Today Helium introduced a number of new features and enhancements. In many ways, this is one of the biggest changes to Helium since we introduced Marketplace. The features in this release reflect Helium’s continued strategy of advancing new and innovative solutions aimed at empowering our members to produce high quality content while also advancing our objectives of creating the world’s largest and most supportive writing community.
New Products Introduced: With this release, Helium is advancing a new approach to creating and publishing new forms of content. Up to this point, Helium has solely enabled members to create articles. With this release, we are introducing How-To Guides, News Events and Topics pages.
These new products are based on a closed community approach. Members must apply to each community to participate and each piece of content created will be reviewed, edited and approved by members of the closed community.
Instead of leveraging Helium’s relative ranking engine, these new products rely on an application process and a peer approval process. This leverages an underlying collaborative editing capability (wiki model) to enable members to collaborate on creating the best content possible.
Whereas the Helium relative ranking model works well to enable many people to create competitive articles on a subject (lifestyle content, evergreen content, creative writing, opinion etc), the new content types, such as News, allow members to cover breaking news and to collaborate on creating unique resource centers in our new Topics pages.
Added to this release is a new payment method for these new content types for compensation based on a clear formula of views of their work.
New and improved community tools:
New Messaging Center: Comparable to email inboxes and social networking messaging abilities, now we can send, receive, delete and archive messages on Helium. Members can create their own personalized signatures for messages. Contact this Writer will now use the Helium Inbox (a link will appear at the top when you’re logged in). Whenever you receive a message in your Inbox, you’ll be pinged on your email — we’ve even included preferences so you can change the frequency of receiving emails regarding your Helium inbox activity.
Easier Access to New Social Tools: Links to social activities, friends, groups, etc., are found from your My Helium, Inbox, and About Me pages via the new top navigation bar.
About Me pages reflect changes. All of the new products and changes are shown through your About Me page on Helium. Members of How-To, Topics, News and Zone communities will now have tabs presenting their content on Helium — along with your articles, as always. There is also a Social tab directing readers to your expanded profile that embraces your friends, followers, groups you are a member of, and interests you’ve uploaded.
As an aside – I’d like to ask each of you to take a few moments to make sure that you are presenting yourself in the most professional manner possible with your image, and bio. The publishers that come to Helium to source content for their publications want to know that you are serious about your writing efforts on Helium.
Making the site faster and other infrastructure upgrades: Lastly, this new release introduces some improved infrastructure for how Helium serves ads on the site that will dramatically improve the speed of the site. A faster site should lead towards more page views per visit – resulting in higher earnings for all of our members.
As with all new releases and changes at Helium, we welcome your feedback and hope to answer all of your questions. For a more detailed explanation of all of these new features, please review our Helium Help Guide and for questions regarding preexisting features please visit our community forum, and for all other questions regarding new products, features, and navigation visit our group help forums.
From all of us at Helium, we hope you enjoy the new features and continue to enjoy the site.
Mark Ranalli – CEO, Helium Inc