Hello Neatoramanauts! We’re happy to officially kick off Neatorama’s first iPad contest. Here’s your chance of winning the gorgeous iPad tablet computer from Apple:

The top submitter for May 2010 (measured by the number of frontpaged submissions) on the Neatorama Upcoming Queue will win 1 free iPad. Top submitters #2 to #4 will win $50 shopping-sprees from the NeatoShop.

What is the Upcoming Queue?

It’s Neatorama’s DIY post system. The Upcoming Queue lets anyone write a blog post on Neatorama. Good submissions are voted up by Neatorama readers, and if they’re great, they’ll be promoted to the blog’s front page. Be sure to read the Upcoming Queue FAQ.

What’s the secret to getting my submissions front-paged?

It’s actually quite simple: make sure your posts are formatted correctly, and submit a lot of high-quality links from a variety of sources. Don’t worry about making minor mistakes as editors will try to help improve your post, though your chances of winning is vastly greater if you make their work easier

Please remember that posts with scant descriptions don’t do well. And laziness doesn’t pay: Copy and pasting the description will get you banned (and while we’re at it, cheating or gaming the system through sockpuppetry and other shenanigans will also disqualify you from the contest).

Where can I find out my standings?

The link to the current Top Submitters list is on the right-hand side navigation of the Upcoming Queue. Or you can click here: Top Submitters. Remember that you have until the end of May to be in the Top 5!

Note: iPad is shippable to US destinations only. If the grand prize winner is outside the US, then we’ll send the monetary equivalent via Paypal. The shopping spree is shippable to just about anywhere postal service delivers. We reserve the rights to void the prize if cheatin’ is involved.

Neatorama Facebook Fans and Twitter followers did get a head start (and we’ll continue to posts tips and other hints there), but the field is still wide open.

Mystery Sale
Last week, Neatorama had its last Mystery Sale. Thank you for everyone who participated! Why was it our last one? We’re working on a new system for the Neatorama Shop and I have an inkling that it may be incompatible with the way Mystery Sales work. Perhaps we’ll bring it back in the future, but for now, the last Mystery Sale was our very last one

The warehouse is officially in overdrive mode. We’ll be sending out shipments for the next week or two. Unfortunately, I don’t know where a particular order is in the queue – so please be patient, your package is on its way!

Neatorama on Yahoo!
Our post about Elena Desserich, the 6-year-old girl with brain cancer who hid love notes for her parents to find after her death, was featured on Yahoo! front page, which delivered about 2 million visitors (and over 2,700 comments – most of them are nice, but some are … wow, just wow!) in a span of just a few hours (Thanks Yahoo!) Needless to say, the servers got clobbered (though the post itself had no problem as we had put it on a CDN) So if you experienced a server hiccup last week, that was the cause.

Upcoming Queue
We changed the way the Upcoming Queue worked a little bit. Now you can browse Archived Posts (5,000+ submissions!) and keep up with comments on your submissions through RSS Feed.

The Archived Posts link is at the very bottom of the page, whereas the My RSS Feed is on the top right-hand navigation panel.

Hello everybody! I'm happy to be back blogging on Neatorama after being mostly absent last month (why? Here's the very cute reason). Anyway, it's good to be back! I'd like to update you on a number of going ons at the blog:

Neatorama Update
We've done some work under the hood (so to speak). The idea is that regular readers don't see any changes, though some things may be broken. If you've subscribed to the No Upcoming Queue RSS feed, you'll know what I'm talking about (the feed is now ironically only posts from the UQ!). We'll try to get that fixed soon, I promise.

In the meantime, please give the full RSS feed a chance - there's a lot of gems coming from promoted posts from the Upcoming Queue.

If you see anything broken, please email me (alex at this here blog dot com). I appreciate the help!

New Features

If you look at the right-hand side navigation bar, you'll see a number of new neat features:

• Browse by Date
  We've gotten a lot of requests from people who like to read all of Neatorama by going back posts after posts in the archives. This "browse by date" feature should help them keep track of where they're at.
• Browse by Tags
  I'm kind of late to the whole tagging thing (I started tagging my posts in November 2008 but have since seen the light!) It's revealing to see that we write more about Star Wars than Star Trek, as denoted by the size of the tag (reflecting the frequency the particular tag is used).

