Let Your Voice Be Heard
By Amanda Nicole on January 15, 2008 - 10:34am
Hi everyone,
I just came across a new site which, much like Digg, is a user-controlled news source. But, unlike Digg, it's all about Vancouver: Vancouver news, oddities, reviews and--are you listening, Ray?--photos of our lovely city. You can vote, comment, or submit your own articles or blog posts and share what you think other Vancouverites should know about. You can find it here,
Have fun!
Your link still isn't working right. This should fix it...
this link takes you to it
My concern about that site is that it seems to me to be connected to something offshore, and may
possibly be intended as a "fishing expedition" to collect personal information on users. You should therefore use caution with it.
I'll try to find the bookmark I have for a page of basic HTML codes, which includes the one to use for making live links to other URLs, so check back later please...
I fixed the link. I've seen this a few times, where a link won't get added. Something for me to look into in the back-end.
The concept is neat, and there's room for a good user-contributed site that filters the best stories about Vancouver. Maybe Vancouver Vibe is it, but I won't participate in it until they have direct links to the articles. See http://www.vancouvervibe.ca/story.php?title=Photos_From_The_Walk for example. If you hover over "Photos From The Walk", you get a link that's vancouvervibe.ca/out.php, not the URL to the article they're linking to. I know they do the out.php thing to redirect to the article and to track who clicks on what. It might seem like a minor issue, but people value the search engine ranking they got through posting interesting stuff, so they should be rewarded with direct links. The Urban Vancouver aggregator: every link goes directly to the original source articles, and I'll oppose any change to that policy. It's possible to track clicks without the out.php-style links.
Hi Richard,
I'm one of the founders of VancouverVibe.ca. I post under the same alias (naim786) on our news portal. We officially launched this weekend, so we're pretty new, and any feedback we can get is much appreciated. Thank you for pointing out the redirect issue, we're in touch with our developers and on the support forums of the open source platform our site is built on (Pligg) to figure a way around the "out.php" thing. The lifeblood of VancouverVibe is the content from bloggers we're linking to, so we're really shooting ourselves in the foot if we give bloggers a reason to avoid our site altogether. Nonetheless, I am looking into this and will be responding in short notice once this has been figured out.
Local. Social. Unfiltered. VancouverVibe.
http://www.vancouvervibe.ca
I checked some links provided by that page, and I couldn't find anything like the "About Us"
information you'd get on Urban Vancouver and other sites, for example. What I did discover made
me think that these links on there were being re-directed through a site in Taiwan or somewhere
in that region, and I can only wonder why. Maybe I'm the paranoid type, but I'm told that most
of the scams and malware around these days is coming from the Far East, meaning Taiwan and China
and places near there. So I'm not going to post anything on that site for that reason, as well as
the reasons Richard gives above. There's something suspicious about that site, and I just can't
put my finger on it yet. So I'm not going there.
Hi Ray,
I think if any of these claims could be substantiated you would be doing a great public service. Unfortunately, that's not the case. I'm a little saddened, however, that this post and your subsequent post have to border on almost slanderous. I hesitated responding but I realized that not responding to comments like this is too risky. Sadly, without anything but a gut feel, you're calling VancouverVibe a scam and planting seeds of doubt that are very hard to reverse.
I started VancouverVibe with a close friend of mine. We both live and work in Vancouver, and VancouverVibe is essentially a project we're working on because we felt that it would be a fun project we could manage and it served an unmet need. I find that my perspective of this city has been shaped by the many talented bloggers we have in this city, and since I began following their blogs I've found Vancouver to be a far more interesting place than I initially thought it was when I first moved here. One day we came across an open-source social-news platform called Pligg and thought that would be a great platform to jumpstart our news portal that would aggregated some of the best content from local bloggers.
The above used to be on our About page, but we decided to take it down in the interest of keeping our About page to the point and focused on what social news is and how users can actually make USE of VancouverVibe. Believe it or not, there are a lot of folks out there who don't know much about Digg or social news sites like it, and we felt we needed to trim down our About page to focus on clearly communicating what we can offer as opposed to trying to be personal.
So it's built on Pligg, on a shoe-string budget, and our registration process does not require a valid e-mail address (so if we're stealing user information, its not exactly accurate). There's no conspiracy connection with Taiwan "or somewhere in that region". We're not trying to hide from anyone, and we're certainly not afraid of anyone.
We're a couple recent university graduates who are looking to promote their web-site but more importantly, gather important, constructive criticism to help us make the site better early on. What we weren't expecting was completely unsubstantiated hints that we could be stealing user-account information and raising privacy concerns when there's no evidence to suggest we're doing that at all.
Despite my disappointment, I really think I got something out of your comments. We'll be starting a blog, linked to VancouverVibe.ca, to add a more personal and engaging feel to the web-site, so that we don't seem as "suspicious" or foreign. It also reminds me to get on the developers to put the Terms of Service back up on the Registration page, as we had to dismantle the registration form completely a few days ago due to a bug that wasn't allowing people to register.
We need to do more to prove our credibility. That's what I've taken from your comments, and that's constructive. What's not constructive is planting a seed of doubt in readers minds that we're a rogue organization that's abusing people's right to privacy with absolutely nothing to back a claim like that up. Privacy issues are extremely sensitive, and I felt it was irresponsible to go that far in your criticisms.
Regards,
Na'im
Local. Social. Unfiltered. VancouverVibe.
http://www.vancouvervibe.ca
Thanks for burning the midnight oil and commenting here, Na'im. The idea of a Digg-like site about Vancouver-related stories got me thinking about the features we could add to Urban Vancouver. UV doesn't have to do what you're doing, though, so we can instead watch Vancouver Vibe and even syndicate the RSS feed in our Vancouver aggregator. We had the idea of turning Urban Vancouver into an über-aggregator that would make single posts for every item, then people could vote them up or down based on what they thought of them. Ideas are free, and implementation is golden, so it's good to see the concept in action. That means I'll be following Vancouver Vibe, especially when the links are direct. I subscribe to a search of 'vancouver' in Digg, but few items that are Vancouver related make it to the front page. Now Vancouver has its own Digg front page!
