| Business & Marketing Editorial at Creative COW |
Article Focus:
A few secrets of what lies ahead for the COW and its members in 2010. Read ahead for what the master of the pasture reveals about the COW's exciting new interface, new projects, and design. |
Change. It's a word that seems to be in the air lately. And when you have been building media professionals communities as we have since June of 1995, you learn that on the web, change is a constant. And in 2009 and 2010, change is speeding up in ways never seen before.
Creative COW is entering its own 10th year during 2010, and as we enter 2010, we have the biggest changes in our history to roll out. Some changes will come earlier in the year, others will come later. But change will be a constant, one piece at a time. But when the calendar closes on 2010, one thing will be quite sure: Creative COW was never busier, or as evolutionary as it was during 2010.
We realize that it would be nearly impossible to take the COW on the road -- at least in the sense of actually getting everyone together in one place. So we have been working to add features that allows our members to easily interact with "birds of a feather" in their own local area. We hope to one day see many local COW groups around the globe.
It's just one small but important part of the new interface we are working on, an entirely new interface for The COW that will allow our members to opt-in (or out) of features that will give them the ability to meet with COWs from their own area. It could be for local user group meetings, or you might want to meet with other COW members in your area that use DSLRs. It could be to help staff or promote a film festival in your area, or any event of interest to COW members in a geographical area. The possibilities are endless.
Our new interface has been in the planning stage for much of 2009, and began development in the last quarter of 2009. Its planned completion date is slated for early Q3 of 2010.
Even our popular video reels area is slated for an upgrade in both backbone and feature support. These video features will then be leveraged by other new areas of our redesign. For example: we are developing new camera areas into which you might upload your test footage if you elect to. This requires a huge redevelopment effort on the part of the COW and is not a simple tweaking of our existing interface. This is a major redesign of nearly every system and sub-system that now makes up Creative COW.
We have "master-planned" the kind of design and feature-set that we believe is indicative of what social media communities will be in the future. It is an interface that we have code-named our "nonlinear" interface and it allows our members to interact in many entirely new ways. It bears no resemblance to anything that we have seen elsewhere on the Net. It allows us to leverage The COW's enormous amount of support and information, and serve it to our visitors within an interface that "takes them from question to answer" in the fewest number of steps possible.
If you hate change, don't worry, as you will still be able to access the classic COW interface. We hope to have the completed nonlinear interface fully implemented by Q3 2010.
An earlier mentioned contributing "piece" will roll out shortly: our new professional camera site. We have built a database of nearly every pro-level camera and lens in the market and we have many ways that we will later leverage this information to the benefit of our members. Stay tuned.
You learn a few things in 15 years, and one of the things that we have learned is that Neil Young was right: rust never sleeps -- and neither does the internet. You can't rest for long on the internet.
2010 will be the year in which Creative COW redefined itself in ways that leveraged its powerful legacy of linear forums and millions of questions and answers, and tied it to an artificial intelligence engine that took media professionals to a far more powerful and supportive future.
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