Humble Voice, think MySpace, but with a pleasant facelift and being overall more versatile. Essentially, it’s a social network for the creative type where users can show off their work, build a portfolio, and connect with friends and family. It has all the recognized social community features that everyone has come to abide by and appreciate. You have your standard profiles, Friends Lists, Bulletin Board, and comments. There’s also a point system in place in which you’re able to win prizes after accumulating certain amounts of points. In general, Humble Voice is a place where any person who is creative through designing, composing music, art, video, and writing can convene to meet others who share similar interests and hobbies.

Let’s start with the main sections of the site. They have separated their sections in five major categories: Music, Video, Art, Photography, and Word (Writing). Each section displays the latest and greatest pertaining to its topic. Every section’s main page contains recent and popular profiles. For instance the Music section has a side column that displays the Newest Artists, Most Played Songs of the Day, and Most Played Artists. Featured Uploads, along with the most recently uploaded are there as well. Naturally, for each artist you’re able to go into their profile and listen to their work via the Humble Voice media player. Also you’ll find more information and biographies of the band and its members, along with upcoming shows and pictures, if any.

Next is the community section; this section features a point ticker that keeps and up-to-date track of the active user base on Humble Voice. Powered by Flash, it presents a scrolling list of members on Humble Voice and the points that each member has accumulated according to recent activity on the site. So, the more browsing and participation you do will affect whether or not you’re seen on the ticker. Furthermore, they have an area to recognize the members who currently are the leaders in points within the community. Additionally, they have outfitted the section with their very own Humble Voice TV player. The TV has “channels” that show user submitted videos that you can watch at your own leisure. Lists of the newest members and the friendliest members can be located on this page, along with a link to the Humble Voice store. The community section is also where you’re able to cash in all those points that you earn on Humble Voice. You’ll also find a online chat on the community page where you can openly share messages with others logged in to Humble Voice.

Moving onto an area where I believe Humble Voice executes exceedingly well at. Their profile and user account area is very thorough. They’ve implemented a small control panel that lets you freely edit any and all of the things you wish. They give you layout choices for each content area of your profile. You can choose one, two, or three column formation for each content area. You can then mix and match the different layout settings to satisfy what you vision your Humble Voice page to look like. The content areas include: Profile Photo, Featured Text, Actions, Artist Profile, Bulletin Board, Word Gallery, Friends, Blog, and Comments. You’re also allowed to add new pages to your profile. You can then, in turn, add and remove any of the contents areas on the first page. Users can then sort out which content they want on each particular page. This allows for more expansive user profiles and helps diversify your profile from others. So say, for instance, I wanted to make a section for each of my individual interests. I could make a separate page for Writing, Music Composition, and Design. I could add all the content categories that are associated with each of those topics in those specific pages. For example, in my Design page you’d find the Art Gallery and Photo Album content areas, in comparison to say, my Writing page which you’d find content areas such as the Blog, Word Galleries, and Notepad. This feature helps to easily maintain and organize your information so your viewer can easily browse your profile.

The Music section’s streaming audio player is similar to PureVolume, in functionality. You can add songs from artist profiles to your Library so that you can easily find them at a later date. Additionally, you can also add the actual bands to your library as well. Their Video section mimics the Music section design-wise, but in a more simplified way. You’re able to tag, add comments, bookmark, and rate all the uploaded videos to sort out the bad from the good. Their rating systems compares with many standard five star rating systems, but instead of stars it’s, of course, their logo’s bird. Obviously, you can bookmark videos for future viewing as well. The Photography and Art section are almost identical. Featured work is on the front page, along with lists of a selection of the popular pieces and recent submissions. Naturally, you acquire points from rating and commenting on people’s work. The comments that members submit to each other aren’t moderated, so it could be hard to find thorough reviews of your work, if that’s what you’re seeking.

However in the long run, you get the best of both worlds with Humble Voice. They have nicely designed their website while keeping a wide variety of usability for the members. Topics are organized well, they have a plethora of content for your surfing pleasure, and heck, you can win prizes. What’s not to like? It’s easy enough for the timid online user and diverse enough for the more competent. So if you’re looking to get your work out their and hopefully positively criticized, then Humble Voice is one of your best bets. They have a notable amount of active users for how new their community is to the social network scene, so input on your work shouldn’t be too hard to acquire. Personally, I’m not a hardcore MySpace person, but browsing through MySpace after being on Humble Voice is like drinking orange juice after brushing your teeth. (Yeah, that bad.)

