Show HN: Phrot, a more social way of blogging. | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Phrot, a more social way of blogging.

phrot.com

20 pointsStevenup700227 comments

Sexually suggestive names notwithstanding, why don't you make this a blog aggregation platform?

Almost every blog in the world has RSS - why not make it "social RSS"?

I mean, there are already blogs around and many people put ads on their blogs and post links to reddit and HN and get an audience and whatnot.

What I'd like to be able to do is come to Phrot and submit a link to workingsoftware.com.au/rss and know that whenever I post a blog entry it'll go on the home page for people to see. Tagging would obviously be a good way to automate the categorisation, people could upvote and comment just as you have now and Phrot would become another source of "reactions" on the internet through backtype so I would still have that conversation hosted on my blog.

The people should be able to favourite bloggers they like, and plug the feed from Phrot into their favourite RSS reader, and share their favourites and have friends and all that sort of malarky that goes along with the most ridiculous internet buzzword of all time (social).

But forcing me to blog in Phrot won't work for me.

Oh, and while you're solving all my problems, another thing I've always wanted was a way to see what people i know or care about are saying - not a list of massive comments on a blog but just like a chat room that spans the entire internet (not sure if Disqus already does this - if they do it's not particularly obvious but they sure as hell should I reckon!).

Thanks for your feedback.

As a gay guy, I've got to say that "Phrot" is the worst name imaginable.

[NSFW] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=frot

Oh dear, thanks for pointing that out. I've never heard that term used in conversation though, is it common?

Well it's not the worst thing ever...I mean the website is kind of about people rubbing their stories with other people's stories, and I'm sure it will cause a lot of excitement...

That's an... interesting way to put it, but yeah, I guess we can use that as an excuse if anyone brings it up ;).

Almost all gay guys know the term. I came here to warn you too.

Thanks, I appreciate that. Surprised I didn't find the double meaning before I launched though. That's the last time I impulsively buy a 5 letter domain just because it's available and "sounds good".

On the upside, you know the target audience to whom you can flip the domain, now.

Common enough that my first reaction to the name was thinking it was some kind of early April fools day joke.

I am only familiar with this because a bunch of my friends in college were gay. It is the first thing I thought of when I read "Phrot."

Kind of look like reddit/hn or whatever, only now they also host your blog (and for people who want to earn a little money via ads, that won't cut).

Wondering if they would also add the "readability" button, who get the shares of those up-votes?

So just as the recent posts about hacker news and how to solve them (http://al3x.net/2011/02/22/solving-the-hacker-news-problem.h..., hn:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2252152) it seems that there are a few more cases where people would like to make new things with to solve them once and for all.

For this case, I wonder if there are any tagging system implemented to sort, the topics are just too board.

Thanks for your feedback, sure, if you want ads on your content then by all means use something like wordpress for that, we may offer some revenue sharing model in the future though. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by a readability button, could you elaborate?

A tagging system is a pretty good idea, we will definitely consider implementing something like that.

http://www.readability.com

They offer a revenue sharing model for subscribed users.

The confirmation email the app sent me went into Gmail's spam folder -- maybe this is related to the domain name you're using?

AIUI, the idea is that people's friends will also be on phrot so that when somone writes an entry, their friends will see it. If this is the case, do you plan to add friending/following options?

Out of interest, what's it written in?

Hmm that's odd, gmail hasn't given us problems before, as anyone else had this issue?

We don't have plans to add friending/following options at the moment, but it's certainly a possibility in the future. The site is written in PHP with a MySQL backend.

What's the advantage of Phrot over competing blogging platforms?

When you set up a blog on a traditional platform like Wordpress with the intent of looking for feedback on an idea, to share a story or just to start a conversation, or even just to share an idea with a large amount of people, there's not really any immediate way to do it, unless you market your blog and actively advertise it to get readers, and if you want to keep the interest of those readers, you generally have to commit yourself to your blog.

A lot of people just want to write something without having to spend time marketing it. It doesn't make sense, why would you want to do that, when all you want to do is write one or two blog posts in a year? Phrot is a very community centric site to blog with. It's designed for the person that wants to write about something, and wants it to be read, but doesn't want to have to go through all the hassle of promoting it.

This isn't designed to replace other blogging platforms like wordpress, just to provide a more suitable alternative for people who want to do things a bit differently. I hope this answers your question :).

Just to play devil's advocate here: let's say Phrot takes off and becomes wildly popular. Then, isn't it harder to get attention for your posts, since it'll be lost in the crowd? Basically, then you're back to having to market your blog posts heavily on Phrot to get it notice, which is the original problem Phrot is trying to attack.

At a higher level, I disagree with your point that you can get away without the "hassle" of promoting your content. You'll always have to do some kind of promotion of your content, even if it's really good. And, if it's bad, no amount of promotion will get it anywhere.

IMHO, the main point I'm driving at is that there is no "free lunch". You'll always have to promote your content in order to gain a followship. It's just a fact of the web.

If it does take off, I'd be happy to begin subdividing the site into categories in order to help it scale better. By subdividing, there would always be a manageable stream of content within those categories for discovery.

Regarding your point about this not completely eliminating the promotional aspect of gaining a followship, that's not what Phrot is ultimately about. I agree if you really want a followship, you do have to work hard to build it up, and if you're publishing content on a daily basis, that's not what Phrot is for, you can use a wordpress blog or something similar for that. I should also make it clear that we're all about promoting and rewarding good content that wouldn't otherwise be discovered, not giving a chance in the spotlight to everything that gets submitted regardless of how good or bad it is.

I suggest that on your introductory video, you remove the music. It's distracting, and made it a lot harder for me to understand what you were saying.

Sorry to hear that, we didn't think adding music would cause any problems, thanks for the suggestion.

I like the idea, and really hope this takes off.

You're talking about the blogging platform, right?

Use javascript to correct '1 comments' like it is done on this site.

How is this any different than what hacker news essentially is now?

This is a blogging platform, not a "hacker-news-like" site.

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