I would like to know how many people have viewed my articles :-)

And add podcasts :-)

People tend to feel reluctant to say that they are uninformed about something that everyone else seems to understand.  In business, there is a tendency to use a great deal of industry specific abbreviations.  For someone in the same business, the meanings are obvious.  For the rest of us, there is a real difficulty in following along and therefore there is difficulty establishing relationships.  We could help resolve this situation by encouraging each member to avoid the abbreviations.  In addition, we could also have a "dictionary" of terms that could be accessed by double-clicking the industry term or word to open a brief explaination or link to further articles.  People will be more likely to make a business connection with someone they can better understand.

Robert,

Welcome to MySolutionSpot.  I really like your suggestion of having a "dictionary" of terms.  There is nothing more intimidating than reading a document full of terms you don't understand.  While people should avoid writing with abbreviations and acronyms, it's also important to become familar with the lingo in a field.  Keep the ideas coming!

Kelly

Sian and Robert,

Thanks so much for your suggestions. Both of you have contributed some great ideas that we can pursue. Robert, do you think that it would be helpful to create this 'dictionary' in a Wiki format so that users may add/edit entries specific to their industry? Sian, both of your suggestions are doable - we will take a look at our release schedule and see if we can work those feature requests in.

Thanks!

Yes, I think that the WiKi format is a good choice because it will encourage more participation and ownership by forum members.  It will be more accessible than the standard "See my post on ..." that you commonly see.  It will need a little "advertising" by you guys to get the idea out there that the dictionary is available and for "newbies" to WiKi you should have a short "How to ... " available in some prominant location.  You can use that same document to get across what the expectations and purpose(s) of the dictionary are.  This dictionary can hopefully become a good tool to make dissimilar businesses more intelligible to one another and by that means encourage dynamic business relationships.

I may be idiosyncratic on this, but have another suggestion. I am sure other people will have different ideas on this.....

When I click on a link to "Recent Contributions" from the home page, I would like to go directly to that forum post, rather than having to click through some pages to find the most recent post. If the post is interesting, I will go back through the thread to read what others contributed previously.

I think the other links work fine by starting at the beginning, but I think the "recent" contributions really should link to the most recent post....

Best,

Sian