Marktd – Week 3 Review

At the end of week 3, what’s surprised us most, is the number of compliments we had for our new site, Marktd. We’ve never had so many mentions regarding the launch of a new site – and we like the fact that some are international. Comments were made by Trendcentral, Sten Pittet, T37, Le Blog A Ollie, We’ll Know When We Get There, Social Marketing, Future Is Now, Blogs4Biz, Customer Evangelists, SEM Pro, ShopTalk, Open and John Battelle.

The key criticism made is about the number of users in the system. A fair criticism. Saying that – there are over 150 people registered to submit and vote on the site!

What’s also happened is we’ve seen people put ‘Add This To Marktd’ links under their blog posts – e.g. Planning Outside In, Search Engine Lowdown and Lifefilter. This blows our minds.

Meanwhile – ‘Digg-like’ community edited news sites seem to be the in thing for the next few days/weeks/months. AOL relaunched Netscape as a community-edited site with voting and submission tools – and I’ve been mailed a few times by people asking how I did it. (The answer is: www.pligg.com)

The two aspects that I really like about Marktd is:

(a) you can see who likes the content you do and you can make them your ‘friend’ (click ‘discuss’ and see who else voted)

(b) you can follow the submissions of your favorite Marktd user by RSS! (by clicking on an individual user’s link, you get to a page with a link to their Marktd RSS.

So, some tasks for the next week:

• Improve navigation, so you know what section you’re in – new, latest, top
• We’re thinking of changing Latest to ‘Main’ or something like that
• Make the site more search engine friendly by adapting the meta-tagging for the post
• Fix a trackback ping bugg, where the Marktd’s name doesn’t appear on the site it pings

Any further comments welcome in the comments box.

One other thing: if you’re a blogger then feel free to add all relevant content from your site onto Marktd. Don’t be shy or humble. Marktd has been created to democratize access to marketing news and information. Add your content and see whether the mob thinks it’s important. Hey – you may learn something about what content works and what doesn’t!