At the very bottom of the navigation bar, you can see the 5 most recent comments made on the blog - so comment frequently, mmkay?

New Ad Units

We're still playing around adding new ad units (showing products from the Neatorama Shop) in the front page and in the single post pages and deleting some in the navigation bar.

We're trying to reach a balance between controlling the number of ad spots and types of ads (for example, the rotating product ads are static images and not Flash) while maximizing revenue to pay the blog's operational cost (dem darned bills).

Neatorama Upcoming Queue: Top Submitters of August 2009

We promised to reward the top 5 submitters to the Upcoming Queue for the month of August ... and here they are (thanks guys!)

Congratulations to coconutnut who got the grand prize (an iPod Nano) - the rest of the people listed above will win something neat from the Neatorama Shop.

We'll continue to reward the Top Submitters, so if you haven't tried the Upcoming Queue, what are you waiting for? Here's the FAQ and Formatting Tips to maximize your chances of getting your submissions promoted.

Though the Mystery Sale is over, you can still get geektastic Science T-Shirts, Funny T-Shirts, nifty Ice Trays and other fun stuff at the Neatorama Online Store. Thank you to everybody who participated!

Neatorama Software Upgrade
We’re going to be doing a maintenance/upgrade soon on Neatorama – if everything goes well, you shouldn’t notice anything. If not, then, well, pardon the hiccups!

Upcoming Queue
As I’ve posted before, the Top 5 Submitter (based on Front Paged submissions) to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue for the month of August will win very cool prizes. The top dog will win an iPod Nano, whereas the rest will get cool stuff from the Neatorama Online Store.

As of today, the field is wiiiide open:

Please read the FAQ and Submission Tips to increase your chances of getting posts promoted to the Front Page. Remember that copy & pasting your description is the surest way NOT to get your post picked up

Hello Neatoramanauts! It's been a while since our last Neatorama State of the Blog post, so I'd like to take a minute to update everyone.

Mystery Sale - July 2009
Thank you to everybody who participated! We truly appreciate your business and support. It took us a few days longer than I had initially expected to gear up to ship out orders, but the warehouse has started to ship out - we shipped the first batch two days ago and it'll probably take us another full week or so to complete every order.

Usually, we ship out your NeatoShop order within 1 business day or so, but the volume of shipment for the Mystery Sale is (like last time) extraordinarily high. We're working hard to continually improve this process and thank everybody for being patient :)

If you ordered from outside of the United States, please be extra patient - shipments can take up to 14 to 21 business days due to customs clearance (those guys can really take their time though they're usually much, much quicker). I'll do another round of update when we've finished shipping out.

Twitter Only Contest
We're going to post a Twitter-only contest where you can win cool stuff from the NeatoShop soon. It won't be announced on the blog, so you have to follow @neatorama on Twitter (we won't overload you with tweets, I promise!) to find out. Perhaps if it's a success, we can do the same thing on Neatorama's Facebook Fan Page ... what do you think?

Upcoming Queue Top Submitter Prize
Love it or not, I think the Upcoming Queue is one of the neatest feature of Neatorama. For those of you who are not familiar with the UQ, it is a way for the blog's readers to write a blog post. Submissions are voted up or down by other viewers and good posts are promoted to Neatorama's front page (details at the Upcoming Queue FAQ).

For the coming month of August, we're going to have a neat prize for the top 5 submitters: the number 1 submitter (based on frontpaged posts) will get an iPod Nano, whereas the rest will get some extra neat stuff from the NeatoShop.

Remember that quality, not quantity of submissions will be the key - please read the Formatting Tip first.

Neat Stories You May Have Missed
We posted a lot of neat stories on Neatorama in July, so be sure to check these out (in case you missed them):

Fun with Low Temperatures	What 'Chu Know 'Bout Wombats? (Photo: Shami Chatterjee)	7 College Pranks
Weird, Wacky World of the Platypus	5 Historic Train Robberies	Wonderful World of Big Science

Thank you for reading Neatorama! Please tell your friends about the blog!

