This week was our first beta 
test. Pretty exciting time for a young startup. Real people, as I like to call them, have now tried our site – and many of them have provided feedback.
What have we learned?
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My Grades:
Overall: A
Content: A
Post Frequency: A
Admins: A
Community Interaction: A+
Site Navigation: B+
Intro: I was referred to this site by my brother-in-law, who is an avid photographer. I have found throughout my life that more often than not, if someone is into photography, that they are really into photography. We all know that a large group of people obsessed with their given niche usually makes for a pretty good niche social network. This is most definitely the case with dpreview.
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Two beta list sites have accepted userladder.com. As our date to proceed with beta testing nears, more and more people are signing up to be testers. I never knew how many people were interested in startups. How exciting!
Here is a link to the sites that are featuring UserLadder.com:
We also got covered by a fellow blogger here:
Thank you everyone who signed up. We are currently aiming for February 24th for our initial testing. We will send out an email with all the information soon.
My Grades:
Overall: B-
Content: A
Post Frequency: B
Admins: B
Community Interaction: C+
Site Navigation: C+
Intro: I finally have a strictly media blog. I have been meaning to review more blogs from the media realm, but haven’t found an appropriate blog to do so until now.
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We have been working on our logo for a few weeks now and have had several logos created so far.
The first logo was co-created by myself and my buddy Jeff, who does side graphic design projects. We were looking to incorporate a ladder into the logo for obvious reasons. Here is what we came up with.
From there, the logo progressed to..
This one was much easier to read but ultimately was to deep (in size, not in meaning) for what I was looking for. It would take up a little too much vertical real-estate.
From here I requested the services of another friend, Josh Skversky, who does freelance graphic design. You can see his portfolio here. I sent his what we had so far and asked him if he could create something using the ladder as a theme. Here is what he sent me.
I added the dot in the middle to separate the words.
I like this logo because it incorporates the ladder theme, it is shallow and the A-frame ladder can be used as a stand alone button logo.
I am not quite sure if this is the final product. I am still looking for a color scheme. If you have any suggestions please feel free to leave them in the comment section.
My Grades:
Overall: B
Content: B
Post Frequency: A
Admins: A
Community Interaction: B-
Site Navigation: C+
Intro: Some blogs cover serious topics, like politics and religion… other blogs don’t. For instance there is The Caucus Blog which covers political news on one end of the spectrum and LOLcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures blog on the other. Today’s blog, more than any other I have come across, fluctuates back and forth across this spectrum.
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My Grades:
Overall: B+
Content: A-
Post Frequency: A-
Admins: B
Community Interaction: B+
Site Navigation: B
Intro: Tech-blogs are a dime a dozen these days and competition in this space rivals the energy drink market. I guess because bloggers are inherently good with technology, it is natural for them to create tech content. While searching through the mess that is the blogosphere, you will come across hundreds of them. The trick is to be able to decipher the which ones consistently give quality content, the main reason for creating userladder.com, which is launching in beta in about a month. Even after we launch our beta product, it will be at least a month of tweaking, then a few months of gaining users before you will be able to successfully filter blog authors. So in the mean time, you are stuck doing things the hard way.
I was in the process of doing things the hard way when I came across Howtogeek.com.
My Grades:
Overall: A-
Content: A+
Post Frequency: B+
Admins: A
Community Interaction: B+
Site Navigation: B
Intro: I don’t know much about building computers. In fact, my last purchase was an iMac i7, which is basically the furthest thing from building your own. This does not mean that I don’t know it is smart to do so. If you have the time, energy and the where-with-all, building a computer from scratch can have several benefits. You get a computer that is capable of doing exactly what you want, and you don’t have to pay for extras that you will never use. It can also be a fun hobby, if you are into that kind of thing. There is one problem. Where would you even start?
Answer: Hardware-Revolution.com
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My Grades:
Overall: C+
Content: A-
Post Frequency: C+
Admins: B-
Community Interaction: C-
Site Navigation: C
Intro: The snow has been terrible this year but this is only my excuse to not go snowboarding. The real reason is I am no longer able to cut the last three periods of high school and use my allowance to buy a season pass, not to mention all new gear. I will make it up there eventually, one of these seasons, because there is really nothing like shredding the gnar on some fresh pow. In the mean time, I can always check up on some articles and media to at least remind me of what I am missing.
I found ilivextreme doing exactly that. While surfing through countless snowboarding blogs, I ended up landing on it. The blog actually covers sixteen different extreme sports, some of which I haven’t even heard of.
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My Grades: I have been grading blogs for almost a month now and in that time I have developed my own system. This grading system helps me break down the blog into sections that I can focus on one at a time. Here are some of the factors that go into each grade. This is not an all inclusive list but it is generally what I focus on while writing a review.
Overall: This is just what you think it is. I assign all the other grades the same weight and average them. I use a standard GPA calculator for this.
Content: The content section grades how the content is read, viewed or heard. It also covers my perception of the quality of content. Some of the questions I ask my self while deriving this grade are:
1. Does the content stay within its described niche?
2. Is the length of the post appropriate for the topic?
3. What kind of voice is the author going for? Does it come off well in the language?
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