OK, I've applied #1 and also cleaned up the welcome page quite a bit. Let me know what you think!
The "what's going on now" stuff will require a little more work, and a lot more thought because I've been consciously designing the site to let users be as private as they want to be, which has had the unintended side effect of making it hard for some users to be as public as they want to be.
A web-based, text-only usenet reader modeled after Google groups (tree threading, favoriting of threads, robust search), but more reliable and with the ability to ignore trolls and spammers. An additional, streamlined, "mobile" option would be a big plus. :)
1 and 2 I did; I emailed all the major video game blogs and news sites with a sort of "friendly press release" in which I pointed out the features of my service that would make great attention-grabbing headlines and really appeal to video game players. Only one, relatively small, game news site actually posted about it, and they only did because a friend of mine is an editor there and he specifically told them to.
3: There's a Facebook "like" button and a Google "+1" button on every game's page, and there's a general "+1" button for the entire site.
4 I should look into. A few of my most well-connected users have evangelized about the service quite a bit without any incentives (although they probably understand that the more users and ratings are in the service the better the recommendations will be). So I don't know how much more effective incentivizing evangelism will be; it might be what finally cracks the big game forums as users post their referral links there, but most of those forums forbid referral links in the same breath that they forbid talking about your own service. So, it might get some people banned from their favorite forums, but it would get me a few more users in the process. :\
I refrained from posting a link of mentioning the service by name in the original post, because I didn't want it to look like a "stealth ad". But maybe all the crap about not promoting your own services in forums has just made me over-cautious. :)
Could you model your PR business to take equity in exchange for your services? Most lean startups wouldn't be able to pay you much cash, but I think a lot of them would be willing to give you equity. In fact, I think taking equity rather than cash would offset the "the results are difficult to measure" issue you mentioned; if I give you $5,000 to do some PR for my startup, then (to my mind) you have the money regardless, and you could be spending 60 hours a week for two months traveling the world and evangelizing about my startup to all the right people, or you could just ask a friend to post it to his blog and call it good.
If you have equity, however, then your profit is tied directly to the success of my startup, so I could rest assured that you would have a (literal) vested interest in making my company successful.
Interesting. I've noticed on reccr ( http://reccr.com ), my own recommendation project, that the recommendations for 4 and 5 star ratings are much more accurate than those for 2 and 3 star ratings. I had initially thought that it was simply that there were more 4 and 5 star ratings in the system, and thus more data to base recommendations on, but the "larger perceived gap" between 2 and 3 versus 4 and 5 makes a lot of sense and is probably also a major contributing factor.
Cripes. After the fourth "small penis" joke and the phrase "head-towel in hand" I had to stop reading. And I will make a point not to read Vanity Fair in the future.
I am interested in the future of Dubai, but this is not how I want to read about it.
Of course there's already the P-ROC (http://www.pinballcontrollers.com) which replaces the MPU in a pinball machine with a board running open-source software, and Ni-Wumpf (http://ni-wumpf.com/development.html) has something similar for older machines, but this will be the first time that a pinball manufacturer has invited hobbyist programmers to modify the code.
I'll be interested to see how their plan to be "gatekeepers" of the mods works out, and suspect that if it takes off programmers will quickly find a way around it, if Jersey Jack's hasn't already decided to completely open it up by the time they launch.
A couple months ago I quit my day job and devoted myself full-time to learning Rails and starting up my exciting new web project: reccr, the amazing automated video game recommender! Rate the games you've played, and it'll tell you what games you should play next. It's currently in early beta, and capped at 500 users, but the all-important core "recommendation" engine is working great, so come on by and rate some games and get some interesting recommendations!
Feedback here in this Hacker News thread is greatly appreciated! At the moment I'm on the cusp of adding some "social" features to the site, but I'm not sure what the best social feature additions would be. What would YOU most like to see addded?
http://reccr.com