Search by Tag is Live....

You can now search for RateItAll reviewers by their People Tags.

The next step will be a tag cloud, that will look something like this.

I think this is a pretty good tool for making sure your tags match what others are doing... for example, if I tag myself "hoops" but someone else tags themselves "bball," we're not going to match. It may be worth it to double check your tags in the search to get the most mileage out of this feature...

Tagging Output is live.... and it's very, very cool

As promised, I think we have this tagging stuff in order, and i'm pretty freaking excited about it.

Click on a tag on any profile page to find likeminded folks, and what they're writing about.

Check out some Tag groups clusters for:

Art

Web2.0

Basketball

Baseball

Politics

Beer

So what are your tags??

Get Firefox

In the last 3 months we've seen the percentage of RateItAll visitors using Firefox as a browser go from 8% to over 14%. There's a reason. Firefox is great. Don't believe me? Check out this video:



Get Firefox today by clicking on the graphic in the sidebar.

Rolling in Some Fixes....

.... We could see as much as 45 minutes of downtime.

We're rolling in:

- People Tagging
- Home Page Fixes
- Search Tweaks
- Registration Tweaks


Stay tuned....

A Little Bit on Tagging

Some of you may have noticed a change to the "Expert Tag" fields on the profile. Specifically, "Expert Tags" have become just "Tags," and the instructions say to use this field for Areas of Expertise, Interests, and Groups.

Let me give you some background on what happened.

First, StarkTruth wrote me and suggested that "Areas of Expertise" was too limiting - that "Areas of Interest" might be more useful. This made a lot of sense to me, as the whole point of this feature will be to help folks find other folks who share interests, and not just to find an expert.

Then, designer extraordinaire Wurkit made a supa fly comment about how he was going to "abuse" the expert tag feature to stay abreast of what his friends from RefreshPhoenix were reviewing.

I found this brilliant. I've often wondered about an easy way to filter reviews by various sub groups on. The Trusted Network functionality is cool, but it's one size fits all. Maybe I trust someone for one thing like music, but not so much for politics.

For example, I have a number of mini social networks that I keep in touch with. There's my friends from high school, my friends from college, the folks from my Web2.0 stuff, the guys from my hoops team, the various sides of my family, folks from other forums, etcetera.

Many of these folks get on RIA at one point or another. What this tagging feature is going to do is to allow me to filter reviews by one group or another, by just clicking a link.

For example, some of my tags include:

haas (my wife's school friends)
wmw (an online forum that i particpate in)
web2.0

All I have to do is to circulate these tags among my groups, and presto, I'll have an instant filter to find out what each particular subgroup is talking about.

An obvious example would be a TrinityOfEvil tag for Numbah, BlueOrchid, and Madhatter. By tagging themselves by this group, the trinity of evil can stay easily abreast of all of the evil things spewing from their compadres.

This will all make more sense once we launch the output part of this feature.... hopefully this will be later this week.

So this tagging feature can now be helpful for 1) finding people who share interests; 2) finding an expert in something specific; 3) and staying on top of what our particular subgroups are talking about.

Is this as cool as I think it is, or am I just being a geek?

Couple of Updates

1) Weblist publishing bug is fixed

2) I have control of the admin site again, meaning that I am starting to work my way through the outstanding suggestions

3) There have been some changes to Expert Tags (more on this to follow)

Errors when trying to create a new weblist...

.... and when trying to suggest a new item to an existing list.

We are aware of the issue and are working on it.

Doing some bug fixes....

.... site will be unstable for the next little bit.

Toddler Hockey Fight

My friend Greg Hartnett, of Best of the Web fame, showed me this video last week in Boston. His four year old son had apparently been harassed throughout toddler hockey practice. Finally, Jr. snapped and sent a message to any and all in his way.

Jr. is the one with his back to the camera at the beginning of video.

My favorite part is the frantic chase scene at the end.

(make sure to turn the volume up)

Enjoy.

New Listing Suggestions

We're currently backlogged about 700 new listing suggestions across RIA, Weblists, and Local. The reason? The new RateItAll admin site has lagged the redesign in terms of actually working.

I hope to get Admin Site functionality back today, and we'll start working through your suggestions.

Thanks for your patience.

Making Weblists

Between the bigger type and the cleaner interface, I think publishing Weblists is about twice as easy now. I encourage folks to give it a spin if they haven't tried it yet... it's pretty easy.

We're working on integrating "Edit Page" links for Weblist publishers that will be visible to them when they are on their own Weblists. This should make it easier to edit pages on the fly.

One other note - make sure to take full advantage of the Weblist tagging functionality... while the output of this feature is not live yet, it's going to be a great way to get your Weblist more exposure - both through search and through having your Weblists show up automatically as "related" on other Weblists that are tagged with the same keywords.

More on this to follow.

Economist Article

There's a big article in the most recent Economist magazine about participatory media - things like blogs, wikis, and yes, review sites like RateItAll.

