QueensSpeech - The Blog http://blog.queensspeech.com Updates, thoughts and ramblings from the founders of QueensSpeech.com Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:41:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5.1 en MANHUNT becomes First Conversational Advertising Sponsor on QueensSpeech http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/manhunt-becomes-first-conversational-advertising-sponsor-on-queensspeech/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/manhunt-becomes-first-conversational-advertising-sponsor-on-queensspeech/#comments Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:09:34 +0000 Naz http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=36 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "MANHUNT becomes First Conversational Advertising Sponsor on QueensSpeech", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/manhunt-becomes-first-conversational-advertising-sponsor-on-queensspeech/" } ); ]]>

Introducing our new and exciting Conversational Advertising product.

Since our inception in December 2006 we have promoted and publicised over 400 of the best gay and lesbian blogs on the Internet. Our guiding philosophy is to inform our readers, giving them access to the most up to date news, gossip and entertainment from across the Queer web. Our aim is to drive traffic to all the amazing sites that appear on QueensSpeech.com.

Realising the power of online conversations, we have just launched our innovative and exciting advertising product called Conversational Advertising. We are now offering a limited number of premium sponsor packages to blog owners who want to promote their blog content, products or websites through their RSS feed.

The package includes premium blog placement across all pages of the QueensSpeech site. As an advertiser, you control the message of your ad – when you update your blog your new post will appear almost immediately across QueensSpeech within your dedicated ad space.

Conversational Advertising is a perfect platform to promote both websites and blogs. Your content will have approximately 600,000 page views a month, and you’ll receive nearly 185,000 new incoming links for the duration of your sponsorship. There is no limit on the amount of posts that can be made, the more messages you post, the more you will be connected with the 250,000 monthly unique QueensSpeech users.

We are proud to announce our first conversational advertising sponsor as Manhunt and their new Manhunt Daily Blog, we have a limited number of further sponsorship placements available for website owners to promote their blog to our audience. Please contact us for further information about this exciting product through our advertise page.

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/manhunt-becomes-first-conversational-advertising-sponsor-on-queensspeech/feed/ QueensSpeech supports George Takei - Say NO to Prop 8 http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/queensspeech-supports-george-takei-say-no-to-prop-8/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/queensspeech-supports-george-takei-say-no-to-prop-8/#comments Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:41:45 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=35 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "QueensSpeech supports George Takei - Say NO to Prop 8", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/queensspeech-supports-george-takei-say-no-to-prop-8/" } ); ]]> Actor George Takei (Star Trek and Heroes) joins other Asian Pacific Islanders leaders at a press event and rally in Little Tokyo to oppose Proposition 8.

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/11/queensspeech-supports-george-takei-say-no-to-prop-8/feed/ New Feature on QueensSpeech: Meme Explorer http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/09/new-feature-on-queensspeech-meme-explorer/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/09/new-feature-on-queensspeech-meme-explorer/#comments Sun, 21 Sep 2008 21:27:49 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=33 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "New Feature on QueensSpeech: Meme Explorer", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/09/new-feature-on-queensspeech-meme-explorer/" } ); ]]> Building on our last update, we wanted to continue to explore different ways to help track and promote  common themes occurring across the gay blogosphere, often referred to as Memes (definition of Meme). We already have the tags page, and although useful, it lacks context (if you’re busy browsing for stories, the last thing you’d want is to be moved away to a dedicated tags page where your current context is lost.)

Last night we released our Meme Explorer bar, which is now available at the top of all main section pages across the site. This new feature analyses all stories in a given category published over the last week. It then attempts to identify common themes, threads and topics discussed, then ranking them in order of activity. The most popular re-occurring themes appear in the new ‘Popular this week’ bar as shown below:

QueensSpeech's New Meme Exporer

This particular example is taken today from the news section - where this week the hot topics have been Brad Pitt, who reportedly donated $100,000 to support gay marriage, Sarah Palin and Barack Obama.

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/09/new-feature-on-queensspeech-meme-explorer/feed/ Information overhaul at QueensSpeech.com http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/information-overhaul-at-queens-speechcom/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/information-overhaul-at-queens-speechcom/#comments Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:57:18 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=31 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "Information overhaul at QueensSpeech.com", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/information-overhaul-at-queens-speechcom/" } ); ]]> You may have noticed the brand new navigation bar across the top of the top of QueensSpeech.com(?) - the end product of a major review in the way we classify, categorise and organise the 130,000+ stories published within on our network.

When we re-launched back in November 2007, we categorised content into 6 basic high-level categories, News, Opinion, Gossip, Blogs, Sexy and Adult. These were adequate for casual browsing, but not really powerful enough to explore related stories or low level themes. So to compliment them we introduced our dynamic tagging engine - a powerful system to automatically tag the stories based on their subject matter and relationship to similar stories found on mainstream search engines (summary of the most popular tags here). We’re now tracking over 650,000 inter-related tags and memes covering topics such as Lindsay Lohan, Hillary Clinton, The Olympics, and even gay prison inmates,

But we wanted to go one step further and make it even easier for you to discover interesting and relevant content. So with the launch of the new toolbar we re-jigged the old top level categories, and introduced several more, including a number of secondary level categories such as Politics, Religion, Travel and Gay Marriage.

So have a browse round and please do let us know what you think.

