"people would be encouraged to submit articles ad-hoc rather than join a ‘team’ to do so first"

Also, people would be encouraged to comment on existing articles either to correct inaccuracies, update or expand on content. These comments would then be integrated into the main article by the staff or moderators. Ultimately we want to blur the line a little between staff and customers allowing everyone to contribute in a meaningful manner.

I agree with you about keeping the customer blogs off the community site and I almost removed that entry from the roadmap but decided to leave it in until i find somewhere else to put it!

The social side is interesting. I agree that we could never compete with facebook or myspace for social networking, nor would we want to. However it's true that people have different friends in different areas and for different purposes. The friends I would have on the plusnet community are different from those I have on facebook which are different from the ones I have on flickr, last.fm etc. We already have a community, the social features would exist to allow easier and more natural communication within it. It's not definitely going to happen but I think it's an interesting idea that deserves some attention.

Similarly, I don't think bringing customer blogs on to the community site is a good idea either. I come to this site for things about PlusNet, not to read its various customers rambling on about things. (I'm not even that keen on the integration of external news from sites such as Engadget.) On the other hand, the '1 click install' of WordPress to a customer's webspace is, IMO, an excellent idea - that way people who don't really know what they're doing can get started very easily.

The chat room and user-generated support pages sound interesting, although I notice that they somewhat duplicate stuff Usertools has been doing already for years now... which means I think PN should consider lessons learnt from that. Namely, that the whole 'tutorials' thing - which 'user-generated support' is basically a duplication of - never really worked out, as evidenced by the fact that a 'tutorials team' doesn't even exist any more. Of course, there is one difference in that people would be encouraged to submit articles ad-hoc rather than join a 'team' to do so first, but still, I have a feeling that most people are too busy to want to write support articles when, arguably, that's the job of the company they pay for their service to some extent. But it might work quite nicely if it has an element of incentivisation - perhaps, say, a month's free internet connection for whatever's the top-rated article one month (which would obviously require a voting system).

In short, I think PlusNet are trying to do too much with this community site - trying to turn it in to a jack of all trades, which will most likely become a master of none. Focus on what the community site can offer which other websites can't - namely, integration with PlusNet and its staff. If I want technology news, I'll always get it elsewhere. If I want to 'socially network' with people, I'll always go elsewhere. But if I want to know what's going on in the world of PlusNet, I'll always come here - unless the site fills up with so many superfluous things that make doing so tiresome.