Yellow is the New Blog

One of several new offerings Lotus 911 unveiled at Lotusphere was a new product called Crowded Wisdom. To quote our shiny new website:

Crowded Wisdom™ is Lotus 911's social idea management and business decision support solution. Featuring a sophisticated Web 2.0 interface, Crowded Wisdom allows employees, customers, vendors and partners to share ideas that can then be quickly and easily evaluated on multiple criteria by the defined community. Ideas can be contributed by anyone at any time, and become immediately available for other users to add to their personal Wishlist.

But the wisdom of crowds doesn't end there. Participants can organize their wishlists by ranking and rating ideas with simple drag & drop gestures. By sorting ideas in order of priority, users can express not simply that they like an idea, but where they rank it among other ideas they like. They can also rate ideas independent of their ranking, creating a deeper understanding of priorities and preferences.

Site administrators can group ideas together into Scorecards, which are then made available to crowd participants. Scorecards can be limited to a preset collection of ideas, or be open-ended. Once participants have submitted their scores, administrators can see rankings and ratings for all the ideas. Administrators can also assign weighting values to participants, which will differentiate their scoring, allowing key customers and users to have a stronger voice.

For example, imagine you are a major fast food chain and want to seek ideas from your customer base about what products or services to offer. You could start by having an open collection of ideas, letting people feed off of and rate each other's ideas, building a loyal community of interest. Then you can create a targeted Scorecard of the highest rated ideas that are actually feasible and publish that to the community to prioritize and rate ideas AGAINST each other, giving you valuable market intelligence about what changes you could make that would have the highest impact to your community. That is the power of Crowded Wisdom™.

The site then goes on to describe how much it would cost you (spoiler: surprisingly little) to run this in-house or hosted on our servers, but you can try it out for free and simultaneously improve BleedYellow by submitting suggestions - and adding suggestions from others to your wishlist - at http://wisdom.bleedyellow.com.

We are pleased to announce the availability of Sametime Advanced on BleedYellow.com!!

Check it out for yourself!

Official statement here

A lot of folks have been discussing the availability of the im.bleedyellow.com Sametime community. At the moment, there are 101 members of the community logged in (more than 1,400 have now registered for a BleedYellow account, by the way). This morning I was told that someone had raised a concern that we might be logging chats on the server... we're not. We weren't, and we won't be. You can still feel free to save chat transcripts locally, but the server won't be saving a copy as well.