I just thought that I would give a book coverage update, since it’s been a few weeks since I did my last one. I had interviews with Jeff Chandler on Performancing (part 1 and part 2) as well as the WordPress Weekly podcast. The WordPress Weekly interview garnered a mention by Lorelle VanFossen on the Blog Herald. I’m going to be coming back onto the podcast soon to talk more about the book.

Lefora, a free forum host, reviewed the book and interviewed me. I was interviewed by Tom Perkins on Fitness Business Radio. Midwest Book Review, Andy Staple and Ray Angel have reviews of the book, as well.

An excerpt of the book was adapted into a feature in the American Management Association’s Moving Ahead newsletter, which was highlighted by Jack Vinson.

There was a cool discussion of the book over at vBulletin Setup, a vBulletin support community. vBulletin Setup is planning a review of the book in the future, as well.

Martin Reed of Community Spark gave the book a quick mention in a post about the value of community features. Martin will be reviewing the book in the future, hopefully, and an interview is coming, as well. James Seligman mentioned that he’d be reviewing the book and interviewing me soon.

Finally, Twing, a community search engine, gave away 100 copies of the book at the recent Online Community Unconference 2008.

Thank you to everyone for the continued interest and support!

Yesterday was the biggest traffic day in the history of this blog. Or, at least, since I started using StatCounter to track statistics in October of 2005. That goes for both pageviews and unique visitors.

Why? Because, as far as I can tell, Colin Temple Stumbled it. And then a couple of other people did it. But, I’m guessing that Colin’s individual stumble set it off. Thanks to him for the Stumble.

81.02% of unique visitors on this record setting day came from StumbleUpon directly. I appreciate the traffic, but I also have a larger point.

Theoretically, one person really set this off and then 5 other people Stumbled it later (myself included). Let’s compare this to my MySpace post last week. That post reached 56 Diggs. Yet, totaling two days worth of traffic (the day it was posted and the next day), Digg sent me about 30% of the traffic StumbleUpon did in 6 hours. And maybe half of that was within like 10 minutes of it being Stumbled.

And therein lies the power of StumbleUpon. It only takes one person, maybe two, to get you some decent traffic. Digg, meanwhile, it would have taken seemingly 150 or more people to get me the traffic that that Stumble brought me. This isn’t exactly a new point – I’ve seen others say it before – but I thought I would repeat and re-enforce it since I was Dugg and Stumbled within such a short period of time. Pretty interesting.

I’m noticing more and more people participating in an unfortunate trend. It’s always been around, but for whatever reason, I’m seeing it more and more. This is where people link directly to images on servers that they most likely don’t have permission to link to. I’m not talking about embedding images so that they display on the page (what would traditionally be known as bandwidth theft or hotlinking), I’m talking of a hyperlink to the image, like this.

Why is this bad? Because people place images on their website to bring people to said website or to enhance the website in some way, generally speaking (or, at least, that should be the presumption unless otherwise stated or indicated). When you link directly to the image, they don’t get a visitor, but they do have their bandwidth used, which costs money and/or resources.

What should you do instead? Link to the page with the image on it, not the image itself. If the image isn’t readily visible on said page, just tell people where to look. But, using people’s bandwidth by direct linking isn’t a cool thing to do.

(As I mentioned, this is with the exception of sites that specifically allow this – like many free file hosting services, for example).

I just wanted to mention that we launched a great competition tonight at phpBBHacks.com. It’s called phpBBHacks.com phpBB 3 Hacks Idol and phpBBHacks.com phpBB 3 Styles Idol.

Basically, all new phpBB 3 hacks and styles from this point through the deadline on July 4, will be pitted one on one against one another until we have two winners – one hacks winner and one styles winner. What’s in it for them, you ask? Their choice of an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Asus Eee, Archos 605, iPod Touch or Amazon Kindle and a ton of other great prizes, provided by sponsors such as Chitika, W3 Markup and SitePoint.

So, if you can write a phpBB hack or create a phpBB style – please check it out! Should be a lot of fun.

Digg this post!

I do a lot of (more professional) writing for other sites and, because of that, I’m in contact with a lot of PR or marketing people. So, I was sent some information about the new MySpace design by someone at MySpace and I don’t really have anywhere else to post it. Yet, I found it interesting. So, I thought I’d post it here. Techcrunch has a story on it but they didn’t post up all the mockups and details, so I thought I would.

On June 14, MySpace will be announcing a global redesign that will include some big UI changes to the site’s homepage, navigation, profile functions, search and the MySpaceTV video player. It’ll begin on June 18 with the new homepage being redesigned. The design itself has been in development since December 27.

Here’s the full details as well as mockups of the design:

MySpace navigation (logged in):