The TIG revamp has been an ongoing project for our tech team for over a year – and this week we launched three exciting new features on the site! They are: a new improved My TIG, tags, and the TIG widget.

My TIG:
Clicking on My TIG now takes you to your Bulletin Board, where you can see what your TIG friends are doing on the site (Groups/Projects they are involved in, content they submit to the site etc), and they will similarly receive alerts about what you are involved in on the site on their Bulletin Board.
On the top right of My TIG is the 'I want to:' drop-down menu, which contains quick links to submitting content like: Panorama articles, Global Gallery submissions, TIGblog posts, resources, and e-cards.
On the left is a menu with the titles: My TIG, TIG Messenger, My Account and My Content.

Under 'My TIG' on the menu:
Link to your Bulletin Board.
Resources for You - contains suggestions of resources, or content on the site that you may be interested in based on your location and the interests you included in your profile, (ex. Human Rights, Corporate Social Responsibility, Climate Change, etc).
Link to your Public Profile – shows your profile as it appears to other TIG members.
Friends – a place where you can manage your friends. It shows who you are currently friends with, as well as those who have added you as a friend whom you haven't added as a friend back yet. You have the option to remove people from your friends list and remove yourself from other people's friend's lists easily.

TIG Messenger:
The new improved TIG Messenger lets you organize and keep track of TIG Messages much more easily than before. It works much more like an e-mail program, since you can mark message as read/unread, and star them for follow-up.
Inbox – You can Report inappropriate messages as before: 'Report this Message', and block people from sending you TIG Messages using 'Block this member'.
Compose – works much the same as it did before, except that you can now give your TIG messages a subject, similar to e-mails.
Send List – this lets you keep track of all the TIG messages you've sent.
Block List – lets you keep track of the members whom you've blocked from sending you TIG Messages, and allows you to un-block them.

My Account:
This section is the equivalent to 'Edit Profile' in the old My TIG – it lets you edit the information about yourself, upload your photo, link other profiles you have around the web to your TIG profile, etc.

My Content:
Submitted – this contains the content you've submitted or created (articles, images, TIGblog posts, resources, discussion threads, etc), organized by the different sections of our site: Make Connections, Take Action, Resources, Express Yourself.
Bookmarks – is a new tool that is part of our TIG widget, which you will now find on every page of the site. The TIG widget will allow you to bookmark content on the site, and the Bookmarks section will organize it for you by site sections, making it easy for you to go back and find later.
Comments I've Made– this section shows you all the comments you have left on content like TIGblogs, Panorama articles and Global Gallery submissions.
Comments to Me [Coming Soon!] – this section shows you all the comments left on your TIGblogs, Panorama articles, and Global Gallery submissions. Will be launched soon!
Involvement [Coming Soon!] – this section contains all of your memberships to things like Projects, Groups, Group TIGblogs, Events you are attending, Commitments, Petitions, Organization, etc.

Tags:
http://www.takingitglobal.org/tags/
Tags are labels for online content that make it easier to search for, and organize. They are generally simple words or phrases that help to describe any content – ranging from a blog post to a project. You will now be able to tag all the content on TIG – and you can visit the tags page (see link above) to search the site by a tag, and to see what the most popular tags are for each site section by checking out the tag clouds under each section title. Tag clouds show the most popular tags as larger than others. For a more detailed explanation of tags see the 'HELP' button beside each 'Add a tag:' text box now located on each page of the TIG site. Don't forget to start tagging content already on the site, as well as adding tags to any new content you create! Tags will help make the TakingITGlobal community much easier to navigate, as TIG members and visitors to the site will be able to search the site easily by the tags you create!

TIG widget:

The TIG widget allows you to rate, bookmark, send to a friend, and report content all over the TIG site! 'Rate this' lets you rate content up or down by clicking on the arrows depending on how interesting, informative, or inspiring the content was to you. You can rate up content that you liked, or think others would like, and rate down content that you think is less useful or interesting. Clicking on 'Bookmark' means that you will easily be able to go back to content you have bookmarked at anytime through the Bookmarks section in My TIG. 'Send to friend' lets you share TIG content with others. 'Report This' allows you to report any content that you may have found offensive, inappropriate or questionable to TIG staff.
'Rate This', 'Bookmark', and 'Send to Friend' all affect the 'score' of any piece of content on TIG. The more times content is rated up, bookmarked, or sent to a friend the higher the 'score' or quality and soon you will be able to browse the site by score or quality of content.

Check out all of these new Features and leave us some comments! If you find anything that is broken on our new features e-mail broken@takingitglobal.org.

Enjoy!