Coming across so many of these niche social networks made us realize that we needed a social network of our own, dedicated entirely to people who have built swickis. Hence, with a little help from our friends at Ning, we built the network swicki shoutouts. This network is a great place for swicki builders to share what they have learned while building, training, and promoting their swickis. With over 100,000 swickis being built to date, there should be plenty of knowledge to go around.

Even if you don't want to join the community, there are plenty of tips in the forum that will help you train and promote your swicki. In many cases, making a few tweaks to how you've trained your swicki, or taking a few minutes to make sure you've promoted your swicki in the right places, can make a huge impact on the success of your swicki.

Come join or browse the community now at shoutouts.swicki.com

We're always keeping an eye out for swicki builders that are doing a little extra to promote their swickis and have thus come up with a list of some of the most popular swickis listed on Widgetbox. As you can see, a well-promoted and well-trained swicki within a widget gallery will generate a significant number of subscriptions.

Come find out more about Widgetbox at our freshly-created Widgetbox information page.

Most of the swickis we see being built are great - focused and trained on an interesting topic, aimed at surfacing meaningful and relevant content to an existing or growing audience. We are honored and excited to share them with the world.

Now that we have left the petri-dish-that-is-beta, the quality and relevance of the swickis that we host is more important to us than ever. Irrelevant, abusive, neglected or otherwise malicious swickis are not only a poor use of our product, they tarnish the reputation of swickis everywhere.

So to help the great swickis really shine, starting today we are more strictly enforcing our terms and conditions and are extending our initial swicki review cycle to a program of regular editorial reviews.

Only swickis that continue to meet our standards of quality and relevance will be shown in our directory, enabled to show custom HTML to their swicki templates, or activate revenue sharing.

We are also adding a link to all swickis allowing users to flag them to our reviewers as abusive or spam. We have always immediately deleted swickis that we find abusive, malicious or just plain spammy.

If you feel that your swicki has been unfairly affected by our policy, please contact us.

The Crunchies Finalist Nominations:

1. Best International Start-up
2. Best User-Generated Content Start-Up
3. Best in Internet Technology and Innovation

Mashable Open Web Awards Winner Nominations:

1. Favorite Social Search Site

Thanks to all who have already voted!

Steven Marder, our CEO at Eurekster, participated in the "Actionable Social Media" panel, along with folks from BuzzLogic, iCrossing, Search Engine Guide and Wildfire Strategic Marketing. The room was filled to capacity, indicating a pretty strong interest in this track they call "Fundamentals."

Based on the diversity of businesses these speakers represent, it was interesting to see where Anne Kennedy of Beyond Ink was guiding the discussions. The agenda promised we'd be looking at "community-driven sites that allow content sharing via tagging and can be a great way to tap into links and search-driven traffic." The question really was how marketers and publishers can leverage social media services and strategies in an appropriate manner.

Todd Parson of Buzzlogic was kicking things off by providing a few impressive numbers on blogging and the huge amount of UGC out there. Did you know 57 million Americans read blogs, 60% of which want to get an opinion? He also brought up the concept of editorial vs. acquired linking, which led to one of the key themes in this talk: authenticity.

Adam Lavelle of iCrossing talked about how we were "social animals" who use content to connect, which personal networks make social. His golden rule was "listen and be useful". (Amazingly enough, he did manage to go through 35 slides in under 5 minutes).

Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide elaborated on the different benefits of image tagging, specifically using flickr as an example, such as a deeper level of community engagement, as well as traffic growth.

Tamara Kremer of Wildfire highlighted del.icio.us as an example for social bookmarking and the opportunity for creating a deep and rich resource library to be leveraged for marketing efforts.

To wrap up, Steven outlined the change in media from 1.0 to social media, and search 1.0 (such as Google, Yahoo and Ask), and the next iteration: Social Search. He described how social search leverages the characteristics of social media, such as de-centralization, participation, and such, and how this allows for the publisher to create a guided and branded, yet community-powered search experience. Best of all, Eurekster swickis can be built for free and actually make you some money, as Anne clarified after Steven's intro.

When asked about what mistakes were being made, the key concepts discussed in this panel were re-iterated: stay authentic, focus on the conversation, don't think of this as a quick fix, and, as Steven pointed out and Anne reinforced: R-E-S-P-E-C-T your customer.

Allow anyone to create and maintain a vertical, topically focused search engine.

And we're not talking about site search here - we're talking build a web search engine that finds the most relevant content published by anyone, and place advertising alongside that content to produce a viable business for the swicki's owner. The new search engine business model quite distinct from the old publishing model.

