Phew. We’ve just uploaded some updates to the site – most notably with language changes, ratings, tag me nots, and search.

Language Changes:

Well, beta testers have been asking us to change Dilemmas for a while now – and yippee! It’s done! We heard feedback around “Dilemmas” being too limiting – and, you know what, you were right.

Share What Matters to You….

What we now have on the site is a place called “Eco Matters”…. This is where you can rant or rave about finds, share your eco successes and bright ideas, ask questions, and well, share what Matters to you.

You might be wondering what’s happened to all the dilemmas people have been posting – they’re still there, in the Eco Matters area. We think it better represents what people want to do – but, again, we’d love to hear your thoughts. In the coming weeks we’ll be refining this area even more.

Ratings and Special Tags

We’re trying out using tags to rate things. Right now we’re using “cool”, “not cool”; “green”, “not green”; “practical”, “not practical”. We know we want to be able to rate things, and in the coming weeks we’ll be gathering feedback from Beta Testers about whether these are the values we want to use.

Soon, we’ll be adding ratings to the Eco Matters area of OsoEco as well…. but that’s still a couple weeks off….

You may have noticed in the past weeks the ability to quickly tag something or someone with “follow”. Well, now we’ve added a few additional quick tags – wish list and friend. Soon, the follow tag will notify you when whatever you have tagged that way has activity.

Tag Me Not

We’ve been playing with this idea of Tag Me Not for the past couple weeks. You say that some thing’s green; I say it’s not. I say something is recycled; you say it’s not. The idea is different than just tagging or untagging something – by saying that it is specifically “not organic” or “not recycled” is a place to start a discussion.

You’ll see Tag Me Not in a few places right now… you’ll see it on your personal page when you open up a tag; you’ll see it below the tag text field when you tag something (tagging something “green” automatically creates the option for me to tag it “not green”).

So let’s say I open up my “organic” tag to see what I’ve tagged organic and what other OsoEco-ers have tagged organic. What I’ll see now is a bunch of numbers under finds… this number is indicating how many people have tagged it “organic” and how many people have tagged it “not organic” and what the net tag is on the find. What’s nice about this is I can quickly see what the community is saying is organic, what they’re saying is “not organic” and if more people are saying it’s one thing or the other. I can also add my voice to the debate by clicking on the green number (it is that tag), or red number (it is NOT that tag) and expressing whether I think it is organic or not organic….

Search

It’s not absolutely perfect – but we finally have search available. You can find this in the upper right hand corner of all OsoEco pages. Yahoo!!!!

We’ll also be refining this over the next couple weeks, so please, if you have any feedback around it, let us know.