display all the Hot Bundles and drill down from there.   We have also implemented a new algorithm which will determine what the Hot Bundles are taking into account various criteria.

So keep making those Bundles and if you want to make sure your Bundle gets on the Homepage you can do a few things to help your chances

• Make sure the Bundle is offering quality cross-site information.    Usually Bundles that are self-promotional linking all to the same site will not get promoted.  This also includes interlinking sites with the same ultimate destination
• Include a Thumbnail photo.    We like Thumbnails.   While it is not necessary, Thumbnails make us happy and increase the chances of getting promoted to the HOT page.
• Get Views and Bumps.   The more views and Bumps, the more chances of Getting promoted.   You can do this by embedding your bundle in your Website or submitting it to the various social bookmarking sites provided  (hint - Stumbleupon loves Great Bundles)
• Invite your Friends to view your Bundle.

Lastly if you miss the old view of seeing the Recently Updated Bundles, it is still available by looking here.

Leave feedback in the comment section.

Bundle On!

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NEW! Individual Pages for Links - Human Generated Web

Welcome all back from the extended holiday.   On this first working day of 2009, we would like to announce that each Bundle now links to an individually created link page for the link.    This will be a common page that will be shared by all bundles containing that link in question.    It will have all the descriptions used for that link, a larger thumbnail, photo or embed.     Soon we will implement commenting and rating on the links.

The point that we are moving to is that Links are DATA.  We Analyze the properties of the various links based on the Bundles that link in.   In doing so we move closer towards a more holistic understanding of the human generated web.

To simplify.    Lets look at a new LINK Page for Example.

This is a page devoted to a specific link.    You can see that this particular link lives in two bundles created by two different people with different themes and descriptions.    Got it?!!

It is in the infancy right now, however you can see how this can lead to massive organization and analysis of human generated Data.

Enjoy!

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5 Moving Technology Trends for 2009

We are going to start the New Year off with 5 slightly outrageous predictions that have a good chance of being realized as we are following some of the major trends in Internet and Technology.

Without Further Ado - 5 not so outrageous Predictions for 2009

5 - Apple makes a Mainstream Multitouch Computer that bridges the gap between iPhone and Laptop.

We can see this one coming miles away.  With the announcement last year of Microsoft Surface, which is a touchscreen coffee table and all quiet on Apples Front, it is the logical next step for Apple to take their iPhone magic a step bigger.   We envision either a laptop or portable tablet type thing that people will effectively be able to work on the go.   Apple Tablet speculation comes and goes, but we think 2009 is the year that it breaks through.

4 - Virtual Reality will gain by leaps and bounds.

We may not have even realized it, but the Nintendo Wii is the first ever virtual reality application to go mainstream.    Right now the functionality is limited to simulating swinging a tennis racket or light saber or perhaps correcting your yoga pose, but it is indicative of things to come.    The motion sensing controllers were the first step and next was the Wii Fit which senses balance.

Now what we will be looking for in 2009 is a apparatus that can scale mainstream and completely measure all of your body movements and be affordable and non-obtrusive.    One cool technology that caught our attention was the lightglove which has not quite got beyond the demo phase yet, but uses hookups to the body and measures movements via lightwaves it projects.

Another is the interactive mirror which seems a bit of a novelty at this point, but we can see the technology moving evolving into scanning full body movements for sake of VR simulation.

3.  Social Bookmarking goes mainstream and becomes useful.

Well we all know about Delicious and friends and they seem to be good for what they are.    The later half of 2008 brought us a sort of next-generation of Social Bookmarking where it allows the users to take it a step further and organize their bookmarking into niche targeted groupings and collaborate with the community.

This will continue further and deeper into 2009 with sites like Twine, YouBundle and Google Search Wiki attempting to cross the line between social bookmarking and search with that added layer of human expertise to ensure clarity in the quest for the ultimately targeted search result.

2.  Twitter tries to become more like Facebook.   Facebook tries to become more like Twitter.

I was talking to my non-techie friend the other day who has dabbled with Twitter and he told me that he uses Facebook like I Twitter and the difference is that he is updating all his friends, while I am updating all my colleagues.  With Facebooks attempted purchase of Twitter for 500m in ghost stock in November, it is clear that the two companies are converging to a similar place.

Look for Twitter to add more social features and Facebook to further refine its update and friending system so that it can further blur the line between friend and colleague and access juicy B2B advertising revenues.

1. Google Releases a fully functional Operating System for the PC.   Backhand Microsoft and stabs up Linux.

To get to our number #1 prediction for 2009, we simply have to examine what the tech world is missing.      Its obvious to some.    Windows is Broken, Mac’s are only for distinguished folks and Linux require that you are comfortable with command lines.    Can you see the pain in the Market?    Who is going to attack this pain other than the big Google ?

