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Collier Undersheriff Kevin Rambosk wants residents to know what’s happening in the community and at the Collier County Sheriff’s Office.

Likewise, Rambosk wants to know what’s happening in residents’ neighborhoods and wants to know residents’ thoughts about how the Sheriff’s Office can make their neighborhoods safer.

It’s this two-way communication, Rambosk said, that allows the Sheriff’s Office to more effectively build its response to crime trends.

In an attempt to foster more interaction with residents, the Sheriff’s Office has introduced an upgraded version of its Web site -- www.colliersheriff.org -- that offers a variety of new features, including a 24/7 traffic log, an updated arrest log with mug shots, videos and an interactive blog.

The new site officially launched Thursday, but was available sporadically starting Tuesday night.

“Our main objective was to make a useful information site that people would visit on a daily basis,” Rambosk said.

The 24/7 traffic log will show the locations of every traffic crash or obstruction that the Sheriff’s Office is working on, Rambosk said. Every five minutes, it automatically pulls information from an existing database, utilizing information that is entered in by dispatchers.

Rambosk envisions people using the site to plan their trips to and from work.

“That’s useful, daily information,” Rambosk said.

The interactive blog, which features posts by Sheriff’s Office employees, allows readers to post comments. The comments are monitored -- offensive, malicious and racist comments will be removed, officials said.

“What we’re trying to get out of this is more ideas and recommendations from the public about how we can serve them better,” Rambosk said. “It’s not a platform for social controversy. It’s to help us serve the community better.”

The new Web site has been under development for about nine months, Public Affairs Supervisor Brigid O’Malley said.

Six members of O’Malley’s public affairs office worked with a California-based Web developer to create the site and add content.

“I knew when I came here what I was going to do,” said O’Malley, who started at the Sheriff’s Office in February 2006. “I think we all had the same vision of what we wanted. It was just getting it there.”

Rambosk said there is no deliberate intent to thwart or replace local news media, though some bloggers on the Daily News Web site already have commented that they plan to rely more and more on the Sheriff’s Office’s Web site for crime information.

It has always been the Sheriff’s Office’s role to communicate with the public, Rambosk said.

“We’ve always had this information,” Rambosk said. “We just didn’t have the ability to get it out in a more professional manner. (Technology) is enabling us to do more than we used to do.”

The new Web site is just the beginning, Rambosk said.

In the future, Sheriff’s Office officials indicated they are considering a daily Web broadcast and the possibility of sending updates to people’s pocket computers and cellular telephones.

“This personal technology that’s coming will allow us to get to everybody ... if they want it,” Rambosk said. “We are the primary source of that information.”