A few more upgrades before the week is out:

RSS feeds are now standardized w/ the Dublin Core namespace and a custom CrispyNews namespace.

To help the publicity portion, we’re now pinging technorati every time you submit a link. As a point of information, we already post a trackback pings to the posts themselves. If you’re linking a post that supports trackbacks, you’ll see a trackback appear on their page.

For users with isolated site capability, we now have an RSS for individual user activity.

And of course, the standard bug fixes here and there to keep things well oiled.

Hey folks. We have some goodies for you today that we are pretty excited about.

1. The ability to save favorites so you can follow the posts that you’re interested in. When you’re logged in, you’ll see a nice save icon next to each post. Just click on ’save’ and it will appear in your saved items list on your new user homepage. To unsave, just click ‘unsave’ in the same place. Very simple.

2. The use of multiple categories (tags). No more drop downs for categories. No more single category selection. Now you can select multiple categories per post. This will help you place those hard-to-classify posts or classify posts across multiple dimensions (i.e. subject and language => subject: computers, language: spanish). You can enable this in Admin Panel > Settings > Articles, on your site.

3. A gaggle of smaller changes are also rolling out with this deployment. Bug fixes, performance optimizations and other minor features.

So there you go. Let us know if you have any questions or comments.

Until now if you were an enterprise site (mostly CrispyIdeas folks), you didn’t have nifty home pages for your users.

We are happy to say they are now available! Get to your user profile pages by clicking on people’s username. They are all under the url
http://ideas.crispynews.com/people/

We do our best to try to update your CSS files, so the formatting should be OK with only minor tweaking needed, if any.

Due to popular demand on the admins community, we’ve finally implemented a much requested feature:

Change the color of those #$&*#! google ads!

Now you can.

Go into Admins Panel > Settings > Ads.

Hold the applause please. Thank you. Thank you.

I was browsing google news with the keyword CRM and bam, I came across this thoughtful article by a CRM analyst Denis Pombriant over at Beagle Research Group. The article makes some interesting points about the future of CRM, and how social networks do belong in CRM, but you can’t just simply fit the consumer model in the enterprise space.

Since Denis makes the point so eloquently, I am going to quote him directly:

Today’s CRM is based on the idea of using technology to improve internal business processes and that was and is a good goal. When CRM got going, internal customer facing business processes ran on a shoestring and scraps of paper.

I think we might have taken that kind of CRM as far as possible for the time being. We have all kinds of CRM systems today that systematize and organize our customer facing processes, but what we lack right now are effective ways of capturing customer feedback.

With feedback we can know whether or not we’re on the right track earlier than the time when we first put a product on the market, and that kind of information serves to save money and improve our business processes in immeasurable ways. So, no offense to my friends who think that social networking is a separate activity, but I really think it’s our space.

We’ve been hard at work with advanced analytics tool so administrators which can be found under the admin panel of your site. It includes graphs, most popular posts, most discussed, and all sorts of metrics so you have detailed knowledge about what happens on your site. Below are some screenshots of part of the system. To access it, go into your admins tab and click on over to the analytics tab.

Just in time for the holidays, we’ve stuck in a new global page for CrispyNews users. Its really just a port of some useful tools we’ve exposed for administrators.

We’ve also tightened up the design for the Dashboard in the admins page and fixed some formatting on the forum pages.

Happy Thanksgiving y’all.

As you may have already noticed, we’ve done alot this week to reorganize the administrator’s pages to make them more intuitive. Below are a few highlights of the change.

1. New home page including recent activity logs and an RSS for this blog to gather recent improvements to the site.
2. Reorganization of the top level tabs.
3. Reorganization of the stats page
4. New analytics tools for enterprise customers (coming soon)
5. A bunch of bug fixes all over the place.

Thanks to everyone who has given us feedback on the features you want.

A few weeks ago, we quietly put out a sister site to CrispyNews called CrispyIdeas. This makes it much easier for people to start Customer Feedback sites.

Where did this all come from?

Our software is used for two main purposes:

• Community news sites such as PutVote, OSViews and INTERNET EN ECUADOR
• Customer Feedback and Idea Generation sites such as Salesforce IdeaExchange

Both sit on the same infrastructure, but its hard to start an ideas site based on the CrispyNews settings. Our fault. We’ve made all of this easier for people to start Customer Feedback sites. We’ve launched a sister site called CrispyIdeas to make this much easier to do.

By default, when you start a CrispyIdeas site, you’ll get:

• A silo-ed site that is isolated away from the rest of the CrispyNews properties. CrispyNews sites are all connected together to encourage cross participation. This isn’t a great feature for customer feedback software so we’ve put up some walls.
• Ability to create multiple sites off of your same user base. (e.g. a News site and an Ideas site for the same community)
• Theme and language settings focused around customer feedback.
• Available, like CrispyNews, starting at free

Interested? Start a site!

I was browsing around google video this weekend and ran across this video by Tachi Kiuchi, ex-CEO of Mitsubishi Electric and now Founder of The Future 500.

The video covers a variety of topics including risk-taking, terrorism and accounting for the costs of using natural resources, all around the theme of “take risks and do what you want, but don’t die.”

Within this theme, he talks about the failure of companies to adapt based on feedback. “Enron grew unsustainably, and because it failed to adapt, it collapsed.” “No feedback, no adaptation. No adaptation, no change” gradually, the feedback, if ignored, grows louder and manifests itself in collapses and disasters. Though he goes on discuss the environment in particular, his point encompasses businesses as a whole. Feedback and adaptation is the key to the survival of a business.

Its an interesting video that runs about 5 minutes or so.

link to video