I spoke yesterday about open source innovation software called ideatorrent. I also said i’d dive in to it an have a good look around and that i did 
It’s perfect for a feedback section, not so much for an ideas section. The reason for that is because it’s designed to ‘act’ on ideas and suggestions, whereas what i had in mind was just to showcase ideas.
If you look at it, you’ll see 3 main sections… ‘popular ideas’, ‘ideas in development’ & ‘implemented ideas’. This is perfect for a website looking for feedback. It’s also perfect for a college and i’ve thrown that idea out there to my own.
Users can see visible progress… which in turn shows that the websites cares and listens… that triggers off more ideas and more loyalty and it all just snowballs in to a loving community where your users talk to you in public, with respect and with suggestions.
If you’re a relatively big site, with no feedback section, people will find forums and blogs to bitch about you and slam your website or company for whatever reason. That can be good too in many ways – i think it’s very important to get a mixture of really harsh criticism along with very constructive criticism – it keeps you on your toes and striving for perfection.
But people will (generally) not attack you in private or in a one on one situation, they’ll do it in public. And they have every right to… with no feedback section in place, you frustrate genuine users and the fact they’re taking the time to talk about you at all in public, shows that they do in fact care about the site to some degree, even if on the face of it, they’re saying how crap it is
Anyway, ideatorrent won’t be used by me at this moment in time, but i will be keeping an eye on it’s development and for the likes of BeerChief, it’s definitely attractive. So if not ideatorrent what else? Well i’ve used pligg before, i know my way around it so i’ll be basing my new idea site around pligg and i’m just after installing it on a new domain name as i write this post…
wifimapper.com is still under development, so too is a .ie project i’m working on, but i can handle them all 
Anyway, i’ll wrap it up for today – big internetworking college exam tomorrow and if i get through that ok, the rest are just formalities…
