I am happy to announce the latest Bukisa release, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about what has been added and fixed.

New Features

Image Upload Tool

This tool will allow you to upload files from your local computer, as well as online sources, files in bulk and also the ability to share images between your different articles. You will also be able to use these uploaded images as an article thumbnail.

A full guide explaining the usage of the new tool will be released soon.

New Facebook &Twitter widgets

We have added two new eye catching widgets in all article pages. This will help increase your promotion on two of the largest social sites – Twitter & Facebook — just click, approve & share.

Featured Content

We have added a new tab called “Featured” to the top menu to give a better showcase for some of the top quality content published. These content items were handed picked by Aviv, our Community manager.

Check it out: http://www.bukisa.com/featured

Integration with Get Satisfaction

I am sure you have noticed that we have started using Get Satisfaction to handle part of our support – this contains a knowledge base of past answered questions along with the option for you to answer each other – its called “People Powered Community Support”

Check it out: http://getsatisfaction.com/bukisa

Fixed Issues

- The Bukisa stats have been rebuilt and the information you receive in your dashboards is accurate across all your reports.

All the best & happy publishing

Simon & the Bukisa Team

Your new content gets automatically tweeted, along with your comments and your content ratings.

We have decided to help everyone who has added their Twitter info, get more followers!

How do we do that? Very simple! Instead of the static twitter banner on your profile pages, we have now included the Twitter approved widget, so people can see your updates and easily start following you.

You can see how it looks on my profile page: http://www.bukisa.com/people/simon

For those of you that have added your Twitter info (hint, hint), now would be a good chance to do so at http://www.bukisa.com/myhome/account

For more information about Twitter, the Twitter 101 Business guide is a great start – http://business.twitter.com/twitter101

Simon.

Due to popular demand we have added 2 new banners to your arsenal of your Bukisa promo banners.

These 2 banners fit in really nicely with most blogging platform page designs.

You can use these banners to build your network of Bukisa publishers.

Enjoy!

As usual if you have any feedback, please drop us a line.

We wanted to share some online metrics demonstrating the excellent growth Bukisa has been getting over the past few months.

Compete.com

Alexa

Quantcast

What this means for you, more viewers and more earnings from your content.

Now is a great time to start building your network of publishers, invite your friends to join today.

$10 and $25

Where the new default minimum payout is $10 (instead of the current $50 minimum payout), these changes will have an immediate effect and will be active for the upcoming payout in March.

We have done this due to great feedback from our community.

If you wish to receive a higher minimum payout, please login at http://www.bukisa.com/login using your display name and password, and go to your account settings to change your minimum payout.

And don’t forget to stay tuned, our latest updates & features are coming very soon…

All the best!

Simon and the Bukisa Team.

There is a new service called ‘Apture’ that allows our site visitors and users to enhance existing articles (only people that have allowed this under their CC license will have this active on their articles).

So what can be added you ask?

So for example you link to a Youtube video, so before Apture the user would have to click and leave Bukisa to go watch the movie, now with an enhanced article all the reader needs to do is hover over the link and they will be able to watch the movie in a nice little pop-up window, you can even choose to embed the video in to the page at a click of a button if you wish.

So, any article boasting this CC license – (which is our default license for new content) will be able to have their article ‘enhanced’ – all that you need to do is click the letter ‘e’ on your keyboard and signup for free with Apture.

You can try it on this article (which I enhanced by adding Wikipedia information for each country mentioned in the article).

http://www.bukisa.com/articles/26055_top-10-tourist-destinations

By enhancing articles users visiting will remain longer on our site and enjoy exposure to more materials and thus contribute to a better overall performance for our site and content.

You can learn more about the features of Apture here: http://www.apture.com/bloggers/

If you are also interested in becoming an editor of Apture enhancements for Bukisa please drop us a line and let us know.

With this new version we hope that all you will have a smoother time on our site, better features and better opportunities to produce quality content and get traffic to it.

Below is a list of the new features that have been added over the past 3 weeks:

• Twitter Integration – http://www.bukisa.com/faq/?faq=11#faq_11
• New Bukisa widget – You can our new widget to drive more traffic from your other online to sites to your Bukisa content. To build a widget, just login and go to your MyBukisa page and click the widget banner to start the wizard.
• Auto tagging and Auto thumbnails suggestions courtesy of Zemanta – http://www.zemanta.com
• Revamped MyBukisa Home Page
• Simplified network page – friends, invitations and network connections all on one page with a new Network search option
• Full earnings & views stats per content on your “My Content” report
• New JavaScript backend to make Bukisa more cross browser compatible.
• Moved over to a new video encoding service, faster encoding and higher quality. (Ooyala)
• New licensing options – per content, choose from 3 types. http://www.bukisa.com/info/syndication
• Slides Upload is enabled again.

Some of planed features for the next version:

• Private messaging between users
• Search for friends
• Notification system (when someone you invited joins Bukisa, when you get a new comment and other social activates involving you and your network)
• Embed videos in your articles from external sources (like YouTube)
• Auto resizing of images you place in articles so they don’t break the article design.
• Full Network Drilldown (Earnings, Views, Users)
• Improvements to “My Content” page
• Improvements to invite system.
• New My Comments section.
• Better “Following” of your network & friends.

Some open issues that are still undecided (from our feedback forum)

• Lowering the minimum payout
• Minimum word count for articles (on certain categories)

As always we are eager to get your feedback on the above features and any new ideas you may have to our feedback forum – http://bukisa.uservoice.com/

I would I also like to let everyone know that very soon we will be making some changes to how we calculate our Bukisa Index – based on the activity and the performance of Bukisa over the past few months – this will benefit the active and “good” users and not so benefit the “bad” spammers & abusers of our system.

A separate email regarding the Bukisa Index will be released if and when any changes are made.

I would like to inform everyone about some policy changes and clarifications that will be taking full effect from the 1st of January 2009.

Bukisa will no longer be accepting content that is being published in a language other than English. The reason for this is that advertising placed on non English content brings in less revenue for the website and thus we cannot give out a high Bukisa Index to these contents.

We do plan to offer more languages in the future and with each language would come a unique rev-share model that will work best for the publishers, us and our advertisers, but for now this is our decision.

We just wanted to also make sure that everyone knows what kind of content we are willing to have published on our network:

• How-to
• Educational
• Instructional
• Creative Writing (Short stories and poems)
• Reviews (non promotional)
• Content that teaches new knowledge or a new skill

Another question we frequently get via our support email is “Why was my content sent for review”. Well, the answer is pretty simple – we run several checks on content that is submitted and we select content to be reviewed but our editorial team for Quality control and testing proposes. (This includes: length, grammar, keywords, copyright checks and more).

Please let us known if you have any more questions.

P.S. lookout for some neat changes to the website tomorrow ….

I would like to point out the Bukisa is not an article directory and thus any information about the author and their business should only be placed on their profile page – that is why we have the large section on the left hand side so its easy for a visitor to learn more about the person writing, by clicking through to their profile page.

Also using your articles to advertise your business isn’t something that we condone. As we are a rev-share site we expect our content to be “clean” of sales pitches and advertising.

Again, feel free to use your profile pages as a gateway for yourselves.

This is a heads up as we don’t want to start removing sections from people’s articles.

Thanks for your understanding,

Simon

Don’t forget to tell all your friends on facebook, twitter & social networks about the voting.

Thanks for Voting!