Informed Networker Blog

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Informed Networker has a two pronged goal: (1) to offer IT Professionals ever increasing value through centralized and summarized knowledge dispersal and (2) to make money. Neither goal is exclusive to the other. It is my (David Mackey) philosophy that a business is most effective in driving revenue when it most effectively services its target audience. Business is about a symbiotic relationship - a win-win situation.

That said, I want to talk to you about one of the ways we intend to increase the value of Informed Networker to IT Professionals - a goal that is within our two week timeline to complete before August 1st (thus far we are on track with our goals).  At the same time I want to note that our other heavy emphasis is recruiting advertisers - not because revenue is our primary concern but because it is of equal concern. We cannot offer a service to you without revenue. But, there isn’t much interesting to talk about generating revenue, so we’ll focus on the topic of increasing value.

One of the ways we intend to increase value for you - our target audience - is by implementing a related stories system. The concept is relatively simple - though implementation is not and with each phase of the release requires greater complexity and automation. Our target is to release Phase 1 by August 1st.

• Phase 1: Editors will be able to note relationships between stories. We will utilize the concept of a master/child relationship similar to that used by Techmeme. This will reduce redundancy in our story headlines while still providing depth. Instead of child stories appearing as separate entities they will appear underneath the master story in a smaller font and with only their title being displayed - this will be true on both the story summary pages and the story details page.
• Phase 2: Users will be allowed to create relationships between stories. This will operate on a two-function model. First, a user may recommend a relationship between a story and an editor may approve the relationship. Secondly, if enough users recommend a relationship the relationship will be automatically formed without need for manual intervention by a editor.
• Phase 3: We’ll be creating a tag cloud visible to both editors and the general user populace. It will display “clouds” of similar story activity. One will be able to utilize AJAX functionality to drag and drop stories into relationships - quickly and effectively affirming the server’s automatic analysis of story content.

We are excited about this new functionality - though it is only one of many new features we intend to bring to Informed Networker over the upcoming weeks and months. We hope you will continue to support us as we push forward in this endeavor.

Thanks: We’d like to take a moment to thank Andrew Vogel (voglabv) for his early recommendation of this feature and continued insistence upon its necessity. Andrew has played a key role throughout the development of Informed Networker.

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