I like this quote:

".... had put his finger on something big: that in least in democratic societies, everbody does have the right to hold opinions, and that the urge to connect and converse with others is so basic that it might as well be added to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Pretty powerful stuff, and something that I enthusiastically agree with.

BTW, Magellan has set up a Weblist of the various types of social media sites.

TOS

I just posted the new Terms of Service on the site.

This is my favorite part:

"The Content which you post on our Web site is yours. You may remove it from our Web site in its entirety, and at any time."

Bug Progress

Little by little, we're stamping out bugs.

You may have noticed that paragraphs are back in comments, the "submit" and "cancel" buttons on the RateIt window are back where they belong, that you can now "view all" and scroll through all items on the ratings list page, and that annoying Google Maps pop up has been eradicated.

Please keep the bug reports coming... my list is down to about 85 now - there's still a ways to go to tighten this thing up.

Thanks to everyone who continues to send the bug reports in. Keep'em coming!

Doing some bug fixing....

.... performance could be a bit erratic for the next hour or so.

Paging Bug on Ratings Lists

Thanks to MA and Ridge who have alerted me to a bug with the paging functionality (see next 20) on ratings lists pages.

Currently, the link to see the final 20 items on a ratings list is not displaying. So if there are 64 items on a list, there's no way to get to the last four.

We're working on fixing this... we're also going to restore the "View All" option on ratings lists.

There's also a bug with adding punctuation to Weblist titles and listings. For example, Zuchinibut's "Characters from 24" list looks a little screwy. This one will also be fixed shortly.

Again, thanks for all the great feedback. We're fixing bugs as fast as we can, and I think we should have most of the big stuff taken care of soon.

More Redesign Stuff

A couple of clarifications:

- To create a Weblist, click the "edit/create/manage" link on your profile. I saw someone saying that creating Weblists is no longer free... i have no idea where that came from. Weblists are free and will be so for the foreseeable future. I suggest that if someone is asking you for money on RateItAll, that you politely decline to give it to them.

- There used to be a feature that let Weblist publishers view all comments that had been left in their Weblist. We're working on bringing that feature back ASAP - leaving it out was an oversight, and not any planned thing.

- The View All link on ratings lists is coming back.

- The paragraph thing is a bug. We're working on restoring the ability to use paragraphs in reviews.

- If you have to scroll horizontally to fully see a page. It's a bug. Please provide me with details if this is happening to you.

I would really appreciate it if folks could try and separate redesign feedback from bug feedback - obviously, if something doesn't work, it's not going to get a high rating :)

Please continue to send the bug reports in to me, and we'll get this thing cleaned up. Thanks for your patience.

Some Thoughts on the Redesign

I just wanted to give a quick thanks to everyone for their patience as we went through this important face lift. Many of you participated in testing, and many more provided feedback.

The utter overhaul of the site is a bit of a shock. It looks nothing like it did before, and all of us are going through the process of figuring out how to get around again. Cluttered and dated as the old RIA was, it was a pretty friendly site that served us well.

I went into the redesign project with very simple goals - to make the site cleaner, friendlier, and readable. I think we made big progress in these areas, though the proof will have to come in the weeks and months to follow.

I'd also like to thank the company that build the design - 30 Second Rule. I chose this company because they understand online community, and are passionate about what they do.

Specifically, Dan Ritzenthaler was the lead designer, and he was fantastic to work with. Smart, cool, thoughtful - an absolute pro who takes a lot of pride in what he does. If you want to find him on RIA, he can be found HERE. And yes ladies, he's single.

Finally, Rob, Buddy, and Jan have been putting in some crazy hours recently to push this thing live. None of us have slept much the last two nights, and these guys stayed cool even as I turned into an impatient, demanding monster.

Even RIA elders Wiggum and Ruby made a cameo for some testing, and that was much appreciated as well.

Thanks to everybody for their help. Time for me to catch some zzzzzz's.

known bugs

Hi all, thanks for the bug reports.

Here are a couple of known bugs:

Registration Confirmation Emails aren't going out

The Delete Item function for Weblists is not working

Some people have reported duplication in adding new items to weblists

Pictures in the "Reviewers Most Interested In" are not showing up properly, and old images are showing up

There character limit on reviews is broken - if you write more than a couple of sentences it says, "please limit yourself to 5000 characters."

Some indexes are showing weblists instead of RIA topics and vice versa.

The feature to view all of the recent reviews on your weblists is missing.

I'm sure there will be more bugs unearthed as the day goes on - please keep sending them in!

Some feedback on the redesign is coming in HERE.

editor's note: please keep in mind that you are looking at the first public beta release. a lot of stuff will be cleaned up in the coming days :)

Got Bugs?

Post'em if you got'em.

Let's try to limit comments on this post to things that are broken, as opposed to things you like or don't like.

Thanks!