Upcoming Queue Top Submitter – May 2009

When we launched the Neatorama Upcoming Queue, we promised to reward Top Submitters. As a token of my appreciation, the top 5 submitters of May 2009 will get a random cool ice tray from our online store:

Ice Invaders, Gin & Titonic, Bone Chillers, and Cool Jazz ice trays
See our complete selection here: Party Ice Trays

You still have a chance to be a Top Submitter for this month (and there’s always next month) – learn more about the Neatorama Upcoming Queue here: FAQ | Tips

Neatorama Facebook Fan Page Hits 1,000 Fans

Thanks to Neatoramanaut Becky, we have a Neatorama Facebook Fan Page – and recently we’ve just hit 1,000 fans! Thank you, guys!

Rogue Ads

It’s taken a lot of work behind the scenes, but I believe we’ve significantly improved the quality of ads on Neatorama – not only are the rogue ads gone, but so are the annoying yellow teeth ads! (Scuttlebutt of the ad industry is that those yellow teeth ads are actually the best performing ads in the history of Internet ads. That’s why you see them everywhere – they’re coming from practically every single ad network on the web. Banning them cost us a pretty penny, but I think we did the right thing).

Running a small blog costs next to nothing (I know, Neato was once very small) but running a large one is actually quite costly. Bandwidth and server costs for Neatorama run in the 5-digits annually and growing. So unfortunately, ads are a necessary evil. Perhaps one day the Neatoama Online Shop is large enough that its revenue could sustain the blog, but for the foreseeable future, ads are our best option.

Because we have to rely on ad providers, sometimes rogue ads slip through – I appreciate everybody’s continued help in spotting them. Please let me know if you see an inappropriate ad, banner that has a self-starting audio, etc., so we can track ‘em down and ban ‘em (my contact info is at the bottom of the blog).

As a final note, I’m trying to find a balance between maximizing ad revenue and minimizing the number of ads that appear on the blog. Many of you probably noticed ads moving/appearing/disappearing starting in the past couple of weeks.

Neatorama Widget

Neatoramanaut Ajan surprised me with an gift: Neatorama’s very own RSS feed widget for Macs. Now, I won’t pretend to understand the mechanics of how it was made (I don’t have a Mac and wouldn’t know the first thing about widgets) – but it looks very neat! If you want one, click here to download it: Link – Thanks Ajan!

Note: a while ago, someone asks how to get in on the Mystery Sale and whether there is an email alert or something like that. Well, the answer is simple: visit Neatorama every day (or subscribe to our RSS feed) – the Mystery Sale is never announced beforehand and it only lasts for a short period of time, so you have to catch it when it’s going on (That’s part of the fun!)

Hello everybody - I'd like to take a minute and give you an update on all things Neatorama.

Mystery Sale - Thank you to everyone who participated! We've been working hard to improve the turnaround time. The first wave of shipment has started - we will be sending out packages for the next week or two. Unfortunately, I don't know whose packages will be shipped when. We'll have another update soon!

Upcoming Queue - We continue to be pleased with your submissions to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue. As a token of our appreciation, the top 5 submitters (well, 6 actually since the last position is a three-way tie) of April 2009 will get free stuff from the store (oh, let's pick one: the Ice Invaders Ice Tray).

We will continue to reward top submitters of the UQ. As the feature is still new, you stand a very good chance in being a top submitter (For hints on how to get your posts promoted to the front page, please read the UQ FAQ and Tips).

Round Up - We've never really done any weekly round up summarizing the neatest and greatest posts on the blog, and I think it's time that we start doing that. Since the beginning of May, we've done 155 posts on Neatorama. That's a lot of posts to keep track, so here are a few noteworthy ones in case you missed them:

• Neatorama's Facebook Fan Page - I don't know what you guys do at Facebook (I'm a luddite that way), but thanks to Neatoramanaut Becky, we now have a Facebook Fan Page. Becky told me that right after the post, the page got 300 fans. It's at a little above 800 fans the last time I checked. Plus all those nice comments on the "Wall." Maybe I should join Facebook after all ...
• Most controversial: Churchgoers Are More Likely to Support Torture
• WTF-iest (is that a word? It should be!): Meet the Woolies
• Cutest: Sonya Loves Her Nom Noms (though I did get emails chastising me about allowing such a post on Neatorama as it legitimizes/will-only-serve-to-encourage people to get slow lorises as pets)
• Best UQ post: America's First Face Transplant Patient Hopes Her Story Teaches People Not To Judge, submitted by Geekazoid
• Mea culpa: Cab Driver Becomes Star For Good Deed - in this UQ frontpaged post, we painted Argentina with a too-broad-of-a-brush. My apologies to our neighbors to the South (See what you did, baiwabel ;) )
• Neatest exclusive posts on Neatorama: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Emoticons :) | The Hindenburg - What Happened? | Music Tidbits: Perry Farrell
• ... and my favorite post: 200 New Frog Species Found: Madagascar Shut. Down. Everything!! (Though to understand it, you have to have played Pandemic 2 or be up with the Web shenanigans)

What do you think? Should we do a weekly round up of sorts?

Gosh, is it April 9th already? Time certainly flies when you’re having fun … or in my case, busy working.

When we started the Upcoming Queue, we promised to reward – not penalize – its top users. The top 10 submitters for the Neatorama Upcoming Queue for March 2009 are getting free stuff (as a token of our thanks for participating). Since 4 people are tied for the last place, we decided to extend the list a bit.

So, if your names are listed above, you’ll be getting an email from me about the free gift (it’s a mystery, but I think you’ll like it!).

Who will win for April 2009? Why not YOU? The field is wide open – if you’d like to give the Upcoming Queue a look see, please visit the FAQ and Submission Tips.

Hi guys! I'm still alive - just really, really busy with work (wow - just checked: I haven't posted nearly anything in about a week!) Regular postings by yours truly will commence soon. Thank you to the rest of the Neatorama authors who picked up my slack :)

Mystery Sale - All mystery sale orders have been shipped as of the Thursday. If you live outside of the US, your package may take up to a couple of business weeks to deliver (the postal service is usually very quick, it's customs clearance that is slow). Interesting discussion at the forum on this topic.

Upcoming Queue - I have a backlog of neat posts from the UQ that should've made it to the Front Page but didn't for some reason or another. If you've recently posted to the UQ but didn't get your post promoted, you may be pleasantly surprised in the next couple of days.

Call for models and designers - Thank you for everyone who submitted their applications! Unfortunately, we have fewer spaces than qualified applicants, so we have to make the painful decision to whittle down the picks to just a few of you. I have the final picks pretty much determined, and will email them in the next day or so.

Neatorama Layout - We're testing different layouts on Neatorama, so you may see new ads, search bar, etc. floating in and out.

Laugh-Out-Loud Cats #1083: Ape Lad [Flickr]

Laugh-Out-Loud Book Signing - Our friend and favorite illustrator Adam "Ape Lad" Koford will be signing copies of his new book The Laugh-Out-Loud Cats Sell Out, published by Abrams ComicArts and featuring an introduction by John Hodgman) at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles (7522 Sunset Blvd) 3 to 5 pm today. Go say hello!

Top 10 Blogs - Gerard Vlemmings of The Presurfer, one of my favorite blogs on the Web, was asked by Blogs.com from Six Apart to pick 10 funny, weird, strange, and interesting blogs. We're honored to be one of 'em. The other 9 are also excellent: Link - Thanks Gerard!

Mystery Sale – the warehouse started shipping out the orders last Friday. We will ship every day (it may take us a week or so) till all the orders go out. I’ll do another update later this week.

Upcoming Queue – if you have original content on your blog, here’s a good reason to submit it to the Upcoming Queue. From Bill Zeman, whose blog was frontpaged on Neatorama:

[Tiny Art Director] has been getting tons of traffic and links lately, including Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic, The Guardian (best of the web), Saatchi Gallery (world art news), Neatorama.com, b3ta.com, Metafilter.com, Daily Candy, Design Observer, NotCot.org, FlavorPill (in the viral section), Urlesque.com…

Thanks to everyone who is linking and sorry that I can’t list everyone, but I want to give a shout out to neatorama.com where all this traffic originated. If you want to promote a site, check out their upcoming queue feature – just make sure your server is ready for it – mine wasn’t!

