December 11, 2011

Hey guise!

So, if you follow us on Twitter or Facebook, you might have seen that we were asking for beta testers for a new page we were working on. Well, finally, it’s live and ready to go!

Here’s the deal: we never actually pick who we’re going to review for Music Mondays. We leave that up for all of you to vote on. You’d vote on our old request page, on Twitter, and on Facebook. Problem was, we had to count all of these votes ourselves. The Facebook poll was easy to count, but our request page? Holy snap. Please take a look at what we were dealing with before:

Also, people would complain if, say, we reviewed a video that didn’t win on Facebook, and they would accuse us of cheating. Well, as you can see, there are tons more votes via our Request page. But you couldn’t see the votes that we saw. So we decided to change that.

Enter this new project. Voting will now be transparent. Basically, you vote by clicking on the thumb up. It’s that easy. If you’d like to vote more, then your Facebook Likes, Tweets, and Google +1s all add to the tally, as well as comments. Engage with the video as much as you can if you want it to win for Music Mondays. The page has an algorithm that tallies a bunch of different factors into ranking the hottest Kpop videos out there, and we determine that based on your interactions.

For now, we’re starting off by testing it out for How to Dance Kpop Style, 2011. Vote away! Voting Ends December 19th. SHAZAM! Once we’re finished that, we’ll start using the page for our Music Mondays and K Crunches. Woot!

Also, we mentioned in the video that we want to encourage good comments to the videos, rather than spammy McSpammersons trying to get their videos to win. We’ll ban spammers that try to vote multiple times in the comments. If you’re worried about the comment policy, don’t worry. You’ll know if you’re spamming, and so will we. For our good commenters, we want to give away Three CDs for How to Dance Kpop 2011. We’ll look at the comments from the top three videos that win our poll, and we’ll mail out CDs to the people who – we think – made the best comment in each. Let us know what you think of the song, dance, video, whatever. We encourage you to engage with the video and with others :D

One of the main reasons we made this chart is also because we want your voice to be more accurately reflected. For example, a lot of people have complained that U-Kiss hasn’t won any awards on any music shows, and – really – we’re surprised by that as well. Based on the responses we’re seeing, U-Kiss is insanely popular on our site and with international fans. But it doesn’t seem like the international fans’ voice really counts in the music awards shows, and that’s too bad. So our page is a step away from those charts. We’re looking at YouTube videos only, and how much you engage with those videos, not how much Korean people engage with the videos via Korean media sites. Sounds fair?

Another reason we made the page: we know that some of you aren’t really into Kpop as much as some diehard fans, and voting might not be something you’re that interested in. But, from time to time you might feel the need to brush up on what’s popular in Kpop. This page can still do that for you. We’ll display the top 60 videos of the moment. Watch them all on that page, come back next month if you need to brush up again. Yeah!

Lastly, this is still a work in progress. We plan on adding a lot more functionality to it in the future. For now, though, we think this page is gonna be pretty cool. If you’ve got any feedback, we’d love to hear it. You might find some bugs if you’re using older or less popular browsers, but nothing crippling, we don’t think.

Yeah! Let us know what you think, and get voting!