When it comes to health and fitness, content farms rule the Internet. Try to search for something like “how to lose weight” and you’ll get a long list of anonymously-written, poorly-sourced articles. So Derek Flanzarich is trying to build something better with Greatist, where he’s founder and CEO.

If you go the site, the differences may be too subtle to notice at first. There’s lots of general how-to content, divided into three categories — fitness, health, and happiness. But when you read the articles, there’s a difference. They’re not covered in ads, they seem to have a genuine editorial voice, and wonder of wonders, they even have a work cited section on the end. This article about how to never be late again? Genuinely useful. (Though let’s be honest: I’ll probably be late again.)

Flanzraich says his goal is to “build the first trusted health- and fitness-branded business” that’s targeted at young, Web-savvy readers. To that end, there’s a team of four full-time editors, plus a larger network of contributing writers. Content has to be approved by an expert, and every fact has to be cited. There’s even a manifesto urging people to “join the Greatist movement,” which is about making one healthy choice a week, rather than fixating on whether you’re ridiculously fit.

The approach seems to be working. In the last five-ish months, traffic has grown from 65,000 to 800,000 unique monthly visitors. Thirty percent of those visitors return, and 65 percent of the traffic comes from social networks (rather than search engines), so people must like the content.

As for making money, Greatist is running ads right now, but Flanzraich is also looking into a model where readers could become Greatist members and get access to special deals.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There are a number of online apps that let you create a timer that counts down to a given date and time, but frankly, most of them suck. Enter itsalmo.st, an appropriately named Web-based tool that lets you quickly and easily create a countdown for essentially anything (e.g. Doomsday) and provides you with you a custom URL to share with your friends.

The app, which was hacked together last week by Type/Code, is squeaky-clean and works as advertised (above is a screenshot of the countdown to TechCrunch Disrupt SF).

You can’t tell from the screenshot, but a bar at the bottom of the screen lets you access all the countdown URLs you’ve created, start a new one or share it on Twitter or Facebook instantly.

A couple of suggestions for the guys who built it to make it even better:

- there’s a whole world outside of the United States and people who live there might be interested in using your handy little tool as well. Perhaps those users could be given an option to change settings somehow, so they can mark the date and time the way they’re used to.

- the bar at the bottom is pretty hard to notice at first glance – consider moving it up top, changing the color scheme to make it stand out and placing default, recognizable Twitter and Facebook sharing buttons under the timer once users have created a countdown.

- let people edit and thus decide what the countdown URL looks like.

- without touch the clean look, consider some themes for people to customize their countdowns.

- consider making countdowns embeddable and/or available as a spiffy widget.

You know you’ve made an app that brings value when users want to see it improved. Nice work.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch