Monday, November 27, 2006

Richard Branson meets…

My good friend Lee met Richard Branson today to interview him for a new web project he’s working on. The meeting is cool enough, but it’s the apparent ease that he got to meet him with that intrigues me.

I’ve been leaving celebrity sign-ups for the One Million Masterpiece to PR people, but now I’m thinking I might just try the personal approach. If I arm myself with a camera, why don’t I just go out there, meet these people and ask them to donate a picture on the spot. If they don’t they’ll look pretty crappy on screen, and if they do well, hey that’s more great publicity.

In all honesty I’m so busy that I doubt my plan will come to anything, but I’ll make some enquiries over the next few days and see if I can set anything up. Be warned celeb people!

Friday, November 24, 2006

Renderosity community backs OMM

After working with Lillian at Renderosity for a few weeks we finally put out a press release and established some marketing on the Renderosity site. At the moment we have a front page news piece, banner ad rotation and placement in their Thanksgiving newsletter.

Apart from all the new members we've signed up, the Renderosity alliance has also led to a few other high profile links that are fueling a growth in traffic to the site. Yesterday we achieved over 3,000 unique visitors and a huge number of sign-ups, although this was offset by the deletion engine, which is removing 5 blank accounts per hour. BTW this is why my massive drop in membership never materialised, as Eamonn had thought ahead and decided to delete accounts slowly in order to allow new members to take up the slack.

So anyway, we all welcome Renderosity to the team. To find out more about them and their support of OMM read their press release.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Join the OMM link and editorial team!

Do you have a spare 10 minutes a week that you could dedicate to helping out at the One Million Masterpiece? We're looking for a crack team of web users to help us generate and record important inbound links to the website.

OK, maybe not a crack team, but a very willing team who can contact websites and request links to the project. The idea is to centralise the process using a collaborative spreadsheet, and in that way make sure that we're being as efficient as possible and not all requesting the same links.

And while we're at it, we also require a newsletter editor who can compile a newsletter each month. Most of the content will come from blog posts that will just need re-writing in a user-friendly style. As editor you will be able to put your own plugs into the mailout, which will have a readership of 000's.

As a non-profit venture we really do need all the help we can get, so please be generous! If you are in a position to help at all, please do let me know.

Usual address – hello@millionmasterpiece.com or post a comment here.

What happened to the mass deletion?

Today's hot topics...
  • Deletion engine
  • Renderosity
  • Spanish website
  • technorati

Deletion engine

Avid readers will know about the deletion engine. So there I was, braced for a huge fall in member numbers, but for some reason it didn't happen. I'm going to get on to Eamonn about this as it's either me getting the wrong end of the stick, or something has broken.

In fact, traffic has been surging in the past few days. A few weeks ago we improved the Googleability of the pages - mainly the profiles and the forums. Well it seems that this has been picked up by Google, who are now delivering more and more visitors per day.

Renderosity

A while back I also mentioned an agreement I was working on with Renderosity, the arts community. On Friday we came to a formal arrangement, so now I'm really looking forward to getting some cross promotion going. To have access to a community like this will be so important in breaking the official world record, which I really want achieve over the Christmas break.

We're going to try and get a mail out to all Renderosity members next week, before the US Thanksgiving weekend.

Spanish website

I never thought translating a website would be so difficult. I've found out that the Spanish language roughly doubles the length of any English sentence, which plays havoc with the layout of a website. Also, the amount of hidden text within a site is extraordinary (think error messages, confirmation emails etc etc). It's taken two weeks longer just to get the text on the site but we're finally there - see a sneak preview here.

Technorati

I try not to be swayed too much by stats, but I'm really quite annoyed with technorati. My old blog address (thepaulfisherblog.com) had a good number of incoming links and was rated well by technorati. I had to change the address due to server problems, but made sure I properly redirected the domain. Unfortunately my technorati rating has plunged, as has my Google PR.

Why am I bothered? I don't know? I watch the major site indicators regularly because of the OMM and I think I'm just becoming obsessed.

