These cool pieces of art were done by graphic artist Osione Itegboje, a Sturvs partner. He must have been very bored.

Some more art done by another Sturvs partner coming soon.

Sturvs has added IMEEM to the list of media that can be embedded with quick-tags (e.g. <imeemsong>VIDEOCODE</imeemsong>) to display media in a Sturvs submission. This means users with audio files/mixes/mixtapes which exceed the Sturvs size limit of 20MB and users with IMEEM videos can still put their content on Sturvs, via IMEEM.

On IMEEM there are currently four (4) types of media users can post, and also copy embed code for, which are song, music playlist, video & photo. We didn’t see the need to enable Sturvs embeds for photos so we decided to focus on only songs & music playlists.

Instructions on how to embed each media type are below:

1. On the page of any IMEEM song, playlist or video copy the embed code from under the player as shown below:
   
2. Now in the embed code you just copied look for a random-looking code (let’s call it MEDIACODE) after the http://media.imeem.com/ part of the src attribute.
In any IMEEM embed code (either song, playlist or video) the media code is located in the same place with the following differences:

   For IMEEM songs, the media code is located at
   ...http://media.imeem.com/m/MEDIACODE…

   For IMEEM playlists, the media code is located at
   ...http://media.imeem.com/pl/MEDIACODE…

   For IMEEM videos, the media code is located at
...http://media.imeem.com/v/MEDIACODE…

   e.g.

   <object width="300" height="80"><param name="movie" value="http://media.imeem.com/m/MEDIACODE/aus=false/“></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://media.imeem.com/m/MEDIACODE/aus=false/” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” width=”300″ height=”110″ wmode=”transparent”></embed><a href=”http://www.imeem.com/someusername/music/somecodeyouignore/song_title/”>Song Title</a></object>

3. Take this string (MEDIACODE) and when you reach step 2 of the Sturvs submit process, you can now place the following quicktag anywhere in the description field on the form to display your media:
   For a Song: <imeemsong>MEDIACODE</imeemsong>
For a Playlist: <imeemplaylist>MEDIACODE</imeemplaylist>
For a Video: <imeemvideo>MEDIACODE</imeemvideo>

View demo of the above instructions

All of the currently allowed quicktags for video/media on Sturvs are: <youtube><googlevideo><myspace><dailymotion><ifilm><metacafe><brightcove><imeemsong><imeemplaylist><imeemvideo> where a code is pasted from the original embed code from the external website and placed in-between the quicktags to embed the media on a Sturvs submission.

We hope say Nigerian IMEEM users go gbadun our new feature.

Sturvs is now on Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturvs

We would like to introduce to you the beta (test) version of our new Sturvs Web Search Engine.

Sturvs Search searches the entire web for whatever word or phrase you give, and also displays results from Sturvs.com to the right. It can serve as an efficient search engine for Nigerian content, because you know whatever you search for, you are showed what Sturvs.com has to offer for that search.

The Sturvs.com box to the right shows the top 10 search results for that keyword/phrase (by number of votes).

Please feel free to search for whatever you like on there.

Due to popular demand and requests from our users, we now have a user playlist feature on Sturvs Music. Each user now has a link to a playlist of music items that the user has saved to his/her profile. So basically the only way to add an mp3 to your playlist is to save that item. Each entry has a Save button under it when logged in.

Please note that the “Save” feature is not only for mp3s. You can save any Sturvs item to your saved items, which is visible under your profile menu, but only those items with mp3s attached will show up in the user playlist. All saved mp3 items can be visible under Profile > Playlist.

1. Click on Profile
   
2. Click on Playlist

Also to remove an item just go to your saved items by clicking on Saved in your profile and then click on the Remove button.

The user playlist will also always be available at:
http://www.sturvs.com/naijamusic/USERNAME

We hope this gives users a better listening experience on Sturvs.com.

First of all, read this testimonial:
http://blog.naijalingo.com/2008/05/naija-lingo-on-sturvscom/

Sooooooo…apart from the wealth of Nigerian content Sturvs provides, we also have something much more profitable to offer. Sturvs has had incredibly increasing traffic over the past few months, and every link that makes it to our home page has driven guaranteed traffic to the source of the content.

Here is an example of a video uploaded to YouTube on the 21st of April 2008. We assume the video would have showed up on Sturvs a few days after and made it to the home page around 1 week after. So let’s say the video made it to the home page of Sturvs on May 1st, 2008. Here are the stats of the video logged by YouTube as of May 25, 2008 (today):

See the statistics for yourself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSAxZotbVO4

285 + 34 + 19 = 338 hits is a good number of hits for being on Sturvs for less than a month. And this is only 1 of the 25 links on our home page at any given time. Some get more traffic while some get less. A link on our home page also currently stays there for about 1 week.

But it gets even better:

Again, see the statistics for yourself here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4cp8fzp54U

551 + 155 = 706 hits

We could only use YouTube as an example as we dont have access to other websites statistics, and YouTube makes theirs public, but we can assure you Sturvs regulars can tell you they DO get reasonable traffic from us.

Sturvs also makes sure your content gets found ASAP. e.g. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bosi+gbangba

So in summary, if you have anything you want Nigerians to see, Sturvs is a very good place to give it guaranteed exposure. Sturvs is perfect for Nigerian musical artistes, event promoters, media/news websites, blogs, video websites, merchants and any other type of Nigerian content on the internet to help get the word out there.

If you have anything you want to promote and dont have an account on Sturvs yet, please open one now here: http://www.sturvs.com/register

Also check out how you can get your content on Sturvs more quickly with Sturvs Tools here.

Sturvs loves the UK! That’s because we’ve been getting most of our traffic from there. The UK tops our list of traffic sources and it seems the lead the UK has over the US & Nigeria keeps increasing. Alexa thinks different though, as it claims Nigeria leads in traffic followed by the United States, then South Africa, then the UK. Hmm.

Sturvs has just broken through the 200,000 mark on Alexa. Sturvs’ traffic rank is currently 175,050 in the whole world and 191 in Nigeria. This means Sturvs is now in the top 200,000 most visited websites in the world and in the 200 most visited websites in Nigeria. It’s good progress but isn’t good enough. We plan to do better than this, so please watch us from now till the end of the year and see what progress we make.

We know Alexa acts like it’s on crack sometimes but this is still a good estimate of how much traffic we get. The graphs don’t correspond to our site statistics at all.

You might be asking, “what’s my business?” or “how does this affect me?” Well, if you have anything you want to market or promote, this means Sturvs can help you expose it to 1000+ daily Nigerian visitors. Any link that makes it to the Sturvs home page gets guaranteed traffic for approximately 1 week before it falls to page 2.

Update

Sturvs breaks through the 100,000 mark on Alexa in July 2008.

Is the correct spelling of the slang sturvs or sturvz? Well the word “sturvs” sounds like it ends with a “z”, but so does every other plural English word ending with a consonant. The whole “z” phenomenon sounds like a drag and makes words sound very informal & casual.

When we were naming Sturvs, the word Sturvz didn’t even come into the picture. It was clear that for this website to reach it’s full potential and break through all circles of people, the name had to be Sturvs (with an “s”).

That was just a trivial piece of information about Sturvs. You don’t have to cram it.

We have yet another review of Sturvs from Startup Africa and all I can say is the author is very observant and has an idea of where Sturvs is going. He noted the meaning of “sturvs” and some of our key features and also made some close-to-accurate assumptions about our strategy. Not bad.