Viddler is a new video sharing site which launched last month offering a great set of features. You will be pleased to find that Viddler is not “yet another Youtube clone.” With Viddler, users have the ability to tag and comment any particular moment of time in a video, essentially enabling users to annotate and add searchable metadata to any video. This also means more relevant search results for specific queries on any person, object, or place. Additionally, Viddler offers a whopping 500MB upload limit for each video, live webcam recording, and true video streaming. Pretty impressive.

Uploading to Viddler is a snap. You can upload videos in bulk through a simple Flash-based uploader with real-time progress indicators and upload videos in 14 different formats (.avi .dv .mov .qt .mpg .mpg2 .mpeg2 .mpeg4 .mp4 .3gp .3g2 .asf .wmv .flv). Viddler’s also very generous in allowing up to 500MB each video while Youtube and Google Video only allow up to 100MB. This should definitely win some users over as it allows for longer and higher quality videos. To add videos to your account, just head to the upload section of Viddler, add all your videos to the list, and click upload. Then wait for all of your videos to finish uploading and click on the “Encode” tab which will covert your videos for viewing on Viddler. Once your videos have been encoded, they will appear in your account at which point you can view to edit your title, description, tags, and privacy settings. It’s a fairly straightforward process, although I feel the encoding should be handled automatically rather than the user having to select it themselves.

Another nice feature is the ability to record a video directly on the website using a webcam. You simply browse to the “Record” section of Viddler and start recording at the click of a button. Users can also set their computer’s audio card and video card if needed. The ability to record video is a great addition and is sure to please video bloggers, especially if they are new to video or lack video editing software. Of course you can’t edit a recording as you would in say iMovie, but sometimes a simple recording is all you need to get things going. Not surprisingly, Youtube launched similar webcam recording functionality last month.

So what is all this timed tagging and commenting stuff about? Viddler has created a system in which you can add time specific information to your videos in the form of tags and comments, similar to basic video captioning. You can simply play a video and stop it at any point to add a tag or comment at that particular moment. If a video already has tags and comments assigned to it, you will clearly see them at the bottom of the video as black and white dots. Black dots represent tags and white dots represent comments. It’s very easy to use. Just click the plus (+) icon on a videos progress bar at any time and select whether you are adding a tag or a comment, then fill in the field and submit.

Tim has recently put Viddler to the test for a writeup about our office on a service which he will be reviewing here shortly. He setup the camera and recorded the office from top to bottom and later uploaded the video to Viddler. He then tagged certain objects around the office in the video and added comments as a form of annotation to explain certain areas. It worked out very well and served as a good example of how to use Viddler’s timed metadata, not to mention the video received more than a half thousand views. You can find his video here.

What’s also neat about the video player having timed metadata is that when you embed (share) a video on your site, your viewers can see the timed tags and comments without leaving your site. Also, Viddler allows you to embed a video on your site that starts at a particular moment rather than starting at the beginning. This way, if you are referring to something specific in the video, you can have the video start playing at that moment making it easier for your viewers. What’s also neat about the video player is that it plays videos with true video streaming, unlike Youtube where it can only play what has been loaded. This means that you can skip to any point of a video and immediately start watching. This also explains how you can immediately skip to a particular moment in a video when clicking a timed tag.

Perhaps Viddler’s most difficult task is making search results relevant, a problem in which many companies have been aiming to solve for years with online video. The relevancy of results in Viddler’s case depends on user assigned tags for a video globally and throughout the video itself. Video descriptions and users are also put into account when performing a search.

To use Tim’s video as example again: Tim added the global tags, “office” and “design” as well as a description for his video. He also added various timed tags for objects around the room as they appeared throughout the video: mac, mini, speaker, and ikea, to name a few. The beauty of all this is that when I am to search on Viddler for the term “mac”, Tim’s video comes up twice in the timed tags area showing the two times that the Mac Mini appears in the video. Likewise, searching “speaker” brings up Tim’s video again, this time showing a picture of our office speakers. Clicking a result would then bring me to the video and automatically skip me to the moment the tag appears in the video. Pretty impressive, although after some testing, I feel that the search still can use some work but is potentially powerful. For starters, it would be nice if you had the option of making a search with multiple tags that would return videos containing all tags (ie: “mac AND mini” for returning videos matching both tags).