Inspired by the elegance and success of blog platforms in enabling non-HTML-saavy users to create their own online publication, we knew we could empower non-Python-saavy users to own their own search engine. So that's what we did. The original swickibuilder allowed anyone to create a search engine in 3 easy steps, and that was good.

But when we looked at what the builders had created, we found that there were tweaks here and there that would vastly improve their swickis. We also saw that the work necessary for builders to maintan their community-driven swicki was too time consuming. What we had was a good, but obviously beta product. We listened to the feedback from our builders and members and we saw that we needed to focus on making sure that:

1. the swickis builders made were the best they could be
2. the swickis were always getting better, automatically

We validated many of our assumptions along the way, and learned plenty more. Big and little things, like:

• There is certainly a market for topical vertical search engines - the public has created over 100,000 of them, and over 9 million users searched them monthly.
• Improving search results by aggregating the wisdom of crowds around a topic is powerful, but needs to be harnessed and channeled properly. Otherwise, the search engine looses focus.
• Users are more likely to vote or comment on a search result when they see it will immediately impact the experience of a larger audience.
• The spider-based model for indexing web content breaks down when you want to find the freshest content because the spider has to crawl the site a hundred times a day overloading the site's servers.

We took what we learned and reinjected it back into the product, constantly evolving and improving it. So coming out of beta, it's not about any specific handful of features, it's about an evolutionary milestone. But here's a short list of my favorite features that we upgraded for this release:

Building
When you enter a URL in the "my site" field, we check to see if you have blog roll and add those sites to your favorites. We also grab any meta tags from your and your favorite sites and add them to the buzzcloud. You get more relevant sites and more search terms, automatically.

Maintaining focus and improving relevance
With our new relevance algorithm - codename Mobius - we constantly evaluate the search stream against the latest click and voting behavior and automatically favor results and buzzcloud terms that are both relevant and popular.

Freshness
We are now indexing your RSS feed so that your latest stories show up immediately in your swicki. If you entered additional favorite websites when you trained your swicki, we'll index their RSS feeds as well. We place a little timestamp with the publish date next to stories that we find this way.

Grab it!
We make it easy for you to post your swicki's buzzcloud on any number of blog as well as widget distribution platforms. The more searches you drive to your swicki, the better it gets.

Welcome to the new Eurekster swicki: it keeps getting better, and now out of beta. What are the most important features for you? We'd love to hear.

The bug generated some unrelated search terms in various swickis. The unrelated terms included the user-agent string for the searchers browser (eg: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)").

Unfortunately owners of the affected swickis will have been notified of the bogus search activity in their swicki. We apologise for any confusion this may have caused.

Quite a few of you contacted us letting us know you noticed the problem and we thank for you that. We think we have fixed the issue and will be monitoring it closely for the next few days but as always would appreciate it if anyone notices it happening again.

Swicki Engineering Team

UPDATE: Edit Buzzcloud maintenance is now complete.

Some of you may have noticed a "Down for Maintenance" page when you tried to Edit your Buzzclouds.

We were performing some maintenance on the buzzcloud system which meant you couldn't edit your data. No data was lost and the page is now fully operational again.

Thank you for your patience!

Swicki Engineering Team

As quoted in the press release, Steven Marder said, “Not only are we thrilled with global investors TVP and Transcosmos joining the Eurekster family but this transaction marks the next phase of accelerating our leadership in the social search and vertical search areas. With their support, we will more aggressively deliver on our vision for social search driving brand reinforcement, user engagement and improved targeting all to the benefit of web publishers, end users and advertisers."

We're excited as this new influx of cash supports our acceleration of further expansion (including global) and moving foward with a commercialization phase.

Check out our full press release for more details.

It is estimated that people find what they want from general search engines only 40-70% of the time. We want to make that closer to 100% and your swicki's new tools will allow your community members to fill in any gaps in the search results.

Your swicki uses the information you give it, along with the best indexing technologies, to gather search results about your topic. No matter how good the automatic tools it uses, there will still be gaps that you and other experts can now easily fill. This means your swicki can become the definitive search destination on the web for "NFL Search Engine".

Your swicki's users can now:

-Vote for results directly on a new results page
-Easily write an answer directly into the search results (see the "Write your own search result" link at the top of the swicki results page).
-Use the new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for writing great looking search results, including: URL links and embedded video.
-See a list of unanswered questions that includes search terms people have searched for or asked on your swicki but didn't find good answers for.
-Subscribe to your swicki for the latest questions and answers using your swicki's RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.

