Montreal Tech Watch

Radio-Energie’s website has been relaunched and visitors now officially land on the community section “carrefour”; and let me tell you, you can’t get more than “web2.0″ beyond that. Here are some of the new features:

1. users can submit news and promote the ones they like by voting. Now, I don’t know if the algorithm they are using is similar to digg or follow reddit’s
2. users can get their own blog at radioenergie.com/username, with video and audio publishing
3. there is also a section about popular videos from youtube, much alike the #1 section
4. VoxPop allows users to record videos from their webcam, which should add more spontaneity and also get more videos published, as it bypasses the classical record-edit-encode-upload process
5. WebJockey Energie lets a user become a community manager, until he or she is replaced by another user
6. there are also presence features, allowing users to discover others

The WebJockey feature is very innovative. Previously, social networks and web2.0 websites who rely on user-generated content had people working as community managers to moderate and encourage users. This is a step beyond: users get to compete on who would be the best webjockey, who is then replaced by a more dynamic user if he/she is not up to the task. As far as I know, this is an industry-first in social networking.

Previously, I openly criticized the project because of their technical problems at launch. But in this new version, I haven’t seen any bugs, the user interface has been polished and expertly done. Another sign of success: the users are also more active and on the forefront, unlike 2 months ago, where the radioenergie and meïdia team were displayed as the most active users.

Congrats to the meïdia team!