Monday, November 13, 2006

Registration email problem

A few Monday morning treats to wake up to. Firstly a deluge of emails from people not receiving registration emails for the One Million Masterpiece. Eamonn had worked out the problem yesterday but the message didn’t get through to me until this morning.

So it looks like all outbound mail is not being sent. I’m awaiting an update on the situation but am hoping to resolve it by the end of the day. Anyone affected will receive their email this afternoon.

I’ve also got a major problem to fix regarding a plan I have for the restaurant business, but that story is for another day.

Friday, November 10, 2006

Some OMM website stats

Time to reflect on some OMM website stats.

At present the background traffic to the site is between 1,500 and 2,000 unique visitors per day with one quarter being returning members. According to SEOmoz we now have 20,969 links pointing to our domain - an excellent number. About 20% of our traffic comes from Google, primarily through people searching for a persons name and finding their profile on our site.

Membership is knocking on the door of 8,000 people, but, and it's a big fat mama BUT, that number isn't going to last... We started a deletion engine running 13 days ago, with everyone owning a blank image at the time being contacted to let them know that they needed to draw a picture within 14 days. These these guys now have just 24 hours before their accounts are wiped.

I'm pretty nervous about this as it's going to reduce the total number of members significantly. After the mass delete tomorrow we could be back down to 6,000, so anyone that's received an email warning - log in and draw something now - ANYTHING - PLEASE !!! :)

According to Technorati there are 233 links to us from 101 blogs. I noticed that the last entry was by Linzi Stoppard, the violinist (?) extraordinaire. Thanks Linzi, I know your Myspace site is extremely popular and so this is bound to help us out significantly. Now everyone, go buy her album...

Long long road…

So the journey continues. I’ve had quite a difficult October so I though a pretty long entry was in order.

OMM

The One Million Masterpiece is just coming out of a pretty big development sweep that has changed the registration gateway, playback tools, drawing tools etc etc. The last major event in November will be the launch of the Spanish site which should take place early next week.

The most difficult element of this whole project has been the funding model. Because of the limited amount of time we couldn’t fundraise before the project began, and therefore we have been putting budgets together for a moving target. An example is the Schools Programme. We were confident of grant funding for this area and so based all our assumptions on this. However, having been led up the garden path a little I received news in October that we weren’t going to be supported.

By this point the Schools Programme was fully developed on paper and was simply awaiting execution. All of the plans had to be frantically reworked and a new financing route found – all in the space of two weeks.

I must admit that this project is also making my normally good natured personality somewhat bitter at the complete lack of support people have out there for charity projects. I’m not talking about the people joining the project and submitting artwork, I’m talking about the businesses and individuals who we are asking for help, support and expertise. It seems that for every 100 people we ask for help, just one will give us the time of day.

Come on people – this is a one off event and a chance to do something fantastic. Let’s see a little passion and energy. Take a risk on doing something good for a change!

I’ve got an interview with a magazine lined up for Monday, and I’ve heard that Elle magazine will be featuring us in February. I’m also working with the artistic community Renderosity on a join promotion deal that could bring in a significant wave of members and could help us reach the world record in time for Christmas.

Moving house

On an entirely more positive note, I have a new house. Having made the move down to Kent in September we’ve been living with family awaiting our house sale to complete. It finally went through on the 1st November, and we immediately sent round a team of builders to knock it in to shape. It’s currently gutted, but we’r still hoping to move in within two weeks.

Monday, November 06, 2006

New image playback tools

Hooray! Eamonn has just finished an upgrade to the replay tools that will make replaying images within the One Million Masterpiece much easier. We've now got three replay speeds, a pause button and a rewind.

The cool thing about the new tools is that they allow you to view the building of images much more quickly, enabling you to find embedded messages, secrets and disguarded pictures more easily. There are loads of pictures out there with hidden content within them - take Laura's Halloween pumpkin that makes a festive appearance half way through her drawing, or Craig's secret declaration of love.

BTW this beautiful image was supplied by Vicky Chan.