Viddler also does a great job at presenting search results. Making a search will return results in four different areas: global tags, timed tags, related videos, and related people. Global tags shows results for tags matching a video itself; timed tags shows videos with matching timed tags; related videos returns videos that match information in the description; and related people returns Viddler users that match tags the users assign to themselves. You can then filter out the results by search type. I found one thing missing though: sorting options. When making a search in Youtube, I often sort results by view count or by date added. It just helps narrow things down and gets me to what I am looking for faster.

The site itself is well designed and passes all the visual guides of a Web 2.0 design with bright colors, large fonts, gradients, and rounded corners. You will also find Ajax used strategically throughout the site for editing information and viewing additional pages of a section. Take the Explore section of Viddler for example. The Explore section is the center of all activity around Viddler and contains areas utilizing Ajax so you can seamlessly browse through pages of results.

In all, Viddler offers a great service with some top notch features. Users can assign time specific tags, add comments at particular moments in a video, record video directly on the website using a webcam, and even upload videos with sizes up to 500MB (five times Youtube’s limit). But of course, there’s always room for improvement. For one, I feel the video pages should show user comments below the video player instead of only being shown in the video itself. This would make it easier to get an overall look of comments and maybe even help Viddler with content for search engines. I also noticed that if you were to embed a Viddler video on your site, the comments window can sometimes gets cut off if the player is too small. Lastly, I felt that the search result page was missing some basic sorting options, such as ordering by date and view count. Other than that, Viddler is off to a great start and I’m excited to see where things go from here.

Disclosure: I know a member of the Viddler team through the 9rules Network.

Gaming. It’s one of the most rapidly growing industries in this new technological era. From the core roots of its forefathers Pong, video games have made an impressive leap through the decades. Games have branched out into numerous categories, each focused into their own unique styles and methods. With the endless possibilities these days, more and more people are now understanding and grasping the concept of generating their creative ideas into entertaining games. Powered by the Flash player, a significant amount of games are being found on the internet. Where am I leading all of this too? Kongregate!

Still in its alpha stage until post holidays, Kongregate brings forth a solid gaming community for Flash game developers and players. For the casual online gamer, this one will easily meander its way into the bookmarks folder. The network is fully user-submitted and relies heavily on feedback and participation to establish the online community. Featured and popular games are found on the front page, naturally. A brief description and gameplay count is specified under each game to help comb out the popular games from the rest. Along with that, there are viewer ratings associated with each game title. Online chat and real-time updates which displays the Kongregate members who are currently logged in the same game as you, is an added plus. A tag cloud can also be found on the Home page to help judge the favored categories.

From a developer’s standpoint, Kongregate offers the ability to upload and advertise your games through their website. Currently, games are only permitted to be uploaded in the standard flash .swf format, however they are in the process of getting the Shockwave format to work as well. Also, developers are able to earn revenue from the games they upload to Kongregate. You can earn profit between 25% and 50% of the total revenue. From the get-go, 25% of the revenue from the advertisments is yours, but additional percentages of revenue can be tacked onto that default 25% if you meet certain criteria. A 10% increase in revenue can be earned if you make use of Kongregate’s integrated APIs. (These APIs are still a work in progress, so everyone holds this additional 10% currently.) An additional 15% is added if your game is exclusive on Kongregate’s site. This simply meaning that besides hosting your game on your own personal website, the only other place your game is hosted is on Kongregate’s website. Payments from the ads is fairly straight-forward. Using the address that you provide in your user profile, payments are mailed out monthly. $25.00 US dollars is the bare minimum each check is made out for, so if you’re revenue from the ads does not meet this amount, your balance will roll-over into next month, and so on, until the required $25.00 mark is attained.

Kongregate wishes to keep their main website’s design advertisement free. They plan on keeping the ads in the window that each game appears in. In this window the advertisements display on a predetermined cycle of around 15 minutes. Exclusive Kongregate members have the ability to enable the ads to appear only during level change, (through the use of Kongregates APIs) so gameplay is kept undisturbed.

Let’s move along to the point system on Kongregate. You earn points by uploading games, rating games, inviting others, and finding/reporting bugs. What are the points for you ask? Well what do you know. It’s like a game! In Kongregate, you accumulate points to increase your “level”. Your level primarily just shows your status within the community as of now, but in the future the points will be exchangable for prizes. You’re also able to view a history of points you’ve obtained from the ratings that you’ve given to games. Kongregate’s staff also noted about the implementation of a mini virtual stock market in the near future. With this, you’ll be able to invest in games which could result in an immense increase to your points, or a painful loss of points, so you must choose wisely.

