That’s what thumbd does. thumbd reaches out to the people by linking to the highest quality resources on the web. This should help any website grow, and I guess we’ll find out how well the philosophy does here.

If the highest quality data sources are submitted to a group of people. At least that’s the thought behind the website so far, and I’m sure it will work.

The word is getting out there, slowly and surely, and some news stories are being submitted daily. Now we just need to get people voting and all should be well.

Progress has been great for the first week. thumbd is up and running and even being used by a select crowd of Web 2.0 elite. The interface has been undergoing design upgrades, and the basic functionality is being improved constantly.

This upcoming week promises to hold even more progress in store. As the community gets a bit larger, more people will naturally take notice. Greg Kiernan was the first person to contribute to the project, in the form of a “thumbd this” add-on for FeedBurner.

That was a nice surprise as the day started.

Not much to report today. I’m messing around with AJAX. The learning curve is relatively steep, but not completely daunting. I’m also increasing basic error-checking, so the backend should improve dramatically.

I’m making the rudimentary moderation tools, as well as increasing the stats-tracking. The site is well-regarded in the search engines right now. As it get’s update, the pages appear very rapidly. No idea if this will continue, but it’s been off to a great start.

I’ll continue to work quietly throughout the weekend.

In a way that’s amazing. The comment spammers really need a link from a 2 week old blog? There has to be easier ways to build links than that.

Really, it’s just a sign of being indexed. The site has 300+ pages indexed in Google already, so the bots and spammers have already placed thumbd in their category. In the next weeks, the problem will become automated, and I’ll be forced to institute more and more rules to defeat them.

That’s the way of the modern internet, and there’s no way out of it. As long as idiots realize they can manipulate the puny algos of search engines, they will.

Thumbing your vote can now be done the Ajax way. Ajax is fun. It’s not an easy thing to learn, but it really does represent a step forward in web development because the pages load so much quicker and you don’t get the herky-jerky feeling you get on a site that needs re-loading.

I’ll work on making the comments and registration into Ajax also. I also plan on polishing up on the look and feel. My CSS skills are not great, but with some example code lying around, I should be able to get the job done.

I’ll also work on the back end this week and introduce some new features like tagging.

That’s a question I’ve been wondering. Obviously, at least some people are directly or indirectly paid for their time. Some work for the company themselves.

But nowhere is the information disclosed. I wonder if it matters to people. At some level I think it might, but it’s probably not the type of thing people lose sleep over. But the same way product placements have permeated movies, we can expect commercialism to pervade every aspect of the social “space” too.

Netscape has adopted a paid plan wholeheartedly, and they don’t really appear to be benefitting from it in any big way. But this might just be the future going forward. Why? Because it’s tough to find people with a talent for being editors.

Wow, time flies.

thumbd is one month old and way behind schedule for feature improvements. I’ll be working on it more in the upcoming month.

But that shows just how quickly time passes. At least we have a small community of people submitting, so we have a start.

Happy anniversary.