Kicking it up a notch with SharePoint

If you’re into the whole Emeril thing you might like this. With the tremendous help of Gavin Joyce, I’ve setup a new community site called SharePointKicks.com.

SharePointKicks is very much like it’s other *kicks siblings. Members of the site submit stories (usually blog posts but can be anything) and have the ability to “kick” a story up if they like it (or down if they don’t). The more kicks a story gets, the higher up the site food chain it is. This is very much like the digg.com mentality of community rated content and takes away that *I* in *TEAM*. After all, do you really want a single MVP or Microsquishy drone always spouting off what’s best? Why not have everyone (including yourself) do it instead.

That’s what the kick sites do. And it works. You end up with a nice filtered view of the world. If a post isn’t popular, you won’t see it until it is. There won’t be dupes (or at least that’s the plan) like other aggregated sites (isn’t it a pain when 8 people all blog about the same thing?) so the signal::noise ratio should also be reduced. And you’ll get the choice content that appeals to the masses so you can focus on what’s important.

Yeah, it all sounds good on paper so time will tell how good it really is.

Anyways, there are a few ways you can participate in growing this community:

• Just visit the site. You’ll get links to blogs/articles/etc. that others find useful so hopefully that’ll be useful to you.
• Register on the site. The great thing is that you can register on one site (say SharePointKicks or DotNetKicks.com) and your registration is used on all of the kicks sites with one login. Once registered you’ll be able to submit your own stories or kick other peoples stories to increase visibility.
• Contribute to the site. As a registered user, you can add stories to the site. These can be your own blog entries (yes, we’re all about shameless self-promotion) or nuggets of SharePoint goodness you’ve found around the web that you want to share. If enough people find it interesting, it’ll be jerked up the popularity stack for all to see.
• Blog about it. A site like this doesn’t work with one guy behind the curtain pulling all the strings. It only works with people like you. If you’re a SharePoint blogger, then go ahead and submit your own story.

As a SharePoint blogger (or ones who blog about SharePoint, yes that means you Sahil) it would be great for you to get your readers to kick your own content for you. It’s like having a million monkeys do all that typing for you. All you have to do is add the following HTML to a SharePoint related blog posting you want people to share:

<a href="http://www.sharepointkicks.com/kick/?url=[URL]"><img src="http://www.sharepointkicks.com/Services/Images/KickItImageGenerator.ashx?url=[URL]"></a>

And replace the [URL] with the permalink to the actual item. This will create an image link (like the one below) and a registered user on any of the *kick sites can just click on it to “kick” your blog entry. If it’s the first entry on the site, you’ll be asked to provide a short description and select a category.

Mmmmm. Metadata. Metadata good.

Just put something useful in the description. Consider this the abstract item you’re kicking, the thing that will suck people into it and make them want to click on the link to find out more.

If it’s an entry that’s already been kicked, your kick total will be added. Once a story has been kicked a few times, it shows up on the home page and in the categories that are available on the site.

Finally if you’re just looking to help out the site, click on the Find stories to kick link on the right hand menu. This will present all the recent items submitted and give you the ability to be the publisher and kick it up onto the homepage.

Very cool.

Many thanks for Gavin for getting the site setup so quickly (I registered the domain around 9AM this morning, by 11:30AM the site was up and running) and Monty Grusendorf who’s helping out with the site duties (watch for more SharePoint stuff from Monty soon!)

So go. Spread the word. And Kick it!