Check out the right hand panel of our blog. See that blue-bordered box? That’s our newest innovation for bloggers out there - the Rrove Roll!

The Rrove Roll - aka Places Just Added - allows you publish the last places you’ve just visited. Its a very cool and simple way to show your readers what you’ve been doing. It’s also nifty way to recommend and suggest new and interesting locations. The best part is that it can be done in a very short time using our RSS feeds. Hurray!

HOW TO: Start a Rrove Roll

1. Sign up for a RSS-to-Website service. We use RSSFeedReader.
2. Identify the list of locations you want. You can publish your personal list, but you can also publish your ‘My Community’ list or the ‘Everyone’ list.
3. Get the RSS feed. Find the orange RSS button () at the bottom of the page and right click on it. Choose ‘Copy Link Location.’
4. Paste the RSS feed into RSSFeedReader. Design your Rrove Roll by choosing font size, borders, color, etc.
5. RSSFeedReader will give you 2-3 lines of code. Copy and paste that to your blog.

Voila! You’re done.

Tip: You can write a short little blurb on your locations through the ‘Review’ section. When you publish your Rrove Roll, you can choose to make these write-ups appear.

That’s it for now. Give the Rrove Roll a go, and let us know!

Digg This

I found this really cool picture on Flickr today (click here for a bigger picture). Zoom in and look to the top middle portion. You might find a little project that’s trying to help the world in its own little way.

Announcing two new Rrove features! Rrove now has RSS feeds - you can easily subscribe and stream the addresses from your personal list, the ‘My Community’ page, and the ‘Everyone’ set. Put them into your personal front pages (see example below) and/or RSS readers. You can also integrate them into your browser toolbar.

(Larger image here)

Give it a go - head to your location lists and add some feeds now!

We’ve also integrated Microformats to our addresses; we’re throwing our support to Chris Messina of Flock and to Tantek Celik of Technorati. As more websites implement Microformats, we hope to leverage this to saving locations. If you’re in the Microformats community, you’ll know what we mean. If you’re not, you’ll experience it, and be excited about this functionality, when we execute.

All for now.

Found this great article by Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo!. He talks about the structure of social software services, and dynamics of the community that comes out of it. What struck me is how a small set of users feed and lead the membership. So instead of getting every sign-up to use your service, you should simply focus on your power users. Eventually they will motivate the casual user to become a more active contributor to community.

I guess its the 80/20 rule. 80% of your content comes from 20% of your users. Similarly, you should focus 80% of your efforts to this top 20%.

Aside from big, nice neon fonts and lots of white space, Web 2.0 services have other characteristics. So, by popular demand, we bring you *drum roll* - the Rrove API! Yes, we believe that information should be set free. With our API, developers and users can take the public locations on Rrove and do as they wish!

There are plenty of ideas here - create your personal map Mash-up and use Rrove as a database for your locations, track the tourist spots around the country that Rrove members have marked, use Rrove as a feature in your service, etc. The ideas are limitless, and you have the tool to create it!

The API was made available last night. You can access it here: Rrove API.