We are Oso Excited to launch OsoEco to the public today!

We have been testing our green social shopping tools over the last several months with a small group of users behind the scenes. Today, we are quietly launching OsoEco to the public, with the intention of continuing to gain valuable feedback before shouting out OsoEco to the world.

For those who decide to join us we’d love it if you played around with the site (while having fun of course) and sharing your thoughts with us. We’re building this for you – so we want to make sure we’re providing social shopping and social research tools that meet your needs.

What Can You Currently Do on OsoEco?

1. Create your own Profile.

2. Tag your interests (assign keywords). This allows you to easily connect with people, products and articles that match your interests.

3. Learn about the power of TAGriculture™ on OsoEco. Basically this is how the OsoEco community works together to create a shared language and directory around green and health & wellness.

4. Take OsoEco with you wherever you go on the Web by adding an “Add to OsoEco” button to your browser’s toolbar. (Note: we currently only support Firefox)
   

This is an example from our TAGriculture™ page that shows who has been using the tag “organic cotton”

How Do You Share Feedback With OsoEco?

At the bottom of each page, you’ll see a “feedback” link – click on this, and you’ll be taken to an Eco Matter where you can post your questions, suggestions, etc. in a comment.

Where Can You Get Help On OsoEco?

Feeling stuck? Click on the “help” tab to find helpful videos, walk throughs, etc. Not finding what you need?

What’s Coming Soon to OsoEco?

[within the next 4-6 weeks]

1. Invite friends into OsoEco and share your finds with others outside of the OsoEco community.

2. “Follow” a Find, Eco Matter and/or Person and receive notifications of any related activity.

3. Use OsoEco across browsers (currently only support Firefox).

4. Eco Matters page will become more organized.

5. The Search feature will become more enhanced.
   

Thanks for your interest - enjoy the site and we look forward to hearing from you.

Updates, tweaks and enhancements on the Beta Site…

TAGriculture:

Are tags the glue that hold our site together; or are they the pathways that connect everything? Hmmmmm. Not sure. What I am sure of is that we have just added our TAGriculture page… and I just got so excited writing that last sentence that I knocked my water bottle over onto my keyboard. Hopefully I’ll survive the rest of this post without electrocuting myself. If not, well, I’ll miss everyone. You’ve been swell.

Back to TAGriculture…

Tag-ri-cul-ture = The science, art, or practice of cultivating tags, engaging in conversations and spirited debate about TagMeNots, and creating a rich and prosperous shared green language.

You can use tags to organize any finds, notes, people, eco matters, in a way that is important to you. You can also use TagMeNots and the Tag Detail pages to expand and share your knowledge.

Want to know more about tagging on OsoEco? If you’re a beta tester, log in, and check out the Help page.

What are TagMeNots?

I first talked about TagMeNots early this week where I butchered the explanation. Here’s a quick lowdown on what they are: TagMeNots give you an important tool for sustainability – the ability to see what’s not there. TagMeNots help us tell the difference between “not” and “don’t know”. Intrigued? Want to know more? Beta tester’s, feel free to log in, and check out the Help page.

This area of the site is very much in beta right now. Over the next several weeks, we will be growing and changing it. Some things on the horizon: The Tag Detail page will soon let you look at any tag and, like a wiki, contribute to it. We see tags as being the place where the community will hold conversations and share knowledge about what certain things mean. This is all part of building a shared green language!

How To Videos:

We had a number of University of Oregon students in the office a few weeks ago testing out our site and giving us feedback. Suddenly, I was hearing my voice throughout the room as people started watching some of the How To Videos. It’s humbling when you think you’re really funny, but then you hear yourself thinking you’re really funny and you realize you’re really not. It was a sad day for me.

But now, in the comfort of your own home, you can watch updated how to videos on tagging finds, people, eco matters, and see how tags work on your personal page. Sorry that I say “uh” so much. I’m working on this, I swear.

Well, though my computer is a bit soggy, I made it through this post. See you on the site!

When I was 4 my sweet, dear brother pushed me into a marble table and I cracked my head open.

I had been sick for a few days, but, I was in the state where I had completely recovered, and was using my “sickness” to issue orders to my brother. “Get me some water” “I want saltines, now” “You have to do it I’m sick”.

He, being the cold-hearted nasty older brother that he was, couldn’t take it anymore. He pushed me very very hard off the couch, and WHACK that was it.

My mother, did, and still does, refuse to believe that he actually pushed me… she, in her “blame the poor victim” mentality, to this day, maintains that I simply “fell”. Uh Huh.

Now, my brother actually admits to doing it – however, he doesn’t take any responsibility for it being psychotic and mean. “You sort of deserved it” is his mantra. No responsibility. No culpability. No apology.

Thank god it’s not genetic – or, if it is, the DNA somehow missed me. Maybe it’s recessive.

Which leads me to this – I made this whole post about all the updates to the site – and, you know what, I got some things wrong. See, I’m a big person, I can admit it.

What, you may be asking, the heck am I talking about?

I’m talking about my use of the words “ratings’. I’m talking about my explanation of Tag Me Not.

The word “ratings” isn’t accurate – because they’re really tags. They are tags that we’ve given extra attention to and made it easy for people to tag as “green” or “not green”, “practical” or “not practical”, “cool” or “not cool”. And because they’re tags with emphasis, it’s very easy for us to make them something else. We’ve put these on the web site as a test of sorts – put them up, have people see what we’re trying to do, and lead us down the path of choosing tags that beta testers see as meaningful and meaty. Maybe we’ll hear from beta testers that what you’d really like as quick tag options are “recycled” or “I have this” or “this company uses sustainable practices”. I think by using the word “ratings” I put an emphasis on these that was not quite right. BUT the important thing to remember is that over the next weeks we’ll be finding some way to ask beta testers what would be valuable.

The next thing I sort of kind of okay I messed up on, is, Tag Me Not. I come from a family of fighters not lovers (as I illustrated in my beginning story…). Ethan pointed out to me today that I had framed Tag Me Not in a completely different way than he thought of it. And, frankly, his explanation is a much nicer, non-confrontational way. And I like it more.

So here it is, Tag Me Not by Ethan: “Tag Me Not gives you an important tool for sustainability – the ability to see what’s not there. In stores, fair trade coffee often comes with “Fair Trade” labels, but you never see any coffee labeled “not Fair Trade”. Same goes for “organic” and countless other labels. But both in stores and on the web, the absence of a label is not the same as the presence of a “not” label. For example, if a shirt on OsoEco doesn’t have an “Organic” tag, does that mean it isn’t Organic, or just that nobody’s tagged it yet? Tag Me Not helps us tell the difference between “not” and “don’t know”.

“With Tag Me Not, things like “Organic” and “not Organic” aren’t two different tags – they’re the flip side of the same tag. This means that tags now offer us spectrum! So now when we look at the Organic tag, we can see side by side all the items that we’ve determined are or are not Organic. The same goes for unappealing characteristics. Think “Toxic” and “not Toxic.” Sure, some times there will be contradictions between how different members tag things. For those cases, we tally the relative counts of Tag Me So’s and Tag Me Nots. Sometimes this kind of contradiction will be really fun, like in seeing who thinks a note should be tagged “funny” and who says “not funny.” But the point isn’t to highlight differences among our opinions, it’s to highlight differences among our options. Which might be a waste of time, since all of our options for addressing sustainability are really just the same old boring rigamarole. Not.”

Now doesn’t that sound a bit better than my version?….

Sigh. Well, I’m sorry about my, uh, miscommunication; and I’m sure I’ll be making many many more mistakes. But, hopefully, I won’t split any heads open….

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.