babelup

During the last few hours, BabelUp was inaccessible.  Sorry about that.  There were complications outside of our control involving a malicious German guy.  Anyway, everything should be fixed now.

There's now a new way to post other pages to BabelUp!

Just right-click this link (BabelBlog) and choose "Add to Favorites" on Internet Explorer or "Bookmark This Link" on Firefox, then click the bookmark when you're on a page you want to write about. A new page or tab will open with BabelUp's "Add new blog entry" page, with the title already filled out and the URL in the content area. In some browsers, text you had selected will be quoted in the content area.

What are they, and how do I get more?

I'm referring to the ones that look like stars and globes and faces and things that show up under people's avatars.

In case you haven't noticed them, BabelUp currently has Featured Articles that appear in the upper-right of the homepage.  The "Featured Article" feature was implemented with the expectation that someone would actually write an article that could be featured there.  Instead, it has mostly been used as a smallish announcement for world news; but we're now beginn

I ran some tests today and it appears that some 8 to 10 times more comments are being posted than forum topics, blogs, images, or groups.  This is good; of course we want to encourage conversations.  But it made me question whether the BabelPoints awarded for posting conversation-starters are high enough, both because there are far fewer conversations than comments and because more BabelPoint

We've got another new poll for you: How should Obama respond to McCain's VP choice of Sarah Palin?  Vote over on the left!

Our last poll showed an astounding 81% of you saying that the VP pick would not affect your vote in November.

We're also having a small contest.  If you would like to suggest the next poll for BabelUp, add a comment to this post!