When DOM started there were lots of problems, but only a few people to deal with them.  Those people where very aware of everything happening on the site, but as DOM's staff and activity on the site has grown it has become nearly impossible to keep up with the interesting ways users decide to post problems.  We hear about problems from phone calls, emails, comments, SMS, chat, and even face to face.  More often than we'd like, problems aren't being addressed.

We've added a few new features to the site you may have noticed and some you probably haven't.  Everyone now sees that the names of users who've rated a specific show 5 stars show up at the bottom of the video.  You can click on those usernames and at the bottom of their profile, you'll see the 10 shows they've most recently rated 5 stars. 

There is an old expression in development that developers need to eat their own dog food. Basically, it means that people who develop software should have to use that software without any special access the same way a user would use it. I've been doing that this week as I've been ingesting several TED Talks from the TED conferences. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Unfortunately, they are distributed as MPEG4 with H.264.

One of the first things I did at DOM was to enable users to start accumulating Karma. Initially this added some information to each user's profile, but didn't do much else. Today, that karma actually started having an impact. Users with more that 20 karma points who rate videos will have that rating count twice. Users with more than 30 karma points will have their ratings count 3 times. 40+, 4 times and 50 or more will count a maximum of 5 times. This "bonus multiplier" only happens when you rate a video for the the first time.

I'm still relatively new to Denver Open Media and while I'm still getting to know the site and channel's audience, the first major change I've made to the site has resulted in more negative feedback than I expected. That change was moving from a QuickTime Streaming Server and embedded QuickTime player to a Wowza Media Server and Flash player to display the live stream of channel 56. When I looked at the server logs for the QuickTime streaming server before making the change, the most concurrent users ever watching the stream in the 60 days prior to the change was 4.

First, I owe John Montgomery's Mom an apology for making changes to the stream last night during VlogTV. I was trying to improve the quality of the stream by moving from a QuickTime player to Flash based player. If you haven't checked out the new stream, please do! I'm looking for feedback on the quality.

We've enabled a new module on denveropenmedia.org that will allow you to earn Karma for doing specific activities on the website like uploading new videos, commenting, and voting. Your current Karma now shows up in your user profile (click the "Your Account" link in the upper right). Over the next few weeks we will be tweaking the amount of Karma you earn and how quickly it expires. The plan is to eventually take Karma into account when calculating votes for the programming that airs. The most active users on the web will have more influence over what airs.