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You can now embed any of the Odadeo pledges in your blog. We think this could be a great way of letting people know about the things you are trying to do to be a great dad, or even use it as a reminder to yourself perhaps?
If you’re feeling ambitious, you can change the size and colors of the speech bubble just by editing the code.
As an idea of how this might work, check out Stef’s blog post about making animals with kids (which is actually his first ‘dad blogger’ posts too).
Let us know what you think – useful? Not useful? Not working on your blog?
We’ve got something of a dad bloggers community growing on Odadeo, and that got us thinking – what could we offer our dad blogger users on the site?
We’ve developed some new things for Odadeo bloggers: we’d love your thoughts…
- An Odadeo Bloggers page - an aggregated page of all of the dad bloggers’ recent posts with added PostRank so you can see what the hot stories are. This updates automatically via the magic of RSS.
- Your latest posts on your profile - if you have a blog we’ll display the latest ten PostRanked stories on your profile page.
- Latest blog posts on the Home Page – new posts from all Odadeo bloggers appear on the Odadeo homepage
- Pull your blog content into Odadeo - tag your posts ‘odadeo’ and they will get displayed on similar Pledge pages on Odadeo automatically.
To get all these tools above working, just make sure your blog address is entered into your Odadeo profile.
Also…
- Grab an Odadeo widget for your blog – you can pull Odadeo onto your own site with our widgets
Get post ideas for your blog
So if you’ve seen a pledge on Odadeo that sparks your interest, say “Get control of my time” you could write a post on your blog about how you’re tackling it, tag it ‘odadeo’ and ‘time’ and it will get displayed on the pledge page.
We’d love your thoughts on this if you’re a dad blogger and we’re keen to turn this part of the site into a valuable resource for the community – helping dads discover useful blog posts around the web that will help them keep their pledges, and helping dad bloggers connect with more people!
If you want to add your blog to Odadeo, just edit your profile to include your blog web address – we do the rest!
Tweetlet is a new twitter app for expectant moms and dads-to-be that sends you private Twitter messages from your baby during pregnancy.
Sign up and you’ll get messages from your Tweetlet saying things like “Hey – I’ve just open my eyes for the first time!”
We’re looking for Diggs, shares, feedback (and if you’ve any ideas for Tweetlet messages…!)
Odadeo.com is very proud to announce that it is opening up to the public with it’s new “Are we nearly there yet?” beta.
Five months after the “Far too early” beta was launched by Stef Lewandowski, there has been a huge amount of work on the site and the beginnings of a very cool dads community. Tom Beardshaw has joined the team as community manager and we reckon it’s now time to open it up to the dads all over the world.
The “Are we nearly there yet?” beta is for dads to join Odadeo as we create what we hope will be the ultimate website and online community for dads – a social web app that can actually help you become a great dad!
Using the invite code “nearlythere” (which is now pre-inserted into the signup form), anyone can now join the community. We’re keeping the invite code system so that we can offer special features to particular groups of dads (watch this space for “newdad” goodies!).
Here are some of the features of the “Are we nearly there yet?” beta:
Badges: you can now connect to dads like you by adding badges such as “expecting”, “geek” or “married” – find out what they’re pledging and send them a message on the badge comment wall.
Pledges: Click on your pledges to find useful links and tips to help you fulfill your pledges. Tag your pledges to get more relevant suggestions from the community.
DADSDAQ: When you make some progress on a pledge, ‘pip’ it – Odadeo will keep track of how you’re doing with your very own DADSDAQ graph.
Friends’ DADSDAQ: Make some friends on Odadeo and you can compare how you’re doing.
Global DADSDAQ: The Odadeo homepage now carries a DADSDAQ graph showing the progress of all Odadeo dads.
Q&A: Ask the Odadeo community a question to help you become a great dad.
Invite friends: You can now search your webmail to invite friends to join Odadeo.
The “Are we nearly there yet?” beta is for testing the system and finding out how dads want to develop the site, find out what features are working, and which are not. So please sign up, tell everyone you know who is a dad and give us your feedback at our Get Satisfaction page.
By Flickr user Malkav
We really want Odadeo to be a useful place for dads to share information on being great dads, but we’re also aware that logging into the site and updating it just to add a quick link that might be of interest to others could be a pain.
So now you can add a useful link to Odadeo and have it listed on Pledge pages and elsewhere on the site, just by using Delicious.
To add a link to Odadeo, just tag it ‘odadeo‘ (along with the other tags you’d normally be added), wait a while and our Delicious robot will do all of the hard work, adding it to Odadeo and linking it up to where it might be useful for other dads.
Got other suggestions for other bookmark sharing services we should support, let us know!
By Flickr user Fotologic (creative commons)
While we’ve been developing Odadeo, we set the site up to email people when certain things happened – comments on your profile, when someone answers one of your questions, and so on.
That’s really useful for reminding people what’s happening on the site that’s relevant to them. The trouble is, that once you get to a certain point (like last week) it starts getting a bit irritating having lots of emails clogging up your inbox.
A couple of our beta testers pointed out that they’d consider leaving the site because of this, so we turned off most of the indirect emails and we’ve been working hard on making a Daily and Weekly Digest email system, which we’re happy to announce should be rolling out over the next day or so.
In the mean time, anyone badged as a Beta Tester user on Odadeo will have already had one of our first batch of digest emails, and we’d love to know what you think!
So – a BIG ’sorry’ for being over-eager on the email front, and we hope you like the new digest emails. If you want to turn them off, just go and edit your profile – there’s a new ‘Emails’ tab that gives you control over what you receive from us. We’ll be expanding this to give even more control over the coming months.
Thanks for bearing with us, and more importantly, thanks for pointing out our mistakes!
Criticism is often better feedback than praise, so is there anything else that you really think we need to be sorting out?
I did a piece for Trevor McDonald’s ‘ITV Tonight’ programme all about the Credit Crunch and what people are doing to adapt to the all round belt-tightening we’re going through. ‘Odadeo Towers’ is actually my apartment here in Birmingham, UK where I live and work – it’s sometimes complicated but working from home means I actually get to see my daughter during the day on most days of the week, which is something that would have been impossible working from an office!
Anyway – have a watch on some of the reasoning behind the home/network working idea.
We’re not yet in public beta, but already we’re getting some interest from the press about the idea we’re working on.
Camille Sweeney at The New York Times interviewed us this week for an article about the new wave of parenting sites dedicated to blogging about your kids securely.
It’s called “Twittering from the Cradle” and it’s well worth a read!
A few quotes:
Nathan, 29[...] joined Odadeo, a site still in beta that allows dads to blog on behalf of baby as well as meet other fathers.
Call it convenient. Call it baby overshare. But a host of new sites, including Totspot, Odadeo, Lil’Grams and Kidmondo, now offer parents a chance to forgo the e-mail blasts of, say, their newborn’s first trip home and instead invite friends and family to join and contribute to a network geared to connecting them to the baby in their lives.
“It’s an interesting model,” said Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. “Everyone can decide how much or little they want to know about a baby, which avoids the situation of receiving a few too many e-mails about someone’s wonderful child, and parents can decide how much they want to share — in minimal or maximal ways.”
And this from an author on the subject of parenting:
“We are at a very pro-parenting moment in time,” said Pamela Paul, the author of the book “Parenting, Inc.” “It’s reflected in our offline culture and on the Web. We are all screaming about it at the top of our lungs.”
And this from a legal professor:
These sites allow parents to create “attractive and compelling versions of a kid’s story,” said John Palfrey, a professor at Harvard Law School and an author of “Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives.”
But Mr. Palfrey warns that parents posting the intimate details of their children’s lives need to ask not only who has access to this content, but also who owns it. “Whether or not they realize it as such,” he said, “parents are contributing to their child’s digital dossier. And, who sees that dossier later on may be of concern.”
This last word of warning is exactly the reason we are still in private beta, rather than going public with a full version of the site. I for one don’t want intimate details of Imogen’s life to be picked up on Google without me expressly wanting to be. What happens in twenty years when she goes for a job, and they pull out her baby snaps in the interview?
So for now, we’re working hard on making Odadeo a safe, exciting place – once we’re all happy with it we’ll be pushing it out to a wider community.
We’re very happy to announce that our new Odadeo Community Manager is Tom Beardshaw who joins us today.
Tom has been our most active user so far on the site and has a lot of experience in doing dad-related stuff, including helping set up dad.info so with Jason now having finished his four-month Graduate Apprentice placement with us (we’re really sad to see him go!) I suggested the idea to Tom, Tom thought it sounded great, and here we are a couple of weeks later with a new member of the team!
I’ll let Tom tell you about it in his own words.
( Why the phonebox? It was near the cafe we met in, and we recruited a random passer-by to snap us outside the best backdrop we could find… )
We have a new box at the top of the home page of Odadeo that looks like this:
We wanted to make the process of doing the most common updates on the site even easier. So now, you can make a pledge, see a list of all of your pledges and ‘pip’ the ones that you’ve made progress on, update your status, and upload photos (including from your Flickr account) – all from one little box, without having to leave the home page. Phew.
We’re particularly proud of the fancy (read geeky) “Add a photo” tab that loads in all of the technical stuff only when you click to keep the home page loading nice and fast.
Watch out for lots more new things happening on the Odadeo home page as we gear up for getting the site ready for Public Beta over the next few weeks.
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