Features, Present and Future

We selected the platform that the new MediaCommons is using, Drupal, in large part because of the community-oriented focus of many of its features.  As I mentioned the other day, we’re very shortly going to be able to offer any registered user the ability to start a blog here, and we’re also making plans to aggregate feeds from a wide range of related blogs.  One thing that the new system already provides, however, is a limited user profiling system, on which we’re planning to build quite significantly in the coming weeks.

You can see an example of this system at work by clicking on my name in the byline above.  Doing so takes you to my current profile page, which lists my real name (which will shortly be the field that the system as a whole draws upon as the "author" of my posts, rather than my user name, allowing me to make that username something easier to input), my homepage, and my institutional affiliation.  If you’re a registered user and you look at your own profile page, you’ll notice an "edit" tab, which will allow you to change any of that information.  But the real trick is the third tab, "track."  This tab allows you to see a list of all of a user’s activity within MediaCommons — and this is the key feature for building our new system of peer-to-peer review, about which I’ll write more in the coming days.

When the full profiling system that we’re building is implemented, it’s possible that we’ll opt to get rid of the "track" tab, and move the information it provides onto the main profile.  (There’s also some refining of the information that it provides that we’d like to do, and we want to make sure that activity across MediaCommons — for instance, In Media Res posts — are included.  Right now, MC and IMR are tracked separately.)  And we’ll also of course be adding a wide range of other user-definable fields for inclusion in your profiles, allowing users to maintain a sort of digital CV here at the site.

So what I’d like to hear from you is about the kinds of information you’d like to have available here.  What fields should we add?  What features would be useful to you in thinking about your own profile, or in looking at the profiles of others?