The Neatorama Upcoming Queue

Hello everyone! On New Year's Day, I wrote about a big surprise that's coming to Neatorama. Well, today's the big day. I'm very excited to introduce a new and very neat feature on the blog: the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.

You're Invited to Write a Blog Post on Neatorama

Like many blogs, Neatorama started with a single author (that's yours truly). Since then, the blog has expanded into many authors, each of whom bring his or her own unique contribution. I think Neatorama is ready to take the next logical step: to become an open blog in which everyone (yes, including you) can write their own posts.

Do you have a blog and would like it featured on Neatorama? Have you ever found something neat/funny/weird on the Web and would like to share it with all of Neatorama's readers? Now you can.

Of course, there needs to be a mechanism to separate good posts from bad ones (like spam, for instance). The Upcoming Queue makes this easy by letting you vote good posts up and bad ones down. Posts that gather a lot of positive votes will then be promoted to the blog's front page.

Neatorama Upcoming = Social Media + Blog Hybrid

The first thing that comes to many people's mind will undoubtedly be this: It's a social media thing, just like digg. And while we love digg, reddit, and other social media websites, the Upcoming Queue has a few differences (explained in greater length in the FAQ):

• Your submission is a blog post
  Neatorama is a blog and will remain a blog. By writing a blog post instead of a link, you'll have more than just a few sentences to tell people what your pick is all about.
  
  
• Equal chance to get promoted to front page
  Not a power user? Don't have a lot of friends that will vote for your submissions? No problem. Besides garnering upvotes, Neatorama editors will be on the look out for good posts to promote, regardless of the number of votes they garner. This will even out the playing field for everyone.
  
  
• Credit is given where credit is due
  This is a personal pet peeve of mine: social networking posts don't give via or author credits. If you found an interesting item to post on Neatorama via a certain blog, please be neighborly and give it a via credit link.
  
  Promoted posts will also have author credit - your posts will carry a link to your blog or website. (We do reserve the right to edit this in cases of spam
  or inappopriate content).
  
  
• No burying
  Once a post is on the front page, it's on the front page. There's no burying or personal vendettas (though we do reserve the right to edit/delete in cases of spam, misformatted or inappropriate content).

Want Your Own Upcoming Queue?

The Upcoming Queue project is carried out in collaboration with Sift Partners, the people behind VideoSift, the best video community website on the Web today. The Queue is a specially customized version of Varo CMS (the engine of VideoSift), hooked up to the WordPress software that Neatorama uses.

I'd like to thank Rommel Santor, the genius behind VaroCMS, for writing such wonderful program and for putting up with me and my incessant nagging during the project. :)

If you'd like your own version of this Upcoming Queue or similar functionality for your blog, I highly recommend that you join the VaroCMS Interest List.

Rewarding, Not Penalizing, Top Users

To celebrate the launch of the Upcoming Queue, let's have a contest: the Top Submitter of the month of February 2009 will get a Free iPod Touch. The rest of the Top 10 Submitters will get a Free Neatorama T-shirt. Why February? That way, we all have a fresh start (the statistics will reset to zero so early testers don't have a head start). You all have a week to play around with the Queue before it's for keeps! :)

Lastly, the Upcoming Queue is technically still a "beta" feature - if you've found a bug, please let us know. And if you have a blog, I'd appreciate it if you would write a post about the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.

Please check it out: Neatorama Upcoming Queue | Frequently Asked Questions