Last weekend we went live with with two important features - Commenting and Profiles.
You are now able to comment on all of the stories appearing across the QueensSpeech publishing network. You can do this by selecting the ‘Post your comment’ link (which appears underneath each story extract) and then registering for a new QS account (which takes a just a few seconds). Once you have validated your email, you will be given the opportunity to create your own profile (example).
Although fairly limited in features at the moment, we will soon be adding new useful tools to your profile to help make communicating with other users, and discovering new content even easier.
QueensSpeech was featured prominently in the LLGFF (London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) email news bulletin today (under ‘Festival Recommends’). Thanks BFI !
You can sign up to the newsletter here or view the online version of today’s email here.
We are proud to announce that this year we will be partnering with the 22nd London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and have been awarded official ‘online partner’ status by the British Film Institute - organisers of the event.
So what does this mean for QS? Over the next few weeks we’ll be publishing over 150 hand-picked stills from films and documentaries showing at the festival on the QueensSpeech.com homepage. Everytime you load the page you’ll see a new image capturing the essence one of the movies.
The first of the Centrepiece Screenings is Parvez Sharma’s A Jihad for Love, a landmark film in the ongoing debate about the nature of true Islam, Islamophobia and homophobia. Sharma’s film introduces individuals who are gay and proud followers of Islam. Their powerful and moving testimonies challenge our perceptions of Islam and the idea that the struggle for gay rights has been won, reclaiming the term ‘Jihad’ from its adopted meaning of holy war, back to its intended meaning of religious struggle.
We’re both really excited about the festival and are looking forward to watching many of the new ground breaking independent lesbian and gay films from around the world. There will also be some classics playing, such as Cabaret, Desperately Seeking Susan and and Les Biches.
Desperately Seeking Susan - Iconic tale of intangible female obsession, ripe for a queer re-evaluation.
Derek - Artist Isaac Julien’s fresh and fascinating reinvigoration of Derek Jarman’s legacy.
The Chinese Botanist’s Daughter - Tragic but beautiful tale of two women in love in rural China.
You can view the entire film schedule, and book tickets at BFI’s official LLGFF website.
This week we passed the 30,000 articles mark! - the number of individual stories we are tracking across the QueensSpeech social publishing network. To support this increased number, our in-house analytics application is now tracking over 770,000 events relating to those articles.
I’ll be spending the next few days re-optimising the caching system used on our servers.
February 1, 2008 – 7:38 pm
This week we’ve added the search bar (top right of the screen), this will allow you to search through the 18,000 stories on QueensSpeech, and growing daily. We hope that you will be able to utilise this vast resource of news, views opinion, gossip and much more to find stories of interest to you.
We are very grateful to have had a significant increase in visitors over the last few days, so we plan to work this week to optimise the server to avoid “traffic jams”. To put this in context there has been a 2,000 per cent increase in visitors to QueensSpeech since our redesign three months ago, so thank you. We hope to bring you many new features and increase the value of the content you view over the next few months so bear with us, and if you have any feedback, don’t be shy.
January 28, 2008 – 4:43 pm
We have recently launched a new feature in the News, Gossip, Opinion, Sexy and Adult sections which will make it much easier for you to find the freshest and most popular content published on QS.
Introducing the new ‘content filter’ bar:
by default, content published within the last 24hrs will be displayed in descending date order. You can switch to ‘Most Read’ - content published in the last 24 hours, or…you can change the published date range:
to view content published within the last week, month or from any time in the past.
We hope you’ll agree, these two filters represent a powerful new way of discovering relevant content from across the QueeensSpeech publishing network.
January 20, 2008 – 10:03 am
Last weekend we went live with our new ‘related’ stories feature. Now when viewing a story, directly underneath the summary you’ll see a list of up to 5 similar stories identified by QueensSpeech (view example).
We had originally been using Yahoo’s Search API to pull together this content, but in recent weeks the quality of Yahoo’s suggestions had gone down hill, turning the feature into more of a distraction than anything useful.
January 14, 2008 – 11:49 am
After what seems an eternity, we’re back and more useful than ever (we hope). Last year we released our ‘Play’ version of QueensSpeech - an experiment in finding new ways to do things by breaking industry norms and best practices. Crazy as it sounds, it was really useful to launch with something that went against the grain.
We were happy enough to be spotted by Mashable, Techcrunch and KillerStartups, but even happier to receive so much feedback about what worked, and more importantly what didn’t. We collected this feedback and have spent the last few months working on a brand new service - a service that we hope will enjoy and find useful.
A lot of hot air? Well not really, take a look at the new homepage, http://queensspeech.com/, and you’ll see a completely different design, but more importantly a brand new service to go with it. We still have our social publishing system (soon to be relaunched) where you can publish your own articles or comment on others, but we’ve also introduced something called ‘conversational publishing‘.
In a nutshell this scans hundreds of gay-centric blogs, websites, online magazines and news agencies each day to bring you online discussions and events affecting gay communities around the world - in one concise, but informative view. We’ve segmented the conversations into six main categories: Lesbian & Gay News, Opinion, Gossip (and entertainment), Blogs, Sexy, and Adult. Therefore you can select a category and view only content that’s relevant to your choice.
We’ve still got loads of work to do, but for now, please do visit QueensSpeech.com and let the team know your thoughts. You can leave comments on this post, or alternatively you can email us at m[at]queensspeech.com
