First let me say I was very honored to be chosen as a Beta tester. This is the only site I ever go to for news, information, knowledge discovery and friendship.

I first felt that as a technical nin-com-poop I could not add much other than to do bug reports, which of course is very important. I did that and it has opend up a new can or worms for me.

I was first using IE8 when testing but when I sent in a bug report, the diagonostic test at Newsvine says I was using IE7. So I updated to IE9. The problem then was that things that once were there in the activity drop list were now gone after I updated. The activity setting and drop list has been my only big problem and it has gotten worse after I again did a bug report on the loss of earlier components in the activity section. Again the diagnostics at Newsvine was showing I was still using IE7.

It was suggested that I switch to chrome or firefox and I was going to do that till I saw comments that some folks with either two had problems also. Now It could be different problems than mine but I am reticent to add to my problems already by downloading and playing with a new system just to do Beta testing.

The other issue I want to address is Newsvine Beta Nation. To me this nation has become a place to dump seeds into and I understand this because of how the nation was described as a place to put anything there. I was using Newsvine Beta as a Nation to talk about Beta development and the changes that will happen with Nations and how we all can help create a better and more interesting place with many strong communites instead of just the few that worked well in classic. I feel that using Newsvine Beta Nation has been a waste of my time and effort and will leave it this afternoon.

My main interest and concern is to make the Nation aspect better because this will be the foundation we build the whole new vine onto. I will continue to think and write about this issue and leave the tehchnical testing and bug reporting to those who have the knowledge and time.

I also will be looking at all the current groups to see which may survive, I can't really tell that now because there are so few of us in Beta testing that there are only so many nations here right now but that will change later on. I am going to look at current groups and look at viability of survival. So size, number of active members, what is the groups purpose, what kind of conversations go on there and anything else I can think of that will help pick good and vialble nations after the change. When the cahnge comes from groups to natins then I can better assess the next nations I want to be a member of.

Well I hope my musings get you thinking agian about natitions, nation building and nation picking