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/information-overhaul-at-queens-speechcom/feed/ Vote for us at GaySocialites.com http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/vote-for-us-at-gaysocialitescom/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/vote-for-us-at-gaysocialitescom/#comments Tue, 05 Aug 2008 02:20:10 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/vote-for-us-at-gaysocialitescom/ SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "Vote for us at GaySocialites.com", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/vote-for-us-at-gaysocialitescom/" } ); ]]> Please vote for us at the 2008 GaySocialites Awards - there is only a few hours left before voting ends!

www.gaysocialites.com/vote

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/08/vote-for-us-at-gaysocialitescom/feed/ Queens Speech reaches 100,000 story milestone! http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/queens-speech-reaches-100000-story-milestone/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/queens-speech-reaches-100000-story-milestone/#comments Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:58:26 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=15 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "Queens Speech reaches 100,000 story milestone!", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/queens-speech-reaches-100000-story-milestone/" } ); ]]> Since we re-launched back in November 2007 we’ve been busy scouring the web for some the most talked about, and most popular stories affecting gay communities around the world. We’ve covered everything from the drawn out US Primaries to Heinz pulling one of their tv ads (because a few people complained of a two gay men being portrayed as a ‘normal’ couple).

Now we’re delighted to announce that we’ve passed the 100,000 stories mark! That’s over 100,000 stories, fully searchable, categorised and available on QueensSpeech for you to read and enjoy. We’ve also increased the number of information sources that we search (every hour), tripled the capacity of our hosting servers (to improve page loading times) and we currently have a range of exciting new features in development  - which we’ll be announcing over the coming months.

We still have a long way to go, and lots of work ahead of us. But for now, a very big thank you to everyone that has helped and contributed to the project so far!

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/queens-speech-reaches-100000-story-milestone/feed/ Same sex ChaChaCha http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/same-sex-chachacha/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/same-sex-chachacha/#comments Sun, 13 Jul 2008 10:30:16 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=27 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "Same sex ChaChaCha", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/same-sex-chachacha/" } ); ]]> Last month we covered a story by Clay Cane discussing how the media has had an effect on the evolution of the ballroom scene. As a follow up, Current TV got in touch with QueensSpeech to let us know about a short film that they had just produced on gay ballroom dancing in Hollywood. We’ve been fans of Current Tv for quite some time, so we thought we’d share their video, Same Sex ChaChaCha, with you.

The original story by Clay Cane can be found on the Media Rights website.

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/same-sex-chachacha/feed/ Caching Phase II Launched http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/caching-phase-ii-launched/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/caching-phase-ii-launched/#comments Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:52:28 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=23 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "Caching Phase II Launched", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/caching-phase-ii-launched/" } ); ]]> Finally, we’ve successfully rolled out Caching Phase II. Although we were happy with the speed increase introduced with the first phase of the caching engine, we still were experiencing slow load times with the popular tags module. This was particularly bad on the homepage where we display popular tags from the last seven days. Since rolling out Caching Phase II, we are now experiencing acceptable speeds across the network - a marked improvement on recent weeks!

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/07/caching-phase-ii-launched/feed/ Caching now enabled http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/06/caching-now-enabled/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/06/caching-now-enabled/#comments Sat, 07 Jun 2008 22:56:24 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=22 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "Caching now enabled", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/06/caching-now-enabled/" } ); ]]> We have now activated a simple caching engine on the homepage and all other pages featuring ‘most read’ and tagged content. Over the last few weeks we’ve seen a continued increase in load on our servers due to an rapid increase in visitor count. This, unfortunately on some days, caused QueensSpeech.com to slow down to an unacceptable level. Even though we’d upgraded our main hosting servers, the extra traffic almost cancelled out the new hardware installation.

After reviewing both commercial and open source caching solutions on the market, we decided instead to develop our own simple caching engine, with the overall goal to decrease the number of dynamic calls to the database.

Phase I - we cached articles the homepage and ‘most read’ content blocks. In Phase II we launched caching on the ‘tag content blocks’. I’m pleased to say that since both phases have been rolled out, load on the servers has decreased. http://queensspeech.com now performs a lot lot better, with pages loading much faster and rendering times greatly reduced.

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]]> http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/06/caching-now-enabled/feed/ New tagging engine now available on QueensSpeech.com http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/06/new-tagging-engine-now-available-on-queensspeechcom/ http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/06/new-tagging-engine-now-available-on-queensspeechcom/#comments Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:58:40 +0000 Matt http://blog.queensspeech.com/?p=21 SHARETHIS.addEntry( { title: "New tagging engine now available on QueensSpeech.com", url: "http://blog.queensspeech.com/2008/06/new-tagging-engine-now-available-on-queensspeechcom/" } ); ]]> We’ve quietly rolled out a simple but powerful tagging feature on all aggregated stories. Every time a new story is found and published, we evaluate the content and then look to identify appropriate tags (Wikipedia definition) to attach to the story. This helps create contextual relationships between similar stories by using one or more keywords to connect the items. When you select one of the tags, you’ll be presented with a summary of all other content ‘tagged’ with that keyword or phrase (example).

We’ve also created a ‘tags overview page‘ which provides a visual summary of the most popular topics and conversations published across the QueensSpeech network. The page is broken down to most popular subjects for today, this week and all time. The larger the font used by a tag, the more stories that have been tagged with that phrase.

More tag related functions will be introduced over the coming months.

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