Actually, I am going to try to upend the AMA formula and instead ask you lots of questions. We're still deep in development on a major release that has taken on the somewhat misleading name of "The Port"- replacing the front page, blog pages, the story page, comments, and the story editor. We've talked a lot about that in the past, and many of you will remember that we were trying our hardest to get that all done, tested and scaling in time for the upcoming elections. We're still pushing hard, coding as quickly as possible while maintaing high technical standards, but I do want to say that that goal is looking more and more difficult the closer we get to it- and we're awfully close. Our plan is to get beta testers on the our testing servers soon to try out everything but the story editor- yes 'soon' is a nebulous non-date. You know I've got real developer roots because I'll talk to scope and complexity, but I won't give you a date. This is where we are- close but nothing ready to be revealed right now. So, instead, I have some questions for you:
- What searches do you run on dailykos.com. Please tell me the simple boring searches as well as the more complicated ones, as well as the motivation behind those searches.
- What sort of information about DailyKos usership, traffic, social network sharing, etc. would best help you focus your writing, organizing and activism efforts on DailyKos?
As you can probably tell, next up are search and public metrics. The machine behind searching the site is largely in place- we'll be reusing the same components we use to power the search of the image library, but I want to be sure we tailor the search interface to how its used and how it could best be used. As for the public metrics the motivation is simple- we use all sorts of metrics to help guide our work- google analytics, quantcast, chartbeat.com, lots of server metrics- and we'd love to know if and how you could see getting benefit from these types of tools for how you use DailyKos.