The Official Genwi Blog

Genwi is releasing newspapers today. Newspapers make it easy for anybody to publish their own website. TechCrunch calls these “vanity URLs,” we first heard this term last week.

What is so exciting about “vanity URLs?” Vanity URLs can lead to a web of individuals – not just a web of websites. With a newspaper, every person online can publish all of their public content, favorites and updates at their own domain. With vanity domains, people are free to go out and get their own followers and share their content with their audience on their own site. Newspapers are a straight forward solution to putting stuff in one place for friends, family and followers to find.

Newspapers can be published at custom URLs

There are so many dozens of great web services available today. Newspapers help people publish what they choose, from the services they use in one place. Newspapers solve the problem many face with consolidating their content while maintaining access to a variety of the best services. Newspapers make this easy and automatically update activity from linked services. Friends, family and followers will always be able to catch updates. Newspapers enable sharing with a single web address compared to a myriad of usernames.

The default newspaper web address is newspapertitle.genwi.com. The web address is completely configurable. Genwi can map any domain name or sub domain to a newspaper page. The configuration settings are under the domain tab under newspaper settings. Genwi charges $15 per year to map custom domains to newspapers. Newspapers are an off the shelf solution for providing individuals their own web address. They enable access to the best web services and provide a single place for sharing with friends, family and followers. What if everybody had their own website?

Setting up a Go Daddy domain for a newspaper is straight forward. A domain name can be redirected from the Domain Manager. The domain name to be changed must be selected. Once selected, Go Daddy provides a status report for the domain. In this report is a section called Total DNS. “Total DNS Control and MX Records” is a link at the bottom of the Total DNS section of the report. This link is where the domain name can be easily mapped to a Genwi newspaper.

Go Daddy Domain Manager

Total DNS Control and MX Manager

For the domain to go to Genwi all that needs to be changed is the first item under A (Host). There is an Edit button in the table under Actions. The Edit button is a pencil in a small square. The Edit button opens up a popup with the fields: Host Name, Points to Address, and TTL. Only “Points to Address” needs to be changed. Points to Address should point to: 68.142.96.178. This is Genwi’s IP Address (web address). Now the domain is ready to map to Genwi. The Domains tab under Newspaper Settings at Genwi contains a field to enter the Go Daddy domain. Once entered, the Go Daddy domain will start going to the newspaper page and the newspaper page will have the Go Daddy domain name.

We’ve got this cool new video. Do you like it? Would it be useful to post a link to this from our homepage? Let us know in the comments. Thanks

We’ve been busy making improvements. Today we’d like to introduce those improvements and demonstrate the new Genwi! Genwi is a platform for finding and sharing stuff online.

The important thing to do on Genwi is subscribe to content. Subscribing creates your wire – so when you click on “My Wire” you will see updates from your subscriptions. There are 2 easy ways to subscribe – one is Add Subscriptions – and you can browse subscriptions by category (video, blog, TV, news, etc.) and/or by most subscribed and highest rated. The second easy way is to add friends – when friends accept your friend request, you will have the opportunity to subscribe to all of their content.

For those familiar with RSS and feed readers, Genwi also allows you to subscribe by entering the feed under Add Subscriptions. Genwi can read RSS, RSS2.0, ATOM, MediaRSS and iTunesRSS feeds. Genwi also allows you to import an OPML file of your subscriptions from another feed reader. Under Add Subscriptions, there is a link to import OPML.

Once you’ve subscribed to a dozen or more feeds, Genwi becomes really useful. When you login to My Wire you can browse all the updates from all of your subscriptions, including friends’ feeds. You can be thorough and go through every update – or you can snack on updates that might be the most interesting by using Genwi’s filters. You can use the snapshot filter to see only the most recent update from each subscription, the most popular and highest rated filters to see what others found to be interesting, and the shared filter to see only stuff shared with you by your friends. From your wire you can also jump to any single subscription, view updates from a single category (like videos, or blogs) or create folders to organize and view stuff you’ve saved. You can select subscriptions, category and folders from the drop downs or you can click on the subscription name and category name in each update to filter instantly to that subscription or category.

Beyond your wire, Genwi helps you if you have content of your own or if you want to find out where the buzz is online. With your own content, you can add your content from other sites to your Genwi profile. For example if you use a blog, a video site and a photo site, you can add all three to your Genwi profile. This way your friends at Genwi will see all of your content in one place. Each time you update content at the other sites, it will be automatically updated by Genwi and shared with your friends. To add your content, go to edit your profile and add content. You can select from an ever-expanding list of sites or just add a content feed (RSS, RSS2.0, ATOM, MediaRSS, iTunesRSS).

If you want to see where the buzz is online – Browse All will help you. Browse All allows anybody to browse what’s on Genwi. You can filter by categories (videos, blogs, news, etc.) and/or by Most Popular, Most Shared, and Highest Rated. Browse All provides a good guide to what is popular on Genwi. It’s a way to see what is getting buzz. And of course, you can always search Genwi and filter the results with the same categories.

Finally, once you’re situated with your wire and have added friends, be sure to try out some of Genwi’s main features like sharing and saving. When you share you can select which friends to share with – or select them all. When you save, you can add content to a folder. The default folder is called favorites but you can create new folders at anytime. You can manage folders from your account. If you set the folders to be public – that means everyone can view them – and they work like a playlist works for music. You can become the editor and select stuff you think is interesting and share it with the rest of Genwi.

So please enjoy the new site, create a wire (if you haven’t done so) and send us more feedback to let us know what features you’d like to see on Genwi.

Quick steps to getting started with your own wire

Genwi added small filters to the feed reader that will have a big impact. The reader now enables everyone to filter subscriptions by Most Popular and Highest Rated. This means if you don’t have time to scroll through all of your updates – why bother?? – you can just see the most popular and highest rated updates from your subscription list.

Genwi wants to help filter through the noise. With some subscriptions updating every few minutes and others updating only once a week – these new features will help filter the updates – by showing updates others found interesting. The term might be “collaborative filtering” of subscriptions. Regardless of what it should be called, it’s pretty useful. Genwi is working to bring similar filters to provide more options for filtering noise and getting the most important, fun and interesting updates.

Of course – the Most Popular, Highest Rated and Most Shared stuff overall is already available. If you want to browse around to see where the buzz is – you can click Web and see the buzz in each category. Genwi will make more filter options available here as well.

Both of these groups of filters – filters to see overall buzz, and filters for the buzz within your subscriptions – only get more useful with more active people. The more people who use Genwi the more interesting it will be to filter your subscriptions by what was highly rated or viewed the most. So tell your friends to start visiting the site.

Genwi will have more updates soon – and we’ll post them here at the blog. Some of these will be some small changes to the site – which, again, will have a big impact in making things easier to use and more enjoyable.