Let’s continue. Each game has its own Contribute section allowing members to send reports of any inappropriate games or .swf files that aren’t actual games. Kongregate’s staff ensures us that they will do their best to remove unnecessary material from the community in a timely manner. Any bugs that are discovered can also be reported in the Contribute section. In the rare case of heated online disputes via the online chat, they have also provided an email address to contact them with, so a moderator can resolve any chat problems as promptly as possible.

Rating games is as simple as choosing one to five star for each title you wish to assess. I believe they could’ve made the rating system clearer and easier to find since you have to hover over the actual stars to rate them. Rating is the main way of acquiring points to increase your level, so Kongregate is heavily dependent on participation. The customary main categories such as Action, Puzzle, Racing, etc. are there. Furthermore, tags are coupled with each game and you’re able to add additional tags for each game to help organize the games as clearly as possible.

In the Upload area you’re able to obviously upload your flash games along with that nice picture of yourself (or fantasy self) that you wish to use as your icon. Title, Game Description, Game Instructions, Category Selection, and Tags are all specified in this section. You also select whether your game is to be exclusive on Kongregate and if your game make use of their APIs in the Upload section. A “Game Uploading Agreement” is waiting for you at the bottom of the page and there’s a brief list of guidelines found to the right of the website, verifying that you fully understand Kongregate’s uploading policy.

They also give you the ability to add friends, and view your fans. Fans are people who have added you as their friend without you adding them as a friend in return. A Favorites list is also implemented so you can sift all the games that interest you into one solitary place. Games in your Favorites area display Game Title, Developer, and Rating for orginization sake.

Granted, Kongregate is partially a social networking website, (which is hardly a new idea) but they have adequately expanded on the accepted ideas of this online age. There are thousands of websites geared towards gaming, however finding one like Kongregate that truly pulls together everything that everyone likes, is a tough target to hit. Yeah, they are still in alpha, but nevertheless they have constructed a notable social networking community for avid flash gamers and developers thus far. If you’re a game developer looking to recieve some recognition for your work while at the same time trying to maybe make a little extra spending money, Kongregate should be a prime candidate for you. And even if you’re just someone trying to pass some time, you’ll be pleased to know that Kongregate can easily help you with that. I know I’m anxiously looking forward to see what the public release of Kongregate delivers us come early 2007.

The ability to express one’s ideas through storytelling is such an amazing gift, yet at the same time it can be very difficult to convey one’s message through writing. Also, finding the right criticism for your writing is often easier said than done. However don’t fret, Urbis is a new online network that allows you to post your creative writings for others to see. Founded by the New Yorker Steve Spurgat, Urbis enables you to: find people who enjoy your type of writing and collaborate with them, help others out by sharing your own thoughts on their writing through constructive criticism, or just browse the community for a good read. (MySpace for writers anyone?)

With the seemingly never-ending amount of social networking websites emerging online these days, it’s getting tough to distinctly categorize the good, the bad, and the ugly. So let’s begin. Urbis’ foundation and backbone is, of course, its society and users. The more users there are, the more interaction there is, the more chances there are for your pieces of writings to be found. In turn, this results in more opportunities for people to critique your writing. However, here lies the main dilemma I have with the web application.

Urbis is focused around credits. Credits are their type of currency within the network and also, coincidently, is the only way that you’re able to pursue getting any feedback on your writing from others. Basically, the method behind their madness is this: The way to help your writing become more well-known within the community is to participate. While I have no problem with openly participating, it comforts me to know that I have the choice of whether to participate or not. Participation is the golden rule to Urbis, and by rule I mean necessity. You’re dependent on credits to reveal any reviews that have been made about your work, however to gain additional credits you’ll be obligated to review other people’s writing.

Before you even enter a page containing an author’s work, a default amount of credits that can be earned is specified. This number is calculated simply by the amount of words in that particular piece of writing. The amount of words that your review consists of is also put into the equation. The sum of these two variables equal the amount of credits you’ll earn for the review you give the writer. Pretty much what I’m getting at is: the more time and effort you put into it, the more you’ll get out of it. (fancy that) The only other way to gain some credits is to invite other people to join Urbis. (go figure) So the endless (and essential) cycle of: uploading your work, reviewing other people’s work, and spending credits to see what others have said about your writing will have to become somewhat of a routine for you if you plan on frequently using Urbis.