Link – Thanks Bill!

Neatorama Store – back in stock: Fuzz, the Crime Scene Scarf – just $13.95

Hello Neatoramanauts! Just a brief update on the State of the Blog:

Mystery Sale - I'm sure that everyone's been wondering about their packages. Don't worry - they're coming.

We usually ship out orders within one business day, but Mystery Sales are a bit unusual. We've gotten a lot of orders that it took a while for the warehouse to gear up to ship (happened last time, too!)

The first batch of shipments is scheduled for this Friday 3/6/09 - and we will process order and ship continuously for the next week or so. I'll make another update about the Mystery Sale soon.

Many of you emailed me about tracking the progress of the order - you can check the status of your order if you're registered at the Neatorama Online Shop at the time of the purchase. For security purposes, the username and password for the shop are separate from the blog. If you ordered and did a quick checkout, you can't check the status online.

Rogue Ads - Some of you have seen inappropriate (though infrequent) ads on Neatorama. Like I explained in the last update, we've had a rash of rogue ads that should be taken cared of by now. If you see one of these, please let me know (a screenshot would be lovely)

Blocked email - A lot of people who didn't get the automatic email receipt for their orders have @sbcglobal.net email address. It seems like our emails are being blocked (not in the recipients' spam filter and not bounced back to us either) - does anyone know how I can get our emails unblocked by sbcglobal? We have never spammed anyone.

Reading All of Neatorama - Congratulations to James Lim, who has just finished reading all of Neatorama. He email me that it took him 3 months and 2 days to read all 637 pages of the blog (well, so far anyway - it's a never ending journey because we keep on adding posts!). James has just joined a small but growing cadre of Neatoramanauts who have accomplished such a feat.

Caption This - If you'd like to get yourself a free Neatorama T-shirt, go forth to One largeprawn who's running a Caption This contest (with a very strange photo!) If you're a blogger who's interested in running a competition in your blog and want us to spot the prize (a free T-Shirt from the Neatorama Online Store), please email me!

Upcoming Queue: It's Much Better Now. Promise! Neatorama reader CalamityKate wrote this about the much maligned UQ:

Hi Alex, I just wanted to eat a little crow here. I was one of the haters of the UQ and was excited when the feeds became separate. But I still had the original feed on my Bloglines, and I’ve been converted! I think that the changes you made to “tighten up” the process have worked really well, and I rarely see posts from people that seem to just be pushing their own content. Forgive me? :-)

Glad that you've kissed and made up with the Queuebot, CalamityKate! And for the rest of you feed readers, it's time to give the Neatorama Full Front Page feed (with Upcoming Queue posts) another try!

Upcoming Queue Top Submitter for February 2009

As promised, the top submitter for the month of February 2009 will get a free iPod Touch. The rest of the Top 10 will get a free Neatorama T-shirt (since taliesyn30 and scbr are tied for the 10th spot, both will get the prize). Congrats, guys!

As I have written before, I intend to continue to reward top submitters to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue. I wont' tell you what March will bring for them (maybe something, maybe nothing), so it'll be fun ;)

New Funny Science T-Shirts

A Day Without Nuclear Fusion is a Day Without Sunshine - $9.95

Great Vocab Didn't Save the Thesaurus From Extinction - $9.95

And lastly, we've added a couple of new designs to our growing list of Funny Science T-Shirts on the Neatorama Online store. Check it out: Science T-Shirts | Science Toys

Mystery Sale: Thank you to everybody who participated! This was our third and best Mystery Sale ever! Due to the high volume of orders, it’ll take our warehouse about two to three weeks to ship out the Mystery sale orders – regular orders won’t be affected and will ship out in just about one business day.

Some of you didn’t get the automatic email receipts from the store: for some reason it seems like sbcglobal.net as well as a couple other ISPs decided that our emails are spam and nuked it en route. This is a problem we’ve discussed before on Neatorama, so if you have one of these emails, perhaps it’s time to switch to Gmail.

Neatorama Upcoming Queue: A few naughty submitters were caught gaming the system – so we’ve instituted a few safeguards. For instance, now the submitter’s info is anonymized during the voting period. This ensures that the focus of the vote is the post, and not the poster.