As moderator, you can:
-Click on the "write an answer" link beside each new search term in your Buzzcloud activity emails to quickly write answers.
-Approve or exclude answers contributed by your community members.
Search is becoming increasingly verticalized and our aim is to help you use your expertise to turn your swicki into a valuable and useful search engine and to help you earn your part of the multi-billion-dollar search industry.

We always appreciate your feedback so let us know your thoughts. Send all feedback to swickifeedback@eurekster.com.

We're proud to announce being named as an AlwaysOn 100 top private company. Last week the AlwaysOn 100 list of winners was posted, click on the AlwaysOn 100 image above for the story or see our press release.

Next week, our CEO, Steven Marder, will be speaking in a CEO Showcase at the AlwaysOn Media Conference in New York. His showcase is titled “Next Generation Search” and is on Wednesday, 1/31 at 11:15am. While in New York, Steven will also be presenting at SIIA Previews on Monday, 1/29 at 2:15pm. If you’re in the area and can attend either or both events, come have a listen…

We're changing the way your users interact with your swicki search results. Eariler this year, we launched tools that allowed end users to send the moderator requests to promote or demote any listing in the results. The response confirmed what we believed: user contribution is extremely valuable - for the publisher, the community and the contributor. We also realized that the interface was still too complex and confusing. So, today, after design iterations and usability testing, we are updating that interface and algorithm.

Background

Your swicki has always watched the natural click pattern of your users to rerank the results on a results page - a 'valid' click counts as an implicit vote of relevance for that result. (We filter out 'suspicious' clicks and click behavior patterns that indicate a user didn't find anything useful on that site). More popular results show up higher on the results for that search term in your swicki.

Swicki owners have always had tools that allow them to promote particular listing to the top of the results list, push entire sites to the top of all results or block results or sites. In April 2006, we gave users access to this 4-feature toolset, placing their promote and demote site suggestions in a queue for the moderator to review and approve.

What's new in this release

• More prominent call to vote: we moved the action buttons from the right column to the left, spiffed up and colorized the icons, and clarified the call to action
• Simplified voting interface: reduced the choices to two - a result is relevant or irrelevant
• Tallying the votes: an explicit vote now goes into the same bucket as implicit votes with a slightly different weighting, instead of a queue for the moderator to approve
• Keeping score: we show how many relevant clicks or votes a result has received for each search
• Moderator override: moderators can still override the community activity and 'peg' results at the top of the page using the moderator tools

Why this is cool

• Visible community collaboration: you can see how many people found a particular result relevant for a search term, from their clickpattern and their explicit votes
• Much easier to vote: one click
• Now requires sign in: to alleviate voter fraud
• Users have an instantaneous effect: no approval from the moderator required

Click on the screenshot to enlarge the image.

1. Page Background Color

body,html {

/* zeroes out page for all browsers */

margin:0;

padding:0;

border:0;

background:#ededed

}

----

2. Header Background Color & Image

.swickiHeader {

background:#c8c8c8 url(http://swicki.eurekster.com/images/bg_header.gif) no-repeat top;

padding:10px 10px 15px

}

----

3. Container Background Color

.swickiContainer {

width:800px;

margin: 0 auto 19px auto ;

background:#fff;

padding:10px;

}

----

4. Search Title Size & Color

h1.swickiSearchTitle {

font-size:2em;

margin:0;

padding:0;

color:#333332;

position:relative

}

h1.swickiSearchTitle a:link,h1.swickiSearchTitle a:visited {

color:#333332;

text-decoration:none

}

----

5. Byline Size & Color

p.swickiByline {

font-size:.9em;

color:#595959;

margin:2px 0 0;

padding:0;

position:relative

}

p.swickiByline a:link,p.swickiByline a:visited {

color:#595959;

text-decoration:none

}

----

6. Search Field Background Color

.swickiSearchField {

width:340px;

background:#feffff;

margin:3px 5px 0 0;

font-size:1.8em;

vertical-align:bottom;

float:left

}

----

7. Sidebar Background Color

.swickiSidebar {

width:197px;

float:right;

margin-top:10px;

padding-left:10px;

background-color:#181817;

}

----

8) Footer Background Color

.swickiFooter {

clear:both;

background:#f0f0f0;

padding:10px 10px 45px

}

----

9) Results Container

.swickiResultContainer {

background:#181817;

width:auto;

padding:.8em 36px;

}

----

10) Hot Cloud Link Colors

.hotcloud a:link,.hotcloud a:visited {

text-decoration:none;

color:#db6700;

}