Easier photos, videos and user registration

OK, now back to some serious stuff -- unless anyone thinks we've been doing nothing but building in Second Life (which has been largely an evening and weekend, on-the-cheap experiment by me and my teammate Justinian).

Over the last few months we've completely rearchitected the Bakomatic platform to make it even more scalable on larger sites (more about that later). The new version is appropriately called Bakomatic 2.0. All of the code behind the scenes has been rewritten, and for the most part the user experience is the same. But there are a few new things, with more to come as always.

First, the "sexy" stuff. We've made it much easier to add photos and videos to blogs and content. All functionality around media shows up in a nice package below the text box for the blog entry.

Here's how it works. After you select photos, MP3s or files from your hard drive, they immediately begin to upload. You can then keep working on your blog or article entry, add captions, or find other files without waiting for the upload to finish. And if you're one of the growing number of user who tries to add YouTube URLs, we surface a box that lets you do just that (without getting into the messy business of allowing embed tags in the post body, which can open up security holes).

Here's an example of the new media tool with one photo and one YouTube video embedded. You can also see a YouTube video showing how to upload a YouTube video to your blog here.

The other thing we did -- which is not quite as exciting but has a much bigger impact -- is lower the bar of user registration for "passive" actions that don't justify getting a full user ID, such as reading a new story. Rather than having to go through a list of 20 questions and confirm their e-mail address, passive readers can simply answer three questions about their age, gender and zip code. That information is saved so that we can customize the experience for that user based on their demographic, starting with ads. We also let any user see three pages for "free" without giving up any of their information.

We think this will impact our overall traffic and also make search engines like Google News happy, as they'll be more likely to index our pages. We still require full registration to participate with blogs, comments and anything involving persona, but since statistically 80% or more of users will never participate in that way we don't see the need to make them jump through the same hoops.

The registration changes are already having a measurable impact on user experience and traffic. Where we used to get 5-10 complaints per day from people who were frustrated with having to fully register just to read a story, we now get an average of zero!

We're also seeing a large percentage increase in pageviews to news stories using this new method during a pre-holiday period during which we typically see a reduction in traffic. I can't share raw numbers, but here are the daily bar graphs from our metrics for just one week.

So that's what we've been up to in Bakomatic lately. We have some much bigger initiatives around businesses and Classifieds that will launch sometime in the first quarter. More on that then!

Technorati Tags: Bakomatic, Youtube,newspapers