The Voyage of the Alpha

Well, sorry it has been so long since our last posting. We've been beavering away on some new functionality and getting some loose ends together in order to make ourselves into an official company along with a small office!! Wahaay.

We've signed up over 40 close friends and family to test out the product and want to say thanks to all of them for their help and time so far.

Some of the new features that Chris has put live over the last few weeks include:

• Buzz
- an area of the site where we are experimenting with showing users the activity and buzz around various products and users. Examples are "top 5 digital cameras ranked by buzz", "most active users", "newest products", and so forth. It's a really good way of seeing many "window" on the world of Crowdstorm.

• Who recommended this..
- below every product main description, you will see a new section showing you all the users who have recommended that product.

• Tag Cloud Improvements
- the tag cloud now updates itself when you perform a search or click one of the tag items from a main page, so that it shows the attributes of a tag range. For example, if you now click "digitalcamera", you will see the buzziest results for this tag while the cloud updates to show shared tags within that range "megapixel", "ccd", "sony" ...

• User Stats
- on the user profile page you can see some stats about your activity on the site such as how many products you have recommended, commented on, and added / edited.

• Breadcrumb Trail
- see where you are in the great scheme of things.

• Feedback Button
- we have ajaxmagically created a "send us your feedback" button on the home page (bottom right) for you to write any comments / suggestions in the box provided and just click "send" to invoke the pigeon messaging service.

You may also have noticed that the digital camera space is now getting very populated and we'll be asking everyone to start commenting and recommending some cameras very soon to see which are the buzziest.