| A simple guide to bighow
features
Bighow is a simple versatile and extremely easy-to-use online publishing
tool that you all can use to publish and share stories related to your
passion or locality.
Take a look at
the Bighow Presentation,
the help page
or go on to a Tour.
Publish & Share anything: news, polls, journals, blog posts, links,
photos, videos, classifieds, announcements, reviews, community
discussions, forum postings, and even form a social network.
Better categorization system for your data:
which makes it more
easy for you to find useful information. You can also tag your items, just
like del.icio.us, so that you can describe your items in ways that our
categorization may not be enough at times. This 2-way categorization
system gives you a more flexible aggregator system.
Better Browsing:
While other sites force users to browse through
pages of content before finding what they were looking for, or let users
submit Search query (more on that later), what we have done is to display
many attributes of items on the right column making it easier for users to
pinpoint on data or just plain fun to browse - as it is, the attributes
can be very interesting indeed.
Better Search:
We have two types of search - the plain vanilla
single box search on home page and the advanced filters search on the
right hand column of every page inside.
Feeds for everything: On Bighow, you can subscribe to RSS feeds to
almost any item in our database - feeds for whole of Bighow, feeds for
each of the 21 topic, feeds fro each attribute, feeds for each locality,
feeds for all types of search and filter search in each section, feeds for
tags...
If you have friends on Bighow, you can track her/his activity by
subscribing to his RSS feed available on his user page, when you go the
user's page by clicking on his name link below any item.
Instant Automatic Aggregation:
While other blogging and other
online publishing tools have done nothing of note about aggregating and
organizing users' posts, bighow automatically aggregates user postings
across categories such as news (bighow.com/news), across geographical
locations - locality, city, country (http://bighow.com/local, http://bighow.com/city,
http://bighow.com/country), across user submitted tags (bighow.com/tags)
and so on. Moreover, we also drill into these individual pages and display
items across sub-categories and so on, providing feeds on-the-fly for
everything as well.
Some important and useful features of bighow:
Bighow local: By automatically tagging each items with country,
city and locality, we make it easy for you to access items and people
based on location.
Polling: Using this tool, you can create polls that are relevant
for your locality or your group. For example, local elections are due in
your locality - How about a poll for most desirable candidates?
Tagging: Tags are a way of
adding keywords to your posts in Bighow as a way of making it easier to
find and organize posts. Tags can be added by the original poster either
at the time of posting or later.
You can view pages tagged with specific words either by clicking on a tag,
or going to a tag URL, for example: http://bighow.com/tags/web20
http://bighow.com/tags/gajodhar
Most popular tags fro any section in
Bighow can be accessed by clicking on the 'Tags' link in any posting
(after clicking more). The larger a word appears on that page, the more
times it has been used to tag an item.
Tags also have individual RSS feeds, linked from the tag page. Tags are
not case sensitive. Plural tags do not combine with their singular
counterparts.
RSS feeds:
Starting with a full Bighow RSS feed, individual feeds
for each section, feeds for all types of sub categories, for search items,
for tags, feeds for any given locality, city or country and group and for
all advanced search filters.
A list of some popular RSS feeds
on Bighow can be found on this RSS feeds main page. http://bighow.com/rss.php
Social bookmarking: Users can see a 'save this' button beside every
Bighow title. This is a tool which helps you track your favorite items on
Bighow. Users who are not registered can also see what items a user has
saved.
'Save' is also an indicator of popularity of item and you may look for
number of saves mentioned below each item. At present we do not show names
of users who have saved a particular item.
Groups: Bighow Groups are collectives of users who share a common
interest or passion and are very easy to create. The groups' page is
always accessible via the navigation on the top.
Groups are created dynamically. So,
if user adds a new tag for a posting, it becomes a group and the option to
join that group is displayed while you are browsing any subcategory, city,
local, country or tags.
The first user to click on the
'Join this Group' button is deemed to the one who started a group. We
know it is out of this world but Bighow is really out of this world kind
of setup. Since this is all dynamic, the element of surprise combined with
shared interest make a more active group.
Messaging: Users will notice a Contact Publisher link at the bottom
every Posting. Using the link, users can send messages to posters,
responding to classified postings etc.
How it works: Every time a Bighow user contacts you, you will
receive a notification in your email with link to the latest message. The
message center works like a normal email system, with links for inbox,
messages sent prominently displayed on .
Alerts: Email alerts are available for any chosen keywords. Mobile
alerts are on the way. Give our lonely developer guy a break. URL:
http://bighow.com/alerts
Widgets: If you have a web site or a blog , we have tools using
which you can publish the latest bighow posts of your liking on your
website/blog. URL: http://bighow.com/widgets
Comments and discussions:
Use the comments link below every Bighow
Item. Share your opinions by commenting on news stories, community and
forum discussions, classified ads and listings.
Community Moderation: When you are viewing any Bighow Item, you
will find "Flag this item" on the bottom left of the item. Users can use
this tool to inform the administrators about objectionable content
(although, you might also want to inform us about great content as well
using the same system). When you flag something as objectionable and the
admin sees that many have flagged the said tem in same manner, we will
remove the offending item immediately.
Use the Feedback form to inform us about any objectionable item.
Flagging: Flags are not
anonymous. Admins know which users are responsible for which flags.
No registration for Forum posts and voting: You do not have to register
with us to be able to make a posting in our forums (URL: http://bighow.com/forums.php)
or to vote in bighow polls (URL: http://bighow.com/polls).
last updated: Feb 2009 |
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