Last week, we announced a new Group feature that dramatically enhances what groups can do, yet has been completely ignored. So let me take a moment to explain it further.
The announcement:
Following for groups:
You can now follow tags, users, and groups to your group if you're an admin. Go to the Following section of your group's profile, and you'll see a link to search for favorites to add to your list.
What is it good for? Groups can create a stream, and the tags they follow will put diaries into a sidebar called "Related Diaries." So, if you're a group about trains, you can automatically add any HSR-tagged diary into the sidebar.
The sidebar stuff is the pretty cool stuff.
You know how on the Daily Kos homepage, there are various community-generated diary boxes on the sidebar? Well, you can now have something similar in your group.
As a group admin, you can select what tags will be pulled in to that "Related Diaries" box. If you run a group blog focused on, say, health care reform, you would find the various tags related to your focus (health care, health care reform, medicare, medicaid, etc), and follow them. Then all diaries tagged as such would show up on your group home page, in that related diaries box. A more concrete example -- the Cranky Users group should follow the "DK4" tag. That way, anyone finding their way to the Cranky Users group would easily see what everyone else is saying (good and bad) about the new platform. Very useful stuff.
It'll be yet another way to give diaries visibility, help people find the content they seek, give group owners yet another way to quickly spot material to republish and diarists to invite to their groups, and otherwise help content find its way to the people who want to read and comment on it.
As of yet, I haven't seen anyone adopt this new functionality, so either it wasn't clear what it was for, or the admin for it is confusing or not working. In either case, I'd like to hear back from you guys, since this is something I was excited to see happen, and so far it's a total flop.
Update: Oh, I forgot to mention another way groups can further community with this feature -- they can create their own tags, so community members can "contribute" to their favorite groups without actually having to be members. For example, KosAbility can follow the "kosability" tag, and then encourage people to use it when discussing disability issues.