If you haven’t already seen it, I have begun re-styling the main section of my website in a new direction. I am trying to implement various ideas about personal branding and positioning myself within a certain information space, etc. One of the models I am applying, basically, is turning myself into a kind of personal company, or some kind of conglomeration of corporate presences or something. (Personal service corporation is not entirely irrelevant, but not accurate yet either) Still working out the language around it, but rest assured it’s hella futuristic!

One of the things I am working on is a new way for people within my “shared value community” to interact with me, as well as with one another. Within the “support” section (modeled after a web hosting company or something), I wanted to install some kind of system where people could email me questions of a non-private nature, which I could answer right on the website. People often ask me questions over email whose answers could already be found on my site, or which deserve to be publicly available. People are also beginning to engage me in more detailed conversations about specific sub-projects which would be best used as public conversations, instead of closed email conversations. So really, it’s partly to save my time, but also to make my communications with the public more efficient and organized.

I thought maybe a trouble ticket system or a bug tracking system might be useful here: something that operates around a simplified forum structure could work. A friend recommended Beast. Does anybody have other ideas or recommendations for bridging technologically the issues I’m describing above? Thanks for your help.

PS. I would also like to potentially create this in such a way that it could be used as a seedbed for human agent search requests. You or I could post an open question, along with TOS for its fulfillment and a bounty/value, if any. And whoever originated the thread would have ownership over when it was closed/solved. Any interest in that out in radio listener-land? This would probably modify the structure of my main blog somewhat, but I’d have to run the systems parallel to each other to see just how.