1898 - Joshua Slocum became the first person to successfully circumnavigate the earth alone when he landed his sloop Spray in Newport, R.I., a 46,000-mile trip.

1950 - President Harry S. Truman ordered the Air Force and Navy into the Korean War.

1969 - Police and gays clashed at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, fostering the gay rights movement.

2003 - The national do-not-call registry, formed to combat unwanted telemarketing calls and administered by the Federal Trade Commission, enrolled almost three-quarters of a million phone numbers on its first day.

2008 - namethis.com surpasses 20,000 names submitted in a mere 3 weeks of existence - about one every minute if you’re counting - awakening the masses to the creative potential of crowds.  R. Ethan Smith makes $829 in the process.

And it’s a perfect day for baseball.  We should add innings to namethis projects.

See you at shea.

In Tuva, these delicacies are eaten with fermented milk.

Afterward, they distill it but they only distill out 75% water.  Alot of that dreck is left behind.

You kind of have leftover milk.   And then they call it araka

I’m waiting for logistics push back.

Make a branch…  and you’ll be all set.  Or a fork, your call.  

Git to your Yak milk.  Are you opposed to a sword?  Yeah me too.

Back to work, boys.

Comments must continue the theme, lets go community, get on it. 

For those of you who reached the $50 threshold and have started to recieve your mastercards:

Mike Twentyman is currently finalizing all the code necessary to integrate with payoneer’s systems.  

We will do a blog post in a few days with instructions on how to load your card. With testing and all things considered… it will probably be early next week when you start to see funds drip onto your card.

Almost there    

-ben

In honor of the 43rd birthday of Dermontti Dawson, soon-to-be hall of fame center for the Pittsburgh Steelers, we’re celebrating by giving 2000 watts to each community member.

Like Dawson, who made 7 straight Pro Bowls, the Kluster community is filled with all-stars. Since launching NameThis (and as of this blog post), you have proposed 9,030 names and invested 870,000 watts.

Thanks.

We’d also like to thank you for all of your feedback as we build out more exciting features for NameThis, Knewsroom, and the rest of the Kluster portfolio. We have some great things planned and can’t wait to roll them out. Stay tuned.

And one last thing, everyone rush out and grab the latest and greatest browser, Firefox 3. Today is download day and not only can you participate in setting a Guinness Book record by downloading it, it’s also the nicest thing you can for every friendly web developer in your life.

UPDATE: I didn’t realize but I’ve now been made aware that today is also Barry Manilow’s birthday. We here at Kluster, especially Ben, couldn’t let the opportunity pass by. Everyone has received an additional 195 watt bump for Barry Manilow’s 65th birthday. 195 watts because he’s 3 times the man of any of you.

we’re having slight server difficulties which is causing the site to be inaccessible from time to time.

20man, Lacy and Ittigson are all over it. To paint the picture for y’all… I’m over their shoulders, drooling… saying “did you get it”, “did we figure it out”, “are we back up”, “how’s it ahhh coming”

standby folks.

Check out our latest labs project:

namethis.com : collaborative product/company naming…

Like all kluster sites, you get paid based upon your influence in each project.

Enjoy, and please provide feedback in the comments thread!

Ben

Congratulations to everyone for 20 published issues. Knewsroom is off to a good start. There is still a ton of work to be done, on both a community growth and site feature standpoint.. but we are happy with where we are at so early on. There are some important knewsroom updates/announcements today:

Rollout of new knewsroom features / site fixes:

Friend invite URL: inviting friends is getting easier, simply post your referral URL for all to see and get 1000 watts for everyone that signs up using your link.

RSS Feeds: You can now subscribe to RSS feeds on both the read & create side of knewsroom…

UI enhancements: We’ve given the read side a substantial overhaul (highlighting original content, making sections a bit easier to read through, etc)

Bug Fixes: We’ve killed duplication errors, hopefully swatted down all of the watt distribution nastiness, made the submit form & topic creation a bit cleaner

Speed & Performance: We’ve cached up a bunch of the pages (things should get a bit zippier)

klusterFCK: We’ve rolled out this very blog where we will keep everyone updated on status, and more importantly request feeback via the comment threads. We’ve also put a “what we’re up to” on the side so you can stalk us, and make sure we’re not slacking off.

Account Suspension: There has been some serious gaming attempts to the system in recent days, and we added a feature that not only devalues suspicious investment, but flags it and allows us to suspend users who don’t play nice.

Influence / Cash Numbers: These should now show up on the knewsroom power strip

Disqualification: We’ve implemented a mechanism to disqualify content that violates editorial guidelines (see below)

Changes to rewards & editorial standards

Our main goal is incentivize and sustain a community which will curate the best news on a daily basis. Today we’ve changed two things which hopefully will bring us closer to that goal.

Editorial Standards: The kluster team has taken a first stab at editorial standards which will govern the knewsroom. They can be found here. We’d like these to constantly be under discussion and welcome thoughts and feedback (use the comment thread below)

Rewards: We are reducing the reward for original content to $25. This community needs to grow substantially before we can afford to sustain higher flat rate payments. We hope this will incentivize our writers to promote their content once it gets published by driving traffic to the site. The more ad revenue your article brings in, the larger the cash reward. We feel this change is quite fair, as the content is simply not worth $150 when there is limited traffic to the site. Lets all work together to continue to improve the quality of the content, and to grow the community. As our site becomes more popular, we will no doubt raise the rewards. It is in our best interests to keep people incentivized.

Thats all for now duders, Stay tuned, and sound off in the comments!

So…my ADD’s kicked in again and we’re launching another company. But this time-I want you to have a piece of it.

Interested? Here’s the scoop:

Knewsroom is a community-directed news publication where you not only have a voice…you get paid to use it.

We publish the Knews every morning, featuring the previous day’s top stories in Politics, Business, Technology, Design, Sports, and Entertainment. What makes it in? You guessed it:

The community decides.

POWERED BY KLUSTER

Over the course of the last few weeks but we’ve learned a lot about our platform and our users:

• It sucks when you go to kluster and there aren’t any paid projects to jump in on.
• When everyone comes together to tackle a single project, the results are amazing
• The community should own a piece of what it creates.

These are the lessons behind our newly-formed kluster Labs: a series of community-directed brands where 20% of the revenue they generate gets shared with the people who make it happen. Trust me-Knewsroom is just the beginning.

YO! WHERE ARE THE PROJECTS AT, HOMIE?

We’ve decided to focus the community’s attention on working together to conquer a single task for right now, within a few weeks we will introduce more projects. We have found that our original message was a bit too complicated for most to understand, so we are making an effort to simplify. That’s all. Hang in there, this is for the best.

Chanukah is coming early this year fellow klusterers…

We are giving all of our pioneer users an extra 2000 watts… happy investing.

Also, check out your opportunities page, you may be some other ways to earn more watts.