big question#1: what is bighow?

bighow is a simple but, dare we add, the most versatile and extremely easy-to-use online publishing tool that you all can use to publish and share many things:

news, polls, journals, blog posts, links, photos, videos, classifieds, announcements, reviews, community discussions, forum postings, and even form a social network.

We will be adding newer things to publish every now and then.

You can also use Bighow to publish and aggregate news and information about your neighborhood, city or country.

For this, you do not have to do anything extra. Bighow automatically aggregates all published or shared items across neighborhoods, cities and countries.

We hope you Bighow to raise local issues - just choose any one of the news category and pour your heart out.

big question#2: why should I use bighow and not others?

A. Use Bighow to bring traffic to your site. There are so many categories in which you submit your content or make your content more accessible to users.

B. Bighow is easy to use.

C. 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.

D. Say 'No' to Walled Gardens. Bighow is open and a delight to browse without forcing users to register first. Anyone can freely subscribe to any RSS feed.
Soon, we will come up with features that will help anyone to republish Bighow content of their choice on their own site/blog.

E. 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.

On Bighow, you will find that we have tried to give link to a mind-boggling variety of items - the idea is to help users browse better.

F. 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.

G. 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.

H. 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 (bighow.com/local, bighow.com/city, 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.

a quick look at some important and useful features of bighow:

1. bighow local
Our mission is to give users easy tools so that they can have a Newspaper for every Locality, City or Country. Bighow Local is our attempt to revolutionize citizen journalism.

Bighow Local, in combination with with a democratic tool like our 'Save' tool, helps people access useful and interesting local information that other Bighow users have found useful.

Local users can also comment on every Bighow Item and share it via email with their friends, family and co-workers.

We are working on combining user-submitted localities with automatic spell check and dynamic database suggest, in the end

2. polling

We are particularly hopeful with our polls feature in the News Section. 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?

3. 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

The 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.

There are more things you can do with tags an we will keep you updated.

4. rss feeds
Bighow gives rss feeds for a wide variety of items: 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

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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 .
 

8. 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

9. 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
 

10. 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.

11. dealing with pornography, SPAM or other objectionable material

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.

Moreover, you can use the Feedback form to inform us about any objectionable item.

12. flagging

Flags are not anonymous. Admins know which users are responsible for which flags.

13. 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).

coming soon

Here is a short list of some features that we will be adding to bighow soon:

- more interesting and useful things to publish

- Twitter-like short posts

- Post from mobile phones

- Templates

- lifestreaming

- APIs, Microformats