MontrealTechWatch features over the year (4)
This post continues the series about MTW’s first-year anniversary. Today, I would like to present features that were added to the blog in order to enrich its content. Most of them are long forgotten, while a few survived the releases cycles.
One of the first feature found here was the mybloglog widget, which gives a rough feeling of who is reading and visiting the blog.
Many find the mybloglog widget a gimmick — I just find a way to enlighten the content of the blog, which is heavy on text, and most of the time, so serious.Another inaugural feature was a chat widget, coming from shoutmix.
I found it interesting, but few bothered to actually use it so it was scrapped after a few weeks of trial.
One feature that was added quickly to the blog was a tumblr feed, which is central place for quick/early news or web pages I discover over the Internet, thanks to the super-handy bookmarklet. Up to this day, the mtw tumblr blog has lots of “exclusive” posts and quickbits.Montreal Tech Watch also has a calendar - it started out as an ical feed, but I discovered few bothered to actually subscribe to the ical, so now it’s parsed and displayed on the third column of the blog.
The calendar and the mtw tumblr blog are I believe useful and provide quality content to anyone who is interesting in technology in Montréal.Now, there were also lots of features that were added to MontrealTechWatch but were ultimately scrapped.
One of them was OpenSpace, which was presented a wiki blog. It was meant to gather user-generated news and posts, and had both french and english interfaces. Go figure, it didn’t work. I guess people want ownership and their names added to any content they create.
MontrealTechWatch also had forums, using Vanilla, which was deployed on the second version of the blog. These didn’t work too, but I believe it’s mostly a lack of promotion and communication. It’s ok with me though - because I am not sure I have the time to moderate those forums.
In the first 6 months, there were also monthly summaries of tech news in Montreal, where I gathered significant product launches, investment news, new technologies coming etc. This is not carried anymore. I like the idea though, so this might come up again, in a new format.
The last feature launched for MTW was the jobs category, which allowed new tech companies to advertise open positions. I believe this feature is an asset for MontrealTechWatch. I actually know about 3 companies which found talent thanks to the post, and I am entertaining the idea of actively developing this as a serious revenue source for MTW.
As you can see, MontrealTechWatch has tried lots of features over the past year, many failed, many were innovative and developed within just a few days hours, and just a few survived, but I have to say I am quite happy with the way it turned out.
good on you for experimenting with different stuff heri.
the blog is certainly MUCH better than it was in its early days ;)
congrats on 1yr!
Congratulations Heri
Mat, Philips, thanks! here’s hoping you will find MTW enjoyable as I do for the next year
Congrats Heri !
My google reader stats indicate that I read 55% of your posts in the last 30 days and 100% of your blog titles (;-))making it number one in my list ! Keep up the excellent work !
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