"Viral distribution" may sound like a contagious rash but the spread of your Sprout, whether conceived for business purposes or for pleasure, is one of its core purposes. The Reports section in the Builder gives you basic tracking information regarding your Sprout's viral distribution. The link is located above the Preview and Publish buttons. The basic report is furnished by Gigya*, one of our distribution partners, and uses a variety of graphs to illustrate the following data:

1. Sprout Views (This is the number of times the Sprout has been viewed).
2. Posting Interface Loads (This is the number of times someone clicked the 'Share' button in your sprout).
3. Sprouts Posted (This is the number of times someone posted your Sprout to their blog, Facebook page, etc.).
4. Sprout Views by Network (This is the number of Sprout views per network).
5. Custom Events (This graph shows the top 5 custom events previously chosen, by you, through "click tracking".) Click tracking records the hits on individual links and is helpful when comparing traffic within your Sprout. See our video below to learn how to set up custom events.

* It is important to note that if you switch from our basic Gigya reporting system to another account (for instance, a fee-based Gigya account, which will give you more comprehensive information) you must republish and re-embed the HTML code or execute a new post to your social networking sites; otherwise, your reports will not show any new viral distribution data.

HowStuffWorks.com (acquired by Discovery Communications in 2007) recently used Sproutbuilder to create their “Keep Asking: Hit the Books” widget. They'll be using the widget to promote their "Keep Asking: Hit The Books" campaign to get parents, teachers and students to post 'back to school' questions on their web site and to see what’s top of mind with their peers. Since the “Hit the Books” widget can be shared among friends, classmates and colleagues within social media sites, virtually anyone can stay in the know, on the go.

This morning an article appeared in the New York Times sunday edition talking about political bloggers fundraising to get themselves to the DNC or RNC. There was a great mention of ChipIn in the article "The Year the Political Blogger has Arrived"

Every year schools and teachers run out of money. Site funds go to everything from typewriter ribbons for P.O. forms (I am not kidding) to painting out graffiti every Monday morning. Zero monies are left for individual teacher requests. A ChipIn component added to a Sprout on a school web site or teacher web page would make it easy to raise money for special projects, and parents and community members could donate to one or more projects that held special interest for them.

Aloha. This has been a nice relaxing week for the team as everyone has been decompressing and resting up from our sprint to get our new Fankits product launched. We had a great company BBQ in Honolulu yesterday and everyone got to just hang out, relax, play music, cook food, and jump in the ocean. Starting Monday we are back on another mini-sprint to fix up some things with sproutbuilder pro and start production of our full meta-builder product. Yes.. we have more up our sleeves!

Good morning. I am very pleased and excited to announce the launch of a new product from Sprout today called Fankits. We have been hard at work over the past two months extending our core Sprout platform engine with a new visual interface builder and a bunch of other goodies.

It has been a little quiet from us as we were working like crazy to get our new product done. We officially finished it up last Friday, but we postponed going live until yesterday at around 7 pm PDT. It was a monumental release for us as we built our first product on top of the Sprout Platform engine. We now sit back and wait to see how the market responds to our vision of user generated widget creation and distribution.

We will be performing OS upgrades on our servers at midnight tonight (July 29 12:00AM PST) and expect it to take under 30 minutes. You will likely experience system availability issues if you are using Sprout Builder during this service window.

Our big week in SF came to a close Sat night with a killer BBQ party and good times hanging out with the gang. A bunch of folks even made it out late night to a cigar bar and well, we can't post much else ;) We are now close to the finish line to launch our newest creation. I so wish I could tell you more, but it would ruin the surprise!

Here are some more pics from our SproutFest... keep watching for an announcement from us sometime in the next two weeks.

Group dinner at Esperpento:

Wii Injury:

Mojito Mixing:

Caught! VP of engineering Matthew on an iPhone

We love all our users!

Wolfgang von Goethe called architecture "frozen music". In Sprout Builder, in contrast, we use the architecture of the Sprout to capture "living audio content". To use either our audio or jukebox component, click on the "Assets" tab and then on the "Add Assets" link in the Builder. You can browse for files on your hard drive or add sound from the web by providing an URL. Note: be sure to keep each audio asset under 18 MB. After the sound files are in the Asset Manager, you can rename them, by clicking on the baby edit pencil under the thumbnail (love this pencil!).

If you are adding only one audio file, you just drag and drop the file unto your page and you are done! If you want to add several music files, you will want to use the jukebox component, which requires a few steps. First, drag the jukebox component unto the page. Second, double-click in the jukebox window to activate another window called the "Add Audio Media" window. Third, drag your music files into this second window (missing either step two or three can lead you down a dark path to nowhere). As the files come in, they create an Asset Queue or list of items, which can be dragged into any order, another handy feature. Fourth, click on "Save" and enjoy! To see our videos on the audio and jukebox component, featuring Morgan Freeman and Decemberists, click on "Read More" below.