Ninja Post t-shirts are here. Designed by the one and only Mr. Totem. Only $20 — quantities are limited!!! Email mike AT ninjapost.com to reserve yours right now!
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Front – close up:
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Back – close up:
Ninja Post is a proud graduate of the Shotput Ventures program, an Atlanta-based incubator for capital light web companies. It was a phenonmenal experience. You could say that we came for the seed funding but stayed for the exceptional mentoring.
Applications for this year’s class are now open and I encourage all aspiring entrepreneurs to apply. There is an early application deadline of March 22nd and a final application deadline of April 8th. More info, including the application form, are available on the SPV website.
Good luck to all applicants. Feel free to email me with any questions about the program.
Finally, here’s a list of other incubators entrepreneurs should consider applying to.
When reading a newspaper or magazine, you may have noticed that it’s easy to read lots of text quickly. This may be because you’re reading Cosmo and not the Journal of Nuclear Physics but aside from a material’s complexity there is another important factor in play: the width of the text column.
A narrow column is easier to parse than a wide column. That’s because the brain can process text more quickly by moving the eyes downward instead of side-to-side. A common speed reading technique is to mitigate lateral eye movement by relying on peripheral vision to “gulp” a line of text in one shot.
Since a friendly user interface is one of our cornerstones, we set the content area for the default Ninja Post skin to be about 600 pixels wide. Coupled with a relatively large font, the content is easy for the reader to scan. Many forums set their main content areas to expand to the width of the user’s screen by default which makes it difficult to digest.
Click to view full size image
The biggest downside to narrow columns is that it can make long pages. Thankfully it’s convenient to scroll down using the browser’s scroll bar, “space bar short cut”, or scroll wheel on a mouse.
One of the goals of Ninja Post is to offer a clean and elegant user interface. In other words, the interface should be very easy on the eyes.
As part of this mission, we seek to eliminate the scourge known as “Dancing Broccoli Syndrome” or DBS. DBS plagues many old school message boards and can be defined as the gratuitous overuse of animated emoticons to the point where it makes it difficult to separate the content from the flashing .gif files.
Every Ninja Post forum that comes to life is a blow against this terrible affliction. We invite you to stand up and join us in this battle.
Typical scenario: A user posts a question with an answer that could easily be found via Google.
Our solution: Integration with the website Let me Google that for you.
To our knowledge, Ninja Post is the first—and currently the only—message board with this feature. We hope that it comes in handy. The pictures below show how this feature works.
Step 1: Compose reply to ridiculous question using handy “goog” button.
Step 2: Post Reply.
Step 3: Link takes reader to Let me Google that for you website.
Step 4: Results are displayed in a new window.
The “90-9-1″ Rule states:
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
One of our goals with Ninja Post is to achieve a more equitable participation distribution in online communities. To combat this phenomenon, known as “participation inequality” we have made the following items cornerstones of Ninja Post software:
- Make it fast and easy to sign up.
- Make the site fast and responsive – this is CRUCIAL!
- Send email alerts when one of their threads is updated to draw users back to the site.
- Allow users to vote a post up or down as a way to get involved without having to compose a reply.
We’re also considering other ways to entice—and enhance—participation. For example, eBay’s reputation system and other “reward mechanisms” are models that we’re considering.
Life is a lot like jazz… it’s best when you improvise. —George Gershwin
One inspiration for Ninja Post was borne out of an interview that I conducted with Steve Silberman several years ago. Steve is a co-author of the book Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads and he is a contributing editor at Wired magazine.
Steve noted that The WELL, one of the earliest online communities, was once described as a stage for “brain jazz”: a global improvised jam where knowledge is the medium of exchange instead of musical notes.
To bring the notion of brain jazz to life, every Ninja Post thread updates in real time. We combined the stability of a traditional message board with the dynamic nature of a chat room. This makes the forum experience more fun, interactive, and improvisational.
Posted by Mike Wilt on 
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