I added the 50 Superbowl commercials on TubeBattle, and let users decide which one is the best. After 1000+ votes, the front runner is… the Snickers ad!

As you can see from the Rankings page, it’s still a close fight. Feel free to go in and have your say!

TubeBattle’s opening was a success beyond my wildest hopes!

In its first week, it clock 1,768 unique hits with 5,436 pageviews. Users span the globe, from the Americas (North and South) to Europe to the Middle East to Asia and Australia. I think pretty much everywhere there is Internet

The busiest day occurred on the 6th day of the first week. It clocked 907 hits primarily coming from StumbleUpon.com. StumbleUpon is a system where users recommend web sites for others to check out. This is a great sign of TubeBattle’s ability to attract organic (natural) and viral (word-of-mouth) traffic.

And perhaps the statistics that I’m most proud of. As mentioned above, we had 1,768 unique visitors. Here’s the cool bit… of those, 139 were return visitors. I’m overjoyed that in the span of 7 days, we’ve had 8% of all visitors returning (within days of their first visit!).

I’ve re-engaged the developer who helped me write TubeBattle.
We’re starting work immediately on v1.1 - nothing revolutionary, some bug fixes, some major and minor tweaks to make a better experience.
But planning has already begun for v2.0, which will bring a whole new angle to TubeBattle. THAT will blow people away!

ps: For those who are tracking, I changed TubeBattle’s logo. I’m moving away from blatant Web 2.0 logo styles. I’ll make another post of what my new style is another time (but you’ll be able to see it on TubeBattle right now).

I mentioned previously that I had a few internet projects in progress…

I’m proud to announce that TubeBattle is now open to the public!

The idea came to me a month or so back.
For those that know me, you know I’ve been a fan of YouTube since its early days. In fact, the old blog on this site (Serendipity) used to show all the videos that I came across that I thought were really cool. But nowadays, there are so many video sites and so many videos submitted each day. It’s really hard to keep up.
So I fiugred it would be a cool idea to “automatically” collect videos from the top video sites and let the community vote on which one is better. It’s designed to be community-powered, users can submit videos into a category (so that other can vote on it) and users can also take videos out of contention (such as when a video has misclassified and shouldn’t have been in that category to begin with).

I’ve got some nifty plans for the next version, but I’ll wait to see how the world takes to TubeBattle before kicking off that development work.

Oh, and of course, here’s the obligatory Web 2.0 logo that I created for it:

No matter how much reflection you put on a logo, a website just isn’t Web 2.0 until it has a cool “loading” icon. Thankfully, ajaxload.info allows anyone to generate their very own custom-colored icon!

Even me

OK, maybe I’m cheap…
I must be one of the miority in the known-universe that doesn’t have Adobe Photoshop (using Corel Paint Shop Pro instead).

Anyway, I’ve been really getting into looking at all those cool Web 2.0 stuff, but all I could find are Photoshop tutorials on how to make those logos.

So I figured I’d have a shot at doing it in Paint Shop Pro (PSP), and I came up with this:

I’ll also made avaialble the source files for those that want to play around and see what they come up with!
PaintShop Pro format
Photoshop format