Well, with a simple logout, close and reopen of the sidebar, you’ll find that Chatsum now comes with an all new and exciting sound effect engine. If you’re one of those people that hates sound effects, don’t worry, there’s a preference to turn them off in the ‘Places to Chatsum’ drawer.

We’ve deliberately kept the number of sounds minimal because we’d like you to tell us what you think it needs. The main purpose of the sounds (at the moment) is to alert you to incoming chat if you have Firefox in the background. You can also use the fantastic All-In-One Sidebar extension to collapse Chatsum without closing it so you can browse full screen and hear if there’s any chat going on.

We currently have sounds for changes to the number of people in the room and for when new chat arrives - let us know what you think needs sound and what you think it should sound like by commenting on this post.

If you look in the preferences section of the drawer, you’ll also see a ‘Default to Page Chat Mode’ checkbox. Turning this on will try to keep you in page chat, rather than site chat, as much as possible. Hopefully this will mean that comments will start to become much more page specific and will alleviate the problems we’ve had with people commenting on specific Digg, Flickr or BBC News articles in the main domain space. Turn it on and see if you like it!

Lastly, we’ve updated the Known Bugs and Current Road Map pages and made them permanently accessible from the menu on the right of this site. Take a look at the Road Map to see what we’re currently working on.

At last, spring has arrived in London and slowly Team Chatsum is beginning to emerge from its bleak February hibernation. We’re hoping to go live with a couple of minor improvements tomorrow whilst the work on member pages and OS X widget continues.

Until I post about the new features tomorrow, why not take a look at a really ugly photo of me over at Fred Bordage’s Blog that Web. The photo accompanies an interview about Web 2.0 we did back in January and is part of a series of Web 2.0 company profiles Fred is publishing. The Pandora, Chatsum and Eurekster interviews are already up with FeedBurner, LinkedIn, Rollyo, Carson Systems and Digg coming soon.

The same interview was also published in French by ZDNet.fr so if French is your preferred language you might want to check it out there instead.