A very special Happy New Year and best wishes to all of our authors and readers around the world. In this day and age of consistent uncertainty and apprehension about the future of online writing, we at SharedReviews are excited and hopeful about delivering a publishing platform that will be uniquely fun, educational, and rewarding for writers everywhere. From the ability to perfect your craft, to earning real supplementary income for those that invest their time, we feel the tools we are building will help shape online publishing for years to come. The timing of our release has been long and hard pressed, but based on recent events in the online writing industry, the market needs what we are building even more than we anticipated, and we can’t wait to deliver.
Our progress has been consistent these last few weeks even with the holidays, but like any puzzle it won’t be complete until all of the pieces are put together. We’ve been developing each component to make sure it works with all the others, but as we put the final pieces together some of our tests fail and bugs pop up that need correcting. I can say we’re close, and everyone here is getting more and more excited as things start to come together, but as usual, it’s taking a bit longer than anticipated. I’ll post another update the evening of Monday Jan 9th with dates and timelines for the rest of this very large release.
Again, thanks to everyone for their loyalty and trust that we are going to deliver everything we have promised these last few months. Happy 2012 to all.
At SharedReviews, we’ve always been a big believer in preventing copyright infringement. From checking the first publish of any new member, to providing incentives for authors and administrators to help pull down anything that’s even remotely been plagiarized.
Justice is and always has been both swift and complete; immediate and permanent suspension for anyone who breaks this golden rule.
Currently being considered in the US House and Senate, are two new bills that would change the current dynamic extensively, specifically SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act). Although one appears to be much broader than the other, their intention as described by lawmakers, is to prevent online piracy of copyright holder’s intellectual property. That’s all fine and good, we’re behind that 100%, but it’s the way they’ve structured the policing and enforcement that could cause catastrophic changes to the way each and every one of us accesses and uses the Internet, let me explain…
Up until today, sites like SharedReviews have been able to operate under what is called the “Safe Harbor” provision of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), which is the current set of laws laid out to prevent copyright infringement online. What “Safe Harbor” means, is that SharedReviews cannot be held liable for user generated content that infringes on a copyright holder as long as we take down such infringing content as soon as we are notified of it. This has worked out well since it allows any user generated content site to operate without the fear that some rogue user will post something that’s deemed inappropriate for public consumption causing fines, lawsuits, or even the elimination of the site from the global DNS registry (Which these new laws purport as punishment). This would be done without trial, oversight, or any outside monitoring. Some government official would hit a button on a keyboard and an entire website could be completely removed from the Internet indefinitely.
If this law were in effect years ago, there would be no SharedReviews, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, or Google since even a link to infringing content could be deemed as breaking the new laws being proposed. Speaking from experience with Google’s Panda changes, even an unscheduled drop in traffic for a start up can be catastrophic, and all of these companies were start-ups at one time or another. Could you imagine the days when Google was a start up competing with the likes of Yahoo / Altavista and had their site removed from the DNS on a weekly basis? I don’t think we’d have the same search leader as we do today, which means innovation would have been stifled, and 10’s of thousands of jobs wouldn’t exist.
The purpose of this post is to make you think and act;
Think about an Internet where some of your favorite sites were blocked by your Internet Service Provider just because someone posted a comment with a link to a page that was “deemed” infringing, or where only sites with big budgets to hire 1000’s of “thought police” to pre-filter every post could survive. Don’t think that’s realistic? Look at China’s version of Twitter (weibo) which does exactly that.
Act if you are outraged at the fact a small percentage of companies who already make billions in profits each year spent a good portion of that lobbying to enact laws that make them even more profit at the expense of your freedoms and access to free speech.
Although we are Canadian, the vast majority of our visitors and authors are from the US, and this affects us as much as any other user generated publishing platform out there. If you are a US citizen, please help STOP SOPA and PITA now before the Internet as we know it ceases to exist.
Warning: Video contains some mildly offensive language
There’s another website you should check out called “Stop American Censorship” that has even more ways of letting your government know you are against this legislation, and even provides a way to be heard if you don’t live in the US.
Thanks for hearing us out, and we hope that not only we, but our children, and their children get to enjoy an Internet without censorship. With your help, we may just be able to do exactly that.
All of us here at SharedReviews wanted to thank our authors and contributors for their continued patience during our big development run. Things have obviously gone way beyond our initial scope during this re-make of our site and model, and all of your continued support has been greatly appreciated.
We hope all of you and yours have a fantastic and wonderful Holiday season. We plan to try to spend some family time with ours while we continue to widdle away at the big to-do list for our grand launch in January. We don’t think it’s fair to ask our beta-testers to spend any of their special family time helping us this month, so we plan on opening the beta the first or second week of January, and having our grand author opening later next month.
Things are really starting to come together here, and we’re extremely excited to share that innovation with all of you very soon. Thanks again, and happy holidays!
We’re posting a quick update on the progress we’re making with what we’re calling the “Player Release”. We’ve decided that we are going to release all of the new content types, as opposed to our original plan to only release a subset. This means that there are additional development delays, but from day 1 players who have earned the prerequisite level will have access to all of the new types we plan to support:
Movie Reviews
Product Reviews
Service Reviews (Including Websites, Restaurants etc…)
Recipes
How To Articles
General Articles (Opinion Pieces)
News Articles (Local, National and International)
Essays
Fiction (Short Stories)
At this stage, we’re looking at a couple of weeks delay for Beta Tester Access, which is slated for the 15th. Currently we have Joan Young, Mimpi, and Lexxia who have volunteered to help put our new interfaces through their paces. If you would like to be included in the list, make sure to email me with your account nickname for consideration. Remember, in addition to gaining early access and providing their input on refining features, beta testers will earn a $5 bonus for every verified bug they help us find!
We’re going to be diligently working right through the holidays, and we’re gearing up for the full general release the first week of January.
We tried really hard, but we’ve discovered that we’re not going to be able to pull off a “Limited” release cohesively. What that means is that it was becoming way too much work to turn off unfinished features already partially tied into the new system in order to allow authors access to a limited set of features without things blowing up. We want to invest our time in bedazzling everyone with stuff that will get the town talking, not offer something that’s standard on many sites albeit with a new coat of paint.
The course has been corrected, and we’re now working on a launch strategy that’s all-or-nothing, which will add some additional delays for our authors. I realize this is frustrating for those loyal to SR and looking forward to checking out all the cool new stuff, but what we’re creating here really hasn’t been done for our industry before, and it’s taking quite a bit of testing and changes to get everything to work together in a way that’s compelling and makes sense.
The thing we’re working on right now is the new toolbar, which will be the instant feedback that’s necessary for a successful online game. Any game designer worth their salt will say that instant feedback is integral to making a game successful, and incorporating features with sounds and visual cues on a website has taken some time, but we’re almost finished.
We still have quite a few pieces to go for other interfaces and features, but as each day progresses we are coming closer and closer to our goal, and that’s first allowing our beta testers early access to help refine the features, and then allowing all authors to play the publishing game and earn fantastic rewards.
We plan for Beta tester access towards the end of November for raw features, and full game access in December for all existing authors. January will mark the ability for new authors to sign up, and is going to be a huge party for everyone that will include prizes, cash, and contests galore. Not only is 2012 the 5 year anniversary for SharedReviews, but January will be our first official month of the Publishing Game that’s taken almost a full year of design, development and planning.
We appreciate everyone’s patience, and we’re hoping to reward that loyalty in some pretty fantastic ways.
