mattloney

Matt Loney's Blog

What it says on the box

Thursday 13 September 2007, 5:08 PM

ZDNet community gets an upgrade

By now you should have noticed at least a couple of the changes we made recently to our community pages to help promote your posts better and make them easier to find.

In case you missed it, here's a run-down of what we've done and and some more details about why:

Community home page

This has been overhauled so that it now shows you at a glance the latest highlighted community content (by which I mean blog posts, comments to blog posts, Talkbacks to articles, Forum posts and product reviews by you), with options to view all the latest such posts, or the most discussed.

This is a big change from the previous community page which just showed the blog entries of our illustrious community editor Karen Friar. The original format was chosen because, quite frankly, we didn't know what to expect when we launched community: would we get loads of spam or flame posts in our blogs, Talkback and Forums?

As it turns out we've been pleasantly surprised by the quality of posts, and felt they deserved more of an airing. So now, if you make an interesting, pertinent, or just funny post, don't be surprised to see it being promoted as a lead item. We'll even go and find or create a graphic illustrate it.

Blogs

What was our opinions, page now provides a listing of all latest blog postings - both ours and yours. We're still running traditional news stories through our news channel of course, but using blogs for other content and for those stories that don't quite make the main news stream, whether because we don't have time to source the story ourselves, or perhaps because they're a bit offbeat.

Again, the main reason for this change is to make your blog postings more prominent. In future we'll be looking for more and better ways to promote your posts, and welcome all suggestions.

Our group blogs are still there too, of course.

Community search

The most technically challenging innovation has been community search. While you could previously search community, at the back end this was done through our internal CMs search engine; now that we are using the Ultraknowledge search that powers the rest of the site.

Now when you search you'll see community content appear in the default search results. Clicking on the community tab in search will allow you to find every member who has written on a particular subject, or find people by username (or part of their username). Try it out for yourself.

The ultimate aim of all this is to better promote your thoughts and comments, and help you better find those of your peers. We're not finished yet, and we know there's a long way to go. Of course this will only work if we make it useable, and the only people who tell us if we have it right (or wrong) are you. So please keep that feedback - good and bad - coming.