I received an email from a donor asking when the new site will be up. Here's my response:
Thank you for your support.
We are rolling out features as we get them finished. We have a lot of ideas of how to make it better than what YouTube and a blog offer.
Two of my sons are doing most of the development, volunteering an hour per weekday and more time on weekends. My primary concern is writing books, but I try to circle back weekly on the site progress, in addition to handling anything that no one else can do. Last I heard, the finishing touches are being made on the combined search (books + blog + videos), which will show you the matching text results (including transcripts of videos). But we are due for a check in. So any day now you should see a beta version of that, and if not, in another week or two.
I have to check with the team, but I think the next highest priority is getting the first version of the integrated video comments and forum up. That will probably take a few more weeks, as it's got a lot of integration details.
One of those details is a login functionality. While the intent is to continue to make all content free, we would like to facilitate communication between users, things like video watch lists, prevent abuse, etc. One idea we've tossed around was allowing people to watch videos, read the blogs, and download the books without logging in, but require a login to make comments. Once logged in, I was thinking of having an option for a user to anonymize a specific comment if they wanted to share something that might be helpful to someone, but incriminating to self or others. Those are just some ideas.
Given the tendency of people to say things they would not say to someone's face when masked by anonymity, as well as how this places an obstacle to real relationships, I would personally very much like to see people register with their own names and real photos as their avatar. We have not thought of a way to do this in a way that we find acceptable, so we're still thinking about that.