First Chrome, then Android and in 2009 we will see a Windows machine compatible PC release of Android  (or whatever they will call it)   This release will be so intelligent, free and Windows Driver compatible so it can be one-click installed over any existing Windows installation.   It will have the magic of Linux, but not require a degree in CS in order to be able to constantly use.

Below is the companion Bundle for this Blog Post with all of the links mentioned Bundled and ready to go.

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Call for Funding

Without getting too much into our history at this point, we are announcing that YouBundle is now officially seeking early stage financing to ramp up our efforts

Up until this point it has been a self-funded operation and by this we were able to build a functioning basic site and small but dedicated userbase (Thank you!)

The Funding will be used for

• Scaling to be able to handle user Growth
• Improvements to Visual Design and UI
• Bringing another full time developer onboard
• Execution of data-portability
• Implementation of full wiki-like (not same but similar) collaboration on Bundles to turn them into living entities.

We have the model and the vision and now it is time to expand.   We have contacted and been contacted by a number of investors.   We will chose the investor that shares our vision and encourages us to continue our lean and efficient operation while adding support and knowledge for growth, partnerships and expansion.  For us, the money is just part of the need with the correct investor being paramount.

We are probably looking for somewhere in low-mid 100k’s as we can do quite a bit with limited amounts of capital as we are experts in keeping the burn rate low.   (Bootstrapping taught us this)

If you are an investor and interested in learning more or can recommend a suitable investor, please contact us via our contact form and we can begin a dialogue ASAP.  (we dont stop for the holidays)

We will leave you with an embedded Bundle on VC Funding resources.

Merry Christmas

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New Semantic Recommendation Technology

Semantic. Semantic. Semantic

There we said it.    If we did the same thing 3 years ago it would have been called a ;great sorting algorithm’.   But now the buzzword for ‘great algorithm’  is ’semantic.’   So we will go with it and officially announce what some of you may have already noticed.

If you go to the main bundle page of almost any bundle and scroll to the bottom you will see a section that says  “You may also Like..”

Well we have done a few ’semantic’ things in the backend and are selecting the Bundles that we think will best complement the current Bundle you are viewing.    Check it out and start browsing around it is a great way to explore.  This will also do a few other specialized personalization tricks that we will go more into later.

On a similar note, we are also announcing that we have revamped our Internal Bundle search engine with this new semantic technology.   Now when you search for ANYTHING on YouBundle.com instead of getting boring text results, you will instead get multimedia rich Bundle Boxes with thumbs stats and ratings.   Give it a try.   We have such an eclectic database of Bundles you never know what you search term may return.

To end we will leave you with a Bundle one of our users made on his research on exactly what is the Semantic Web - I suppose we should know as we are now officially part of the Semantic club. 

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WTF? YouTube Embedded Video Search Bar

UPDATE:   We were able to Fix it on our embeds to remove the search bar by appending

&showsearch=0

to the end of the URL see below in our widget it is now fixed

Reports are coming in from all across the internet about the new Search Bar that is plastered across the header of embedded.     Now when this is on a regular size embedded video it is kinda ok.   See

However..

For the sake of providing concise Bundles of Information - the embeded videos within our Bundles are of a smaller size.   So the video will look like.

See it in action here in this embedded Bundle.

UPDATE WE FIXED IT BY ADDING &showsearch=0 to the end of each embed.   Its all good can go home now.   See it working again in the embed below

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Why Should I Tag Other Peoples Bundles?

One of the frequent questions our users ask us is why they should tag other peoples Bundles?   Especially if that Bundle already seems to have adequate tags that describe it.    For example lets say that you were looking at a Bundle on Bhutan for Example.   I don’t know about you, but I have always wanted to go to Bhutan.

So if you go to this Bundle you will see that the natural and logical tags for this would in fact be “Bhutan” and probably a few others. So why would you bother then to tag it again as “Bhutan”? There are a few reasons for this

1. By Tagging it you add that Tag to your personal Tag cloud on your profile page.    This tag will go in with all the other tags you have included in your Bundles.   This personal tag cloud serves as sort of a quick navigation around the various Bundles.
2. By Tagging you add weight to the tag and help our semantic intelligence determine the true and best definition of the Bundle.    Meaning that when I look at the Bundle, I know it is “Bhutan” and when you look at it, you know also it is “Bhutan”  however the machine needs us to reinforce that Bhutan is in fact a good tag for this Bundle.

That is All.    Tag and Enjoy!

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