Arktan

1. How does Arktan help me if I generate a lot of content on the web and/or use a number of different sites?

Arktan helps you aggregate the blogs, videos, photos, music, micro-blogs etc., that you generate on different sites such as Blogspot, YouTube, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, etc. Even though you don't use all of these sites all of the time, chances are you use some combination of them and over time you've probably changed from one to another because it fills your need better or just because it is the new kid in town.

You can group and style your content, organized by your interests in "Arktan Channels". This allows your to curate your content, organized by your interests, to your social and business circles. Do you have a career-focused blog you would like to keep separate from your personal blog and photos? Arktan allows you to create a "Work" Channel that aggregates all of your work content into one spot. You can create a separate Channel for personal photos, blogs, tweets, and videos. Or you can organize your Flickr photographs and YouTube videos in an Arktan Channel called "Multimedia". You can even assemble just a subset of these from a Vacation you took and mix those into a Channel that documents that one vacation!

You can then share your Arktan Channels with your friends, family, co-workers etc., allowing them to automatically discover your content.

2. How is Arktan helpful if I don't generate much content?

Arktan allows you to keep up to date with your friends' content. We are not just about distributing content you generate. We are also about distributing content to you. Can you keep track of all of the sites your friends, family, and colleagues use? Do you even want to keep track of them? Probably not.

Even if you do not generate much content chances are that some or more of your friends, family and colleagues generate blogs, photos, video and other content on various Websites such as Flickr, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Blogspot etc. You can automatically discover your friends' latest content and discuss and interact with it using Arktan.

3. What is an Arktan Channel?

An Arktan Channel is a subset of your content organized by your interests. For example you may have blogs, photos, micro-blogs on sites such as Blogspot, Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Twitter etc. You may wish to "mix" this content and organize it by your interests to "curate" it to your social and business circles. For instance you may wish to put your micro-blogs from Twitter and Facebook together in one Channel and your photographs from Flickr and Picasa together in another channel.

An Arktan Channel is automatically updated as the content in the parent website changes. For example, if you create a "Photos" channel with Flickr and Picasa and add a new photograph to Flickr, your Photos Channel is automatically updated with the new photograph.

An Arktan Channel also enables you to assign permissions and control who can see your content. Please see below for further details on this.

4. How can Arktan help me to curate my content?

Arktan Channels allow you to curate your content by creating a dedicated page for a particular mix of your content. This can be shared with others using RSS feeds. It can also be embedded and re-distributed to other sites using "Arktan Widgets".

5. Does Arktan require that friends whose content I wish to "Discover" are Arktan members?

No. There are two mechanisms on Arktan that allow you to discover content from your friends who are not on Arktan.

First, if you know the usernames of your friends on a particular site, you can add your friends' content to your Channel.

Second, for some specific popular sites, Arktan can automatically import the content of your friends' on those sites as long as you provide Arktan with the appropriate authentication information for the sites. Currently this is supported for Facebook and Twitter.

6. What are the different messaging tools on Arktan?

Our goal is to give you a choice of messaging tools on Arktan and to integrate popular messaging tools that you use on other sites.

We have the following tools on Arktan itself:

• a) Micro-blogging. You can post your status updates. You can also post your status updates from Arktan to Twitter.
• b) Messages. You can send private messages to your friends who are Arktan members.
• c) Comments. You can comment on your Friends' (or your own!) content.

Further we integrate micro-blogging on Twitter, Facebook and other sites. You can follow your friends' Twitter and Facebook updates and reply to them right on Arktan!

7. How does Arktan allow me to control what I share and with whom?

You have the flexibility to set a particular Arktan Channel as public or private or viewable by only your friends on Arktan. If you set the Channel to private then only you will be able to see the Channel and no one else will be able to discover the content in that Channel. If you set it to Public then everyone can see the content in that Channel. If you set it to be viewable by only your friends on Arktan, then only your Arktan friends have access to the Channel.

Further you can set more fine grained privacy controls to allow only a specific set of your friends access to a Channel. In order to do this first you need to "tag" your friends based on how you wish to categorize them. For instance you may tag all your co-workers with the "co-workers" tag; your family with the "family" tag; your biking friends with the "biking" tag and so on. You can assign multiple tags to a friend. Now you can mark a particular Arktan Channel as viewable by your friends who have been assigned certain tags. For example if you wish to expose a Channel only to our co-workers, you can mark it as viewable by your friends with the "co-workers" tag.

You can specify the privacy control of your Channels using the "Edit" or "Create New Channel" links on the "My Channels" page.

8. Can I receive emails that notify me of changes to my friends' content?

Yes. Arktan sends periodic email digests with the new content from your friends' Channels. You can control the frequency of these emails using the "Settings" link.

9. Which websites does Arktan support?

Arktan currently supports about thirty sites. Our architecture enables us to add support for new sites relatively quickly. Please let us know if you have a request for a new website that you would like us to support. If a site that you want to add is not on this list, please look at the next FAQ "How do I add RSS feeds from websites that are not supported on Arktan?", to add the website to Arktan.

Here is the list of websites that we currently have custom support for:

Blogspot, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us, Google Picasa, Wordpress, Vimeo, Metacafe, Last.fm, Netflix, Pandora, Yelp, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, Zvents, Wikipedia, Music Nation, SoundClick, Upcoming.org, Eventful, Multiply, MyYearbook.com, Xanga, Bloggersbase, Blogger, Google.

10. How do I add RSS feeds from websites that are not supported on Arktan?

If the website you are trying to add is not suppported by Arktan, you can still add the website if you have your RSS feed from the website.

Add RSS feed to a new Channel on Arktan


• 1. After you signup on Arktan, go to the "My Channels" tab.
• 2. On the right, click on "Create New Channel".
• 3. Enter a channel name - Eg. "My Blogs", Click on Save.
• 4. Scroll down in the panel below and go to - "Add a new source manually".
• 5. Enter the RSS URL here, give a title for the URL (this is for your reference later).
• 6. Click on Add.
• 7. Close the popup.
• 8. Refresh the page and you will see the newly created channel on the right.
• 9. Click on the channel and you will see the latest content from the website, that you added, in the channel.



Add RSS feed to an existing Channel


• 1. Click on "Post New Content" button in your profile box on the top right.
• 2. Click on the third tab - Auto-import Website/RSS.
• 3. Select a Channel.
• 4. If the website you want to add is available in the list of websites, please select it.
• 5. If you have custom RSS URL, you can add the RSS URL directly.

11. How to auto-post content from a channel to Twitter?

You can setup a channel such that new entries in that channel are automatically posted to Twitter. The post on our blog has the details.

To enable this, you need to go to your "My Channels" page and mouse over the channel in the left central region of the page, that you want to "Link to Twitter". Click on "Link to Twitter". We will use oauth to link your channel to Twitter and start posting entries to Twitter as your channel content changes! That is it.

For example if you are linking a "Multimedia" channel, with a mix of Flickr and YouTube, to Twitter, we will automatically post your photos and videos to Twitter as you add them on Flickr or YouTube. If your channel is updated with a plethora of entries at the same time, our software is smart enough to apply some throttling so as not to generate a burst of tweets.