Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Mizozo Preparing Its New Version

We at Mizozo are frantically trying to get our new version ready for release. These last few weeks have been crazy at Mizozo Labs with far too much time spent on last minute functionality requests and bug fixes. However, it looks like all of our effort is finally coming to a close, at least for our initial release. We will be making at least 2 releases, a first preliminary with much of our new functionality and, most importantly, our new design. The second will include a new Profile Page for our Publishers, as well as any bug fixes that come up.

It is our hope that we may be able to release a new version as early as this upcoming Monday (April 2nd), however it may need to be pushed back to April 9th. So far, things seem stable, but new problems are still being found. We will be warning our users at least a few days in advanced to the release because we expect intermittent downtime during that process. It shouldn't take long, but the site will definitely seem unstable for a few hours.

Likewise, this release will officially push Mizozo out of Beta. While we were hoping to have substantially more functionality in place before we stripped ourselves of the Beta tag, it looks like our desires didn't match up with our wallets, and hence we will have to shed the Beta skin a bit earlier than originally planned.

When we are ready to do our release, a more thorough list of new functionality, as well as modified functionality, will be provided. Stay tuned ...

Friday, March 23, 2012

Mizozo - As Records Go ...

Here at Mizozo, every time we break a new personal record for viewership we get excited. As yesterday's single article record was broken (fastest to 100,000 page views), we immediately call one another and brag about how well Mizozo is doing and how quickly its growing. Yesterday we broke another record, highest number of visitors (as per Google Analytics) in a single day.

According to Google Analytics, yesterday we saw about 83k visitors and 100k page views. Our previous day record was 80k visitors, but with 115k page views. While most of the team members were incredibly excited about this news, I was a bit more frustrated. The fact is, our server was so over strained during much of the day that in all likelihood our visitor count would have likely been double if we had a faster server, or better yet more efficient code.

Luckily, Mizozo 2.0 is almost ready for release. As bugs are being flushed out, we are prepping everything and are cautious as to the outcome. I expect that we will quickly begin breaking more and more records, but that isn't necessarily going to be the case.

The reason for this post isn't actually to brag about our accomplishments, even though that's what I have been doing thus far. The real point is a cry for help. We need able bodied people to assist us in growing faster. Of course, we are always in need of more publishers, so joining Mizozo's ranks on that end is incredibly important. However, we are also in need of SEO, Site Content and server management. The list of our needs far exceed our ability. All of us here at Mizozo have real jobs and many of us families, so our time is generally of short supply. We are always grateful when people post new articles, and expect our revolutionary business model to attract substantially more (once the profit sharing goes into effect on January 1st, 2013).

But, if you have ability beyond writing articles, we would love to hear from you. Please either post a comment, or write to us directly at mizozo.com@gmail.com.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

An Article on Mizozo Just Broke a New Record

Being a young site, articles on Mizozo regularly break our own records. One such record I would like to share with you because I have been watching it closely these last 2 days. In just under 33 hours, Reddit, the land of Filth and Humor broke the 100,000 page view limit.

While this may not be much for larger sites than hours, until recently our site could only handle a peak of 60k page views a day before it went down. With some minor server configuration adjustments and more RAM, we have increased that number closer to the 100k, and with the new version we hope to push this server to 500k. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

So, a congratulations are in order to RedditTroll for such an amazing feat.

Monday, March 19, 2012

Several Big Changes ready for the new release of Mizozo

I am excited to report that we have several big changes ready for release. As it stands, almost all functionality is complete and the site is in test mode. We haven't initiated the code freeze yet because there still are a few minor details we need done, but for the most part Mizozo Labs is in test mode.

The big changes, however, will make the user experience much better. Over the last year we have been experiencing a large influx of users. Unfortunately, these users have been predominantly SEO experts that are pushing content of other sites. These links have their benefit, so we aren't removing them, but they don't benefit our users much. Hence, we have added a new type of categorization for these pages, aptly labeled SEO. When an article is labeled as SEO, it will no longer show up on the home page nor on any category pages. These articles will be available via search, tag lookup or directly link. By removing them from the Homepage and Cateory pages, however, we feel that the user's will not have as much clutter and better articles to chose from when visiting.

Likewise, we have implemented another label ... SPAM. While most of the SEO guys are posting SEO articles, some of them opt for simply spamming us with random garbage about porn or just blatant advertising ... both of which we aren't pleased with. So far, we have been simply deleting them in a round about way, primarily because we never really implemented an easy way to remove articles. Now, however, we have. Likewise, these spammers will be faced with additional banning from the site, but I won't go into these details quite yet.

A slightly less useful item, but extremely useful when it comes to advertising revenue, is a "No Home" categorization. If an item is deemed unworthy of being on the homepage (generally because the primary image contains nudity), we will assign it this status. All it will do is remove the item from the homepage, but it will show up everywhere else.

Speaking of advertising, the last feature I would like to discuss is one long in the making ... a means to switch our advertisers for given pages. We have noticed that some of our most popular articles were free of Google ads, usually because the article contained some form of nudity. We have now implemented a means for switching between two advertisers on any of our pages. Google will still be our primary advertiser, but if we see that Google isn't showing up somewhere, or we know that Google will not be pleased with such an article, we will switch to our backup.

Of course, there are many more additions to the site, but I can't possibly list them all. These additions, however, are most likely to affect the user experience, hence I felt obligated to share.

Monday, March 12, 2012

Mizozo's Updated Algorithm Code

With development slowly winding down, much of last week was spent in trying to develop a new way for categorizing articles on Mizozo. This may seem like a trivial matter, but in fact we consider this one of Mizozo's greatest features. Trying to identify those things that are popular, thus giving the user what is likely the hottest topic of the moment, is the purpose of the algorithm.

Last week we spent a great deal of time identifying how best to approach this problem. We identified several items that make for a good story. These items include:

  • Page Views
  • Number of Comments
  • Number of Responses
  • Article's Age
  • Publisher's Status

We then identified several minor things to take into account, such as possible trending of a story and if the story has made it to the featured list. As stories age, the articles must settle in some fashion that gives them a logical progression, most likely ordering them simply by their timestamp. Since a timestamp is a very large number, we decided to go with the article's ID, a simple auto_increment field which also gives us a good sequence.

After much deliberation, we decided to remove the Publisher's Status from the current article, allowing for a future enhancement. While we haven't fixed the sorting algorithm yet, the current version looks like this (please ignore the PHP code):


    // Date Coefficient
    $dCof = 1+((5-$days)*.1);
    if ($days < 1)
      $dCof = $dCof+((12-($hours/2))*.05);
    if ($dCof < 1)
      $dCof = 1;

    // Views Coefficient
    $vCof = $article['views_new']*2;

    // Comments Coefficient
    $cCof = ($article['comments_count']-$article['prev_comments_count'])*50;

    // Response Coefficient
    $rCof = 1+($article['responses']*.1);

    // Increasing Trend Coefficient
    $tCof = 1;
    if (($article['views_count']-$article['prev_views_count']) < $article['views_new'])
      $tCof = 1.3;

    // Featured Coefficient
    $fCof = 1+($article['is_featured']*.2);

    $article['score'] = ($article['score'] + ($article['id']+$vCof+$cCof)*$dCof*$rCof*$tCof*$fCof)/2;


What do you guys think? Does this algorithm do a decent job of ordering articles as they appear on Mizozo? Over time, this algorithm will be changed often, as it has in the past. Likewise, we plan on implementing a scoring system for our publishers which will also influence the overall score of each posted article.

Monday, March 5, 2012

Mizozo Development Status Update

Development hasn't been going quite as quickly a I had hoped, but we are progressing steadily at the next version of Mizozo. As mentioned before, the new Home Page and Article Page are ready. They have been tested and are 98% bug free at this point. We have also completed the new Category Page and Search Page. While the Category Page is ready, the Search Page still has a few quirks.

That leaves us with a few simple pages, like our terms and conditions, privacy and other pseudo-static content, along with a new login page. However, one major page left for development is the new Publisher page. We have been working hard at coming up with a reasonable design, but so far we can't come to terms. It looks like all the other pages will be released first, and then the new Publisher page, unless we come to terms quickly.

However the site is released, I am extremely excited. It is incredibly frustrating to see the site go down every time we have a popular link. This new version should allow us a substantial increase in traffic.

It is worth noting that we have no intention of making any changes to our actual Publisher. The page will be redrawn to take into account our new design, but the underlying functionality controlling publishing content will remain the same ... much to the discontent of several of our publishers. This is a very complicated piece with many moving parts, so until the site begins producing substantial revenue, there are no plans to renovate it.

We are, however, almost finished with the new algorithm code. With the new layout of all our major pages, we have simplified a great deal in order to allow for a substantially simpler algorithm. As is currently done, the new version will sort all stories throughout the site on their popularity. This popularity will be calculate every half hour and take such things into account like page clicks, comments and responses. We also plan on developing an algorithm to rate publishers, but this algorithm is still a ways off.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Mizozo's February Report

As promised, part of Mizozo's transparency is status and financial reporting. While I still haven't spent a great deal of time perfecting the data collection and presentation of the data, having spent the majority of the past two months on Mizozo Labs and a corporate identity, I will be sure to enhance my reporting over the next few months.

In short, Februaries numbers are very similar to Januaries. It is important to note that the month is in fact shorter, and the numbers of visitors and page views are a touch higher. However, our advertisement earnings fell a bit short. The quick summary is as follows:


Number of visitors: 673,498
Number of Pageviews: 970,150
Estimated Monthly Earning *: $210.73

* - Estimated because Google hasn't finalized earnings yet.

Last month we had tried an affiliate marketing idea, but that fell flat. Likewise, finding advertisers for Mizozo has become a challenge, one that I haven't had time to address. It seems that advertisers prefer a site that is more geared towards children than adults, and the presence of topless women more or less guarantees their absence. Over the next few months, substantially more time will be spent seeking out advertisers, but this is not overly consequential at this stage of Mizozo. Once the new version rolls out, however, it will become substantially more important.