Rogue Ads: I’ve gotten an email saying that there’s been a rogue banner ad on Neatorama. I spent all morning hunting for it, and it seems that we’ve located and banned the guilty party, but if you do see a NSFW ad on the blog, please let me know!

Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt Winner: Last week, we had our 8th Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt. The winner has been announced in the answer page.

It's been a while since we ran our last Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt - but the wait's worth it, because Tokyoflash has just released a number of really cool watches.

For those of you who haven't played before, the game is an online treasure hunt where you can win a free Tokyoflash watch of your choice.

The rules are simple: we'll give you 3 questions, for example:

1. What color is the "O" pebble in the Neatorama logo?
2. How many posts are on Neatorama’s homepage? (in numbers)
3. What’s the first insulting word in Neatorama’s article 10 Insulting Words You Should Know?

The answers (black, 30, frenchify) separated with dashes make a URL on Neatorama: http://www.neatorama.com/black-30-frenchify (go ahead, copy and paste this URL in your browser's address bar)

Got that? Easy, right? So let's get started! Here are the Tokyoflash Treasure Hunt #8 questions:

1. What is the name of the Tokyoflash watch featured above? (Not the brand, the model name)
2. Go to the Neatorama's Online Store and look for the Audio Bone Headphones page. What is the last color listed in the color option?
3. Go to the Neatorama Upcoming Queue and look for the Top Submitters page. How many are listed per page? (in numerals, for example: 10 not "ten") [By the way, top 10 submitters of this month will get a free Neatorama T-Shirt, the top submitter will get a Free iPod Touch - you still got time, if you're interested ;) ]
4. Go to Tokyoflash website, and find the watch with orange acrylic bars "inspired by the neon skylines of Shinjuku." What is the model name of the watch?

Visit Tokyoflash, and Neatorama's Online Shop and Upcoming Queue to find the answers, then string 'em together to make the URL (all words are lower case, separated by dash). Follow the instruction you'll find there.

Hurry (this contest will end tomorrow - remember to check back to find if you've won) and good luck!

Hello, everyone! Yesterday, Neatorama user rellimz submitted a post to the Upcoming Queue, which subsequently got promoted to Neatorama's front page, about how the Queue is wreaking havoc on the blog. Overnight, the post got over 100 comments from other readers voicing the same concern.

First of all, please let me thank rellimz for the interesting post, and all of you who posted a comment for giving us your feedback. I'm going to tell you what we're going to do about the Queue, but first, please let me give a background on why we have the Upcoming Queue feature in the first place.

Why Do We Have the Upcoming Queue in the First Place?

As much as I enjoy writing for Neatorama, blogging is kind of a "closed" enterprise. Traditionally, blog authors write and blog readers read (and comment, if they like). For something that is supposed to improve interactivity on the Web, it's pretty much a top-down approach or a one-way street.

For a long while, I've been thinking of ways to improve user participations - and thanks to the good folks of VideoSift and VaroCMS, I think we've found the answer. The Upcoming Queue is a place where people can write their own Neatorama posts and have their submissions be reviewed by the community (through voting) and Neatorama editors.

Submissions that get enough votes (and therefore deemed "good" by the community) are promoted to the front page. Conversely, those that are spammy or of dubious quality get voted down and actually purged from the Queue. That's the theory, anyhow.

In practice, community votes may not be enough: good posts that are written up poorly don't get votes. Bad posts may get promoted because of coordinated gaming of the system. Moreover, unless you're a hardcore Neatorama reader, you may not have noticed that the submitted post had already been covered on the blog before. Because of its size, a small number of users can dominate the Queue.

Like any new project, there will be bugs and kinks that need to be worked out - and the Queue is no different. A couple of days ago, we had a massive influx of promoted submissions of dubious quality. We had since tighten up Queuebot's algo, and the problem seems to have largely been solved.

It has been a learning experience, and I'm not ready to get rid of Queuebot nor will we completely discount the community votes (if we were going to do that, why have the voting in place in the first place?). I think the Upcoming Queue has a place on Neatorama. We're not going to change the blog into a web 2.0 or user-generated content. Instead, we will use the Upcoming Queue as a supplementary source of posts.

