Sturvs is an official sponsor for BarCampAfrica. Some other sponsors of this event are Google, Wordpress, Afrigator and allAfrica. The full sponsor list can be found here.

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants. Find out more at http://barcamp.org.

We are currently at event on the Google Campus in Mountain View, California as I blog. California is a sweet place to be, a little bit cold though.

Pictures will be posted later. Live streaming of the event is currently available at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/barcampafricapanels. Feel free to watch and look out for the Sturvs logo.

Any one who went to a public university in Nigeria will understand the concept in the phrase “let my people go”. It has to do with the need to take extra course credits that make a student stay longer than the planned number of years in university, and then getting a very close grade (e.g. a C or D) to allow the student to graduate. Anyway, Sturvs is letting it’s people go…lol.

We have been loading external links within a frame on our website, in the effort to keep people on our site, but we have recently removed that feature, which is why we say we are letting our people go. Basically we have done some research and decided to allow users to freely leave the website for external links as they wish.

We have added a new For Sale category to content on Sturvs. User’s dont need to add items for sale to the Business category any more. What better way would there be to launch this category than with one of our own products?

We have put together a list of our top users for the first half of 2008, which isn’t necessary based on any particular criteria, but on a general overlook on who’s presence has been most felt on the website. Also the order of our list is loosely based on quality of content.

1. notjustOk. This user is definitely “not just ok” as he has been a steady contributor of content for a few months running now. Lately it’s almost been like he’s got something to add to Sturvs every other day. He runs www.notjustOk.com, which is basically a Nigerian entertainment blog. The caption on his blog is “Someone or something that is worthy of notice” and we believe he has become this himself.
2. ocharh. Our man and Sturvs partner ocharh keeps supplying us with both old and new Nigerian music. Sturvs Music has grown as popular as it is not because of his initial booster supply of mp3s. We appreciate his efforts and also Facebook promotion.
3. seunj411. This babe has also helped Sturvs Music with her frequent upload of mp3s. We haven’t heard from her in a while though, but are sure she hasn’t forgotten about us. She has a collection of Nigerian music here, which we steal from once in a while.
4. bellanaija. We will always love bellanaija. Her blog is obviously the foremost Nigerian blog on the internet, here is some proof: http://www.google.com/search?q=naija. Watch out for her new website, being built by the same company behind Sturvs, Antigravity Inc.
5. phcityhottie. We don’t know if this user is located in PH (Port Harcourt) or just from there, but wherever she is we appreciate the article and mp3 submissions.
6. DJMightyMike. Our favorite DJ who uses Obama-style marketing to push his music on the internet. Nothing do you. He was the first user to patronize our IMEEM media embeds feature and has been using the feature regularly.
7. uzuo. We had several submissions by uzuo early after our launch and appreciate them.
8. one. This user was one of our founding members and contributed videos articles, even before we started mp3 uploads.
9. mynaijanews. MyNaijaNews.com is fast becoming the leading website for Nigerian news and we are proud to be associated with them. They were also one of the first to add our Sturvs Bookmarklet.
10. NaijaBoy4life. This user also uploads mp3 frequently, some of which have got high votes.

Think we’re unfair? Well our website logs the top users and you can view the users with the most published votes here: http://www.sturvs.com/topusers.php?sortby=5.

We appreciate every other user who visits our website even without submitting content, and would keep on working hard to give our users a better experience on Sturvs.com

The number of votes required before a submission is sent to the front page of Sturvs has been increased to 4 (from 3). This is to guarantee a good quality of content making it to the home page. With the surge in traffic and submissions, we have to gradually raise the bar. The original plan was to increase the minimum to 5 votes, but we welt it would be better to make the increase gradual. We will increase it to 5 within the next few months. Hopefully we will one day have enough traffic to increase the minimum to 10 votes.

Please note that we Sturvs admins can push any submission they feel worthy to the home page even if it has 0 (zero) votes. Submissions can also be removed from the home page if we feel they aren’t going to be of interest to visitors (as satisfying visitors is our ultimate goal) or if the same user intentionally votes up more than 1 self-related item to the home page at a time. We want to encourage other people voting on user submissions and determining whether or not they make it to the home page. Once again we will just say that satisfying visitors is our #1 goal and the #1 purpose of this website, so we will definitely always do what we can to make sure our home page contains interesting content for our visitors.

So far, the number of votes a submission gets really is a measure of how much the submission is liked by our visitors. A look at the top submissions so far this year can be found on our Top Sturvs page and there is no doubt that Gongo Aso deserves to be the most voted-on item (ahead by a large margin).

One issue of concern is our frequent addition of content from major Nigerian sources (e.g. newspaper websites and Youtube) and how these push user submissions off the Latest Sturvs page. We will be conducting an experiment to see how much user content will be on the Latest Sturvs page and how often content will be submitted if we slow down our import rate or pause it altogether. Hopefully this will encourage users to submit articles if they know that their submissions will spend enough time on the Latest Sturvs page to be seen by others before falling off.

Right now the average amount of time a submission spends on the Latest Sturvs page is 8 hours and for the home page (Hot Sturvs) 4 days. In other words any submission that makes it to our home page gets 4 days of free advertising.

Sturvs has broken through the 100,000 mark on Alexa with a current traffic ranking of 97,669. This is only a month and a half after we broke through the 200,000 mark. This means Sturvs is now in the top 100,000 websites in the world. This might seem like an achievement but we still aren’t stopping here. 50,000 is our next target!

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.