RSS upgrades and Technorati pings

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.

Favorites and multi-category support

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.

Isolated sites get user profile pages

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.

Changing the Google Ad colors.

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.

A new shift in CRM

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.

Advanced Analytics for Premium Users

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.