What We'll Do to Improve the Upcoming Queue

Here are a few things we'll do to make Queuebot better:

• Tighten up the promotion algorithm
  It's now harder for a post to be automatically promoted to the front page. While this will have a negative effect of throttling down the number of posts that make it, it will also rid the front page of lower quality posts.
  
  
• Greater editorial control
  Neatorama admins can now flag submissions that have been featured on the blog before as "dupes." This stops the voting, but lets the submission be visible for the alloted 24 hours in the Queue.
  
  We haven't been as aggressive in marking things as "spam" in the Upcoming Queue before, but we will start doing so soon. We will also edit the descriptions to make them more "Neatorama-worthy" whenever applicable. (Give us a couple of days on this one!)
  
  
• Fishing from the discard pile
  On the other hand, stricter rules will undoubtedly mean that "worthy" submissions end up being discarded rather than promoted. We will continue to fish these out of the discards and promote them manually. This also guards against hateful downvotes, where a user downvotes a worthy post simply because he or she doesn't like the submitter.

Queuebot-Less RSS Feed

One big reason that I stopped using an RSS feed reader is the ever-increasing number of unread post displayed. It's disheartening to open your reader in the morning and find that you have 500 unread posts.

While I think that the fixes above should greatly improve the quality of front page posts on Neatorama, if you hate Queuebot that much, here's an RSS feed that will display every front page post except those promoted from the Upcoming Queue:

http://www.neatorama.com/feed/?author=-5587

Simply copy and paste that into your feed reader and voilà! No more Queuebot posts.

Again, thank you everyone for your input - we take your feedback seriously and will work hard to make Neatorama a blog you can enjoy daily!

Fark has it’s place, and I’ll go there for the silly farklike posts, Neatorama has it’s place, don’t lose sight of it. Please use this post as the start of a discussion in the comments section and let the Neatorama public have a chance to voice. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe people are digging the new system, but let’s find out.

Sincerely yours,
Dan. Neatorama fanboy.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by rellimz.

Obviously some of the posts are of dubious quality – I’m going to go through them and fix what I can. We’ll tighten the algo to improve the quality of posts that get promoted.

We’re still working on the issues of search (the folks at Lijit are working hard to improve indexing and relevance) and duplicates (now admins can stop votings on things that are obviously dupes, I think we should enable flagging for duplicates). Like any good project, this one has its hiccups. We’ll get them all straightened out soon. I thank you for your patience!

Since we launched on January 26, we’ve had about 400 blog posts submitted, of which about 125 were promoted to the front page. Obviously some submissions are of low quality (spam and copy&paste jobs) and many don’t have the appropriate format, but a success rate of 30% is darn good! Furthermore, what we’re asking you to do isn’t easy: the Upcoming Queue isn’t a simple link submission – we’re asking you to write a whole blog post! But I’m not suprised, really, because Neatoramanauts are smarter than the average bear!

If you own a blog, and have unique and original posts, I highly encourage you to submit a post on the Upcoming Queue. As Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips wrote earlier this week, a front page link from Neatorama is worth thousands and thousands of visitors.

The throughput from the Upcoming Queue is actually more than the output of all of Neatorama’s authors on a daily basis. We actually had to throttle the Queue back a little, lest the front page is totally overwhelmed with posts. I’m sure that we’ll find a good number of new posts published daily that will keep you coming back regularly to find new stuff, without being overwhelmed by new posts.

As with any new (and beta) projects, there are bound to be hiccups. Early last week, our database server tripped over itself – the first outage of its sort since we upgraded our hardware. I hope that the fix we did will prevent this sort of things from happening again.

There are also two general areas that we need to improve:

• Format of the blog submissions
  Despite having a "Please write this in your own words, do not copy and paste" request in the submission page, some of you insist on copying and pasting stuff straight from your blog or website. This leads to incorrectly formatted post (HTML codes showing), so don’t copy and
  paste, mmmkay?
  
  
• Duplicates
  With over 18,500 posts on Neatorama, it’s not easy to remember what has been on the blog before (heck, even I don’t remember!). It’s best to search the blog first to see if something has been posted before, but I do understand that a lot of things we covered some years back are suddenly "hot" again.
  
  We try hard not to duplicate posts, but part of the fun of the Upcoming Queue is giving up control over the blog.

Finally, I’d like to reiterate our intention of rewarding, rather than punishing, the top submitters. While we obviously like diversity in the submitter pool, the Pareto Principle (or the 80-20 rule) predicts that only a small minority will put in more time and effort into the Upcoming Queue than the majority of readers – and that’s perfectly fine.

So, to repeat the promise: The Top Submitter of February 2009 will win a Free iPod Touch, and the rest of the Top 10 Submitters (also listed on the sidebar of the Upcoming Queue) will get a free Neatorama T-Shirt. Want yours? Start by submitting your posts. It’s easy and fun!

Links: Neatorama Upcoming Queue | Frequently Asked Questions about the Queue

You’re Invited to Write a Blog Post on Neatorama

Like many blogs, Neatorama started with a single author (that’s yours truly). Since then, the blog has expanded into many authors, each of whom bring his or her own unique contribution. I think Neatorama is ready to take the next logical step: to become an open blog in which everyone (yes, including you) can write their own posts.

Do you have a blog and would like it featured on Neatorama? Have you ever found something neat/funny/weird on the Web and would like to share it with all of Neatorama’s readers? Now you can.

Of course, there needs to be a mechanism to separate good posts from bad ones (like spam, for instance). The Upcoming Queue makes this easy by letting you vote good posts up and bad ones down. Posts that gather a lot of positive votes will then be promoted to the blog’s front page.

Neatorama Upcoming = Social Media + Blog Hybrid

The first thing that comes to many people’s mind will undoubtedly be this: It’s a social media thing, just like digg. And while we love digg, reddit, and other social media websites, the Upcoming Queue has a few differences (explained in greater length in the FAQ):

• Your submission is a blog post
  Neatorama is a blog and will remain a blog. By writing a blog post instead of a link, you’ll have more than just a few sentences to tell people what your pick is all about.
  
  
• Equal chance to get promoted to front page
  Not a power user? Don’t have a lot of friends that will vote for your submissions? No problem. Besides garnering upvotes, Neatorama editors will be on the look out for good posts to promote, regardless of the number of votes they garner. This will even out the playing field for everyone.
  
  
• Credit is given where credit is due
  This is a personal pet peeve of mine: social networking posts don’t give via or author credits. If you found an interesting item to post on Neatorama via a certain blog, please be neighborly and give it a via credit link.
  
  Promoted posts will also have author credit – your posts will carry a link to your blog or website. (We do reserve the right to edit this in cases of spam
  or inappopriate content).
  
  
• No burying
  Once a post is on the front page, it’s on the front page. There’s no burying or personal vendettas (though we do reserve the right to edit/delete in cases of spam, misformatted or inappropriate content).

Want Your Own Upcoming Queue?

The Upcoming Queue project is carried out in collaboration with Sift Partners, the people behind VideoSift, the best video community website on the Web today. The Queue is a specially customized version of Varo CMS (the engine of VideoSift), hooked up to the WordPress software that Neatorama uses.

I’d like to thank Rommel Santor, the genius behind VaroCMS, for writing such wonderful program and for putting up with me and my incessant nagging during the project.

If you’d like your own version of this Upcoming Queue or similar functionality for your blog, I highly recommend that you join the VaroCMS Interest List.

Rewarding, Not Penalizing, Top Users

To celebrate the launch of the Upcoming Queue, let’s have a contest: the Top Submitter of the month of February 2009 will get a Free iPod Touch. The rest of the Top 10 Submitters will get a Free Neatorama T-shirt. Why February? That way, we all have a fresh start (the statistics will reset to zero so early testers don’t have a head start). You all have a week to play around with the Queue before it’s for keeps!

Lastly, the Upcoming Queue is technically still a "beta" feature – if you’ve found a bug, please let us know. And if you have a blog, I’d appreciate it if you would write a post about the Neatorama Upcoming Queue.

Please check it out: Neatorama Upcoming Queue | Frequently Asked Questions

Ready to submit a post? It’s easy! Give it a try here: Link