Also, the reviews that you construct have to follow a set of standards. To make it so people get the most out of Urbis, (and also so they don’t cheat the system) Urbis’ management has come up with a set of guidelines for when someone reviews someone else’s work. To summarize the rules briefly, no short: “Great post!” reviews, no bashing an author within reviews, and you’re not allowed to use exceedingly, unnecessary large quotes from the context of the author’s writing just to gain more credits.

Following in the footsteps of the plethora of social networking websites already populating the online world, you also have the ability to invite other members of Urbis to become your friends. This helps congregate people who might have similar interests in certain types of writing as you. You’re able to check up on your friends and see if they have any new pieces of writing. Also, if you prefer to keep some of your writing more private, you can specify it to only be viewable by your friends. Along with that, Urbis offers the normal features such as simple statistics which track the amount of reviews you’ve completed, comments that were made, credits earned, credits spent, etc. They have also implemented a simple goal system in which you can obviously create and keep track of goals for your writing, nothing overly extensive in this department though.

I actually enjoyed the time I spent on the network. I’m a writer myself and I believe they did a nice job thoroughly thinking out the website. So, to give my general impression on Urbis, it goes as follows: Urbis provides a great way for anyone from novice to experienced writers to share their writing while additionally helping others by criticizing their writing through reviews. The only thing is, is that it doesn’t bring anything notably new to the table. With the traffic jam of social networking websites being released all over the internet, finding new innovating features is a rare gem. However overall, yes, it’s a great network and I encourage people to sign up and at least give it a fair shot. Who knows, it may just be your cup of tea. Authors of all ages have signed up to Urbis so you will find a variety of depth and style between each author, but if you’re just there for a quick glance, I can’t promise you that you’ll come across the next James Patterson.

If you are a regular reader of Solution Watch, you have probably noticed a drop in activity the last couple months. Well, it’s time for that to change. I am excited to announce that Solution Watch now has some new writers! Please welcome Tim Benzinger and Matt Wilson to the site.

You may have seen their names come up here before. They are the same fellas that I work with everyday at Parallel, a creative studio that we started half a year ago. Tim also happens to be my brother (identical twins) and Matt is my best friend. When I told the guys that I’ve been struggling with Solution Watch lately, they stepped up and asked if they can help. So, we are going to give it a shot and see how things go.

This is a big change for me and its been a goal of mine since day one to have multiple writers on Solution Watch. I just didn’t expect it to be the guys that I work with everyday! But, I’m glad it turned out this way. The three of us are very close, so I can trust them, and we can work together in person. We all still have our day jobs at Parallel, of course, but I’m hoping that things will be more consistent on Solution Watch and more quality content can get delivered to you with the three of us writing.

So, who are these guys anyway?

Tim is a graphic designer who claims himself to be “a problem solving, graphic designing, visually communicating kind of guy.” He’s also turned into quite the businessman since the start of Parallel. Ever since the age of ten, he would dream of starting a design studio and run things how he felt a business should be run. By the time of high school graduation, Tim already had a growing list of clients and knew what he wanted to do with his life. During his first year of college, he took a leap into his next venture and started his own clothing label. And I kid you not, we have a whole screen-printing setup in our basement; conveyer belt and everything. He’s now twenty years of age and can easily say that he loves what he does. He also hopes to start his own blog soon about design and business.

Matt is a designer, a writer, and a very talented music composer that has been a friend of mine for around nine years now. Like Tim and I, Matt has been involved with computers most of his life and started designing at an early age. He also enjoys gaming and learning new music. Possibly one of his best qualities that Tim and I have noticed is his high interest in learning new things and how fast he can pick up on things. He could start learning something new today and already have a good understanding the next day. Today, he attends college studying digital media and works with Tim and I during the week at Parallel.

Expect to see a post from Matt in the next couple hours and some changes around the site. I’m also going to be redoing the about section of Solution Watch (finally) in a couple days and you will be able to find Tim’s and Matt’s bios in there. You will also be able to pull up each of our bios and latests posts by clicking on our names at the top of a post. Lastly, thank you to all my readers for making Solution Watch what it is today. It will be exciting to see where things go from here.