From pub to podium, what's your mood?

wis.dm’s a little over 4 months old and we’ve certainly had a blast building a site that starts to push at the edge of online interaction and collaboration. Thanks to everyone for participating, wis.dm just facilitates... the power is in the hands of wis.dm members, and the more there are, the more powerful it becomes. I feel we're making great progress now, enabling wis.dm’ers to work together, an efficient “crowd” or “smart mob” as Howard Rheingold might say, collaborating on and solving some of life’s mysteries. I was in New York earlier this week and someone asked me - “What’s at the core of wis.dm?” and “Where’s its center of gravity?” Having given these questions some thought, I’d say it’s quickly morphing into a form of “life compass”, a place to explore, discover and find one’s “true north”. A place to get answers to some of the tougher challenges we face as human beings, and this is where IMHO a “crowd” as opposed to “an individual expert” can be a most effective medium.

So, to this latest release. First I’d like to explain the nature of the cycles we work in. We’re a small team and though we’re pretty agile, developing software takes time and the developments you’re seeing today are at least 6 weeks in planning and execution. I’m making this point because as we’re constantly receiving feedback, we’re considering it and building it into our schedule. More on what’s next soon! Our primary goal, this trip, was based on much feedback from users wanting to get straight to serious debate - an important component of the wis.dm proposition. But wis.dm has been built to enable a balance of interaction, from the fun and light-hearted -to- deep and thought provoking. We want wis.dm to maintain its lively feel and we want to make sure that better questions across the fun to serious spectrum gain the prominence they deserve. It was on this basis that “slider” was born. Slider enables wis.dm’ers to quickly navigate between questions based on their propensity for lighter or heavier content or their particular mood at any given time. Our innovation: to enable the “crowd” as a whole to dictate what goes where and quickly return questions to match a particular mood. Named as places, the continuum runs from “Pub” to “Podium”. We’ve built the slider into the question asking process enabling users to seed their question; and into the question detail page so that others can nudge it toward a new location if they feel the question is misplaced.

From a functional perspective the next major component of this release is the overall simplification of rate, report and keep track of a question. Rating has been around on wis.dm for some time but this process has now been made significantly easier with the introduction of “thumbs up / wise” and “thumbs down / un-wise”. We’ve also simplified the process of reporting “inappropriate content” with the introduction of “the face”. Check it out and watch it blush! Users have been asking for the longest time for a better way to keep track of questions and we’ve introduced private bookmarks in this release. Essentially, favoriting a question has now been replaced with marking a question as "wise" on the one hand, to promote the best questions to the surface and "bookmarking" - to better keep track. For users who used favorites, we’ve marked everything in your favorites list with a bookmark.

We have also spent a lot of time in the past weeks thinking about the design and usability of the site and have introduced three clear elements into the design, questions, people and my wis.dm. Clicking on the “ask a question” button drops down a new question asking interface - designed to streamline the process and add slider functionality. We’ve also introduced an “invite a friend” drop down which we hope users will adopt en masse! wis.dm’s power grows exponentially with the number of users - so start inviting now! My wis.dm has also been re-vitalized - but this section of the site will be the subject on our next major effort. Oh and the last item to get a special mention, the wis.dm status bar, no longer a major draw on resources and back to working perfectly informing you about your wis.dm activity.

Finally, thx to Will, Mike, Trevor, Kristen, Traci, Nicole, Bill and Daniel for burning the midnight oil and getting this latest iteration out. It’s a great platform for us to move forward and next in our sights is a major revamp of the points system and wis.dm profile. Alongside these activities we’ll be continually improving the everyday features and I’ll post on this in more detail later today.

Thanks for participating and enjoy!