Today, we’re officially launching multimedia suggestions!

As per certain requests (like Chad’s), we took the hint that plain-text suggestions don’t always efficiently convey suggestions. In many cases, one or more visuals to accompany a short description will get the point across faster and sometimes better. That’s why we’ve decided to let people attach multimedia to their suggestions.

The multimedia you can attach include documents, images, and videos. We don’t want to hold your various creative work hostage, and hosting multimedia isn’t our thing, so we decided to hook up with some services that specialize in hosting certain media. You’ll see that videos and images can be embedded from a number of popular sources (which we’ll name in just a bit), but what we’re super excited about is the fact that you can actually upload documents.

In looking for a solution to let people upload documents that can automatically attach to suggestions, we looked to Scribd, the very best document sharing service on the Internet. We popped off an email to Scribd’s co-founder, Trip Alder, and got a response from co-founder, Jared Friedman, in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. After a few more emails, the Scribd team went to town building a truly awesome mechanism for FeVote.

In the process of building something that worked for our platform, Scribd released a cool widget that website owners can implement to get in-line viewing of Scribd documents. The widget also does uploads, but it doesn’t offer a way to grab the location of where the document was uploaded to Scribd. Matt Jaynes, Scribd’s resident JavaScript and TBA API wizard, went above and beyond the call of duty to make Scribd work with FeVote. Matt wrote something called an ‘integrated upload form’, which is exactly what we’re using on FeVote. Thanks to Matt’s efforts, you can now upload a document on any ‘Submit Suggestion’ page, and have that document automatically attached to your suggestion.

Website owners, stay tuned. Soon we’re going to publish documentation on Scribd on how to implement Scribd’s integrated upload form just like FeVote does.

Just so you know, you can upload a slew of documents, including:

• Microsoft Office & Open Office
  doc, ppt, pps, xml; odt, odp, sxw, sxi, etc.
• PDF
  pdf, ps
• Text & HTML
  txt, rdf; html, htm

Since Scribd/FeVote’s upload mechanism doesn’t do images just yet (soon though), we thought it’d be a good idea to let you attach images hosted on Flickr to your suggestions. Flickr is the most popular, and the best lookin’, image host around. Even after images start working in the document upload form, we’ll probably keep the Flickr attachment functionality, mostly because it’s hard not to love Flickr. After all, Flickr “loves you” too. To attach an image to a suggestion, click on the ‘Documents?’ link and then click on ‘Attach a Flickr image instead?’. Then paste the URL of an image hosted on Flickr.

Not to exclude images in motion, we’ve got your videos covered as well. You can attach YouTube, Metacafe, or Vimeo videos by clicking on the ‘Video?’ link on any ‘Submit Suggestion’ page. Simply paste the URL of the video.

Let us know if you want to attach media from any other service (any kind), and we’ll let you know if we can. If you’ve got suggestions for how we do multimedia suggestions, sock it to us.

Some FeVoters have expressed the need to vote suggestions down. With this release, down-voting is here!

This is an early release, and only applies to full suggestion boards. Suggestion box widgets and other external applications do not yet have down-voting functionality.

Since this is hot off the pan, there’s a chance you might notice some hiccups. If you do, please let us know. Thanks!