(Every time I hear the word "slanderous" I think of the scene in The Simpsons where Tito Puente says that instead of killing Mr. Burns, he could "could set his soul afire with a slanderous mambo". Hence the subject of this comment.)
I guess I was a little over excited about a Digg-like concept, but just for Vancouver news. Thanks so much for the heads up, Richard, and for your thoughts, Ray. I appreciate it.
They've now got an "About Us" link, which wasn't there the other day when we were first invited to check it out. At that time, I left a comment asking about that, and as far as I know, it wasn't answered - although I haven't looked lately at that. The "About Us" that they do have now really isn't an "About Us" in the usual sense of the term, because it doesn't tell us anything about the people who are actually operating that site. It just gives us a lot of the usual flak about what a great place it is, and blah-blah-blah. No real information. Again, that's one of the things that sets off my warning flashers and sounds my alarm. What are they hiding from? Who are they afraid of? What's really going on there?
The first is examples of basic stuff, and is here, My Dear.
The other is here!
Give it a shot, Luv.
Breathe, Ray. Breathe.
Gasp! Wheeze! Cough! Cough! - Gasp! Wheeze! Cough! Cough! - Gasp!....(get the picture?)
I went to the doctor yesterday, and he checked my heart-beat. He said, "It's regular, but it's skipping beats. I think you need more tests." I said, "That's not 'skipping beats' - it's just in idling mode. Wait until a pretty girl walks by, and it'll blow that stethoscope right out of your ears."
When I clicked on your page the other day, and tried to find out who was behind it, the link I landed on took me to a site in Taiwan. I couldn't find any local Vancouver people's names listed in the "About Us" or prominently elsewhere on the front page. I am an old guy, and I'm naturally suspicious about such things, because I've heard and read all the horror stories, and I've already picked up my share of spyware and trojans from landing on the wrong kinds of sites. Yours made me nervous, and nobody until tonight has offered any explanation to allay my fears.
I'm glad you're not some foreign scam artist, and I apologize for suggesting you might be up to no good. But you can understand, I'm sure, why I felt that way. From the very beginning of this Urban Vancouver website, the four "founding fathers" had their names and a brief bio available for anyone to read. We could, if we considered it necessary, check that information, and verify that in fact, they were telling us the truth, and everything was open and above-board. You must admit that on your site, that hasn't exactly been the case, until enough dust was raised to make you come forward and give us a look at you. As you know, the Internet is a wild and wonderful place, and there are all sorts of dangers involved with participating on websites that might not be exactly as they seem. So the smart way to avoid suspicion is to be as open and honest and as sincere as possible. One shouldn't have to be "flushed out" before that process commences. This isn't "Pheasant Hunting 101". If you want to be trusted, you have to show us you are worthy of it. We don't automatically assume such is the case.
Hi Ray,
My name is Kerry and I am the other founder of Vancouvervibe.ca. I have tried to register for urbanvancouver, but my email has not been prompted yet with a password or verification. Thanks for responding to our post and helping clear up a few issues.
When you had initially gone to the site, we were still in the final development phase. There were a lot of bugs we had to work out (with that linking problem being one of them).
I fully understand your skepticism and to be perfectly honest, I myself am a very careful user of social networking and web 2.0 sites. One of my biggest complaints and reservations with these social sites is the lack of human interaction. With that being said, Na'im and I will be attending a few local events in the upcoming weeks to help promote vancouvervibe.ca. and get to know more people in the local scene. We'll post our event plans on www.vancouvervibe.ca very shortly.
Hope my account for Urbanvancouver gets activated soon. We are working around the out.php google ranking issues and hope to work with yourself and other Vancouver bloggers in the future to mutually benefit everyone.
Kerry@vancouvervibe.ca
Kerry, I sent you an email with a reset password, and went ahead and associated this comment with your username.
Thanks for the posting and the explanations. I hope I didn't come down too hard on you guys, but
the good news is that we're all still talking, and we're working this out, like we ought to.
It seems that most of these problems happened because you guys were maybe a little bit too anxious to get the site launched, and didn't have enough of the bugs out first. Hopefully, you've
learned something from all this, and it will be something we all benefit from later on.
If you're having problems getting registered for your own blog on Urban Vancouver, please send
an email to Richard at info AT urbanvancouver.com/ and he will look into it for you.
Hello all,
Ray thanks for your comments and explaining your comments further. We appreciate your candor.
On another note, I sent in a help request at the Pligg forums to find out how to ensure our story links are linking directly to original content. Once you've clicked on a story on the main page and you're forwarded to the full excerpt of the story. Now when you hover your mouse over the link in the full excerpt page you'll see the link goes directly to the original story, it is no longer routed through out.PHP.
Richard, let me know if you do in fact see any other problems if you get the time to visit again (our eyes aren't quite as fresh!) :)
Local. Social. Unfiltered. VancouverVibe.
http://www.vancouvervibe.ca
Holy Moses. I had no idea just how fitting the title of this post would turn out to be...
Stay tuned, darlin' because you ain't seen nothin' yet. We're just getting this show on the road!
And naim786 I'm really glad that we can have discussions like this, and have everyone remain friends as it progresses. Frankly, I'm surprised at my own maturity here. I didn't think I had it in me. The good news is, even at 75, I'm still learning things, and still having fun.
Enjoy your evening, Everyone!