We've been talking a lot lately about how to improve our customer service -- not that we think we're laggards there, but we take pride in being responsive and always want to be better. At the same time, we find ourselves spending a lot of time answering the same questions over and over, when our plucky little team could be creating new stuff. And, while we're good at responding to cries for specific help, we haven't had a good way to address and organize feature suggestions and new ideas from the community.

So, we're going to test out a new mechanism, courtesy a company called Get Satisfaction. The advantage is that it archives the Q&A to reduce lag time on answering things that have come up before. Also, it allows you to answer newbie questions if you get there before we do. It also will hopefully eliminate occasional confusion where we have multiple staffers answering the same email. And it's a neat suggestion box.

We picked Get Satisfaction because several us had used and liked it for interacting as customers of other sites/software products. It's pretty close to what we think we'd have created if we made such a thing, but it allows us to stay focused on building cool local gizmos.

Give it a spin and, well, let us know what you think.