Worth Waiting For? 

Well, so much for posting every week to this blog! I hope you'll allow me to claim vicarious blogging as an excuse -- lots of my time lately has gone into getting our two new guest bloggers (and a few more who you don't know about yet) up and running. Cathy's and Pat's posts get more comments than mine ever do, so I figure it's a fair trade of my time to do everything I can to put two such wonderful ladies on the site, even if it means neglecting my own little corner here. To those of you who've been waiting so long for this post, you'll forgive me, right?

AnnTheGran in Toronto

I'm very excited to be helping to host Ann's visit to Toronto this coming week (she blogs about it here). Apparently, the barbeque I'm hosting for Ann, Loes, and their significant others is now being called an "event" in itself, so I guess I'd better cook up something extra special. I was hoping to even have the pool open, but with temperatures here hovering around 10 C (50 F), that doesn't look too likely, although I am heartened to know that the weather for barbeque day is forecast closer to 20 C (70 F).

Ties That Bind

For those of you who don't know, AnnTheGran.com (the site, not the lady) is brought to you by a very special group of people from literally all over the place. I'm in Toronto, Ann's in Orlando, Diane's in St. Louis, and that's just for starters -- the extended team that we rely on to bring you all this extends even to other continents. The reason I mention this is to show you that we practice what we preach. Though there is certainly no substitute for sitting across from another special person in the same room, as we did at Community Circle in Orlando, it never ceases to amaze me how closely we can approximate that feeling of cameraderie and those shared moments within the right online environment. Just as our own community of creative people interacts in meaningful ways even though we are separated by distance, so too does the wider community of creative people that meets here on Ann's site.

Straight From the Horse's Mouth...

In my last post, I talked about the use of tags to help us find what we are looking for, and I gave an example of how tags could also be used to find out information about products out there in the market. Of course, we know that for that information to have any value, to be quality information, it has to come from the people who actually use the products and it has to be unbiased. If you do any amount of online shopping, you'll know that there are many product rating features on sites (usually a five-star system) used to determine the quality of products. This is okay, and definitely helps you decide if you're looking at buying something, but we wanted more than that. We think that, when deciding whether or not to buy a product, you need more than a star system -- you want pictures, ideas, and problems from someone who is actually using the product.

Help Us Help You

That's what we want, too, but we need your help with that. If you use and feel strongly (positively or negatively) about any product that you use to create your beautiful things, we'd love it if you'd share that with us. We even have a dedicated place to do it -- a forum called Reviews, Testimonials & Critiques. (Kudos to one of our superhero users Judy for showing other users the way on using this forum). You can help us and your creative kindred spirits by clicking on the link to this forum and posting your thoughts on any product you use. If you don't find a discussion already taking place about the product on which you want to comment, start a new discussion by clicking 'Write a New Post'.

Tearful (?) Challenge

To that end, I issue a challenge. My goal is to receive at least 20 product reviews/testimonials/critiques before my next post on this blog. If I don't reach that goal, if I don't see at least 20 new entries, I will not write my next post. So, in other words, I will take that as a sign that you do not want me to post and I will likely want to crawl under my desk and sob uncontrollably [:'(]. Okay, maybe not, but I will be sobbing inside...

So if you want more Magic Bookshelf, get busy and post in Reviews, Testimonials & Critiques. If you don't want to hear from me again, just do nothing.

BB