Community - Blogabond

First off, I want to quickly thank all you lot for helping Blogabond take off so quickly. Our user base doubled over the holidays, and then Doubled AGAIN in February! Somebody must have been spreading the word. You guys rock!

I've been quietly putting new features live for the last few months, and leaving them out there for you all to discover. So you may have noticed that your blog entries are autosaving themselves behind the scenes, that you can hide your draft entries until you're ready for the world to see them, and that you can add new places to the world map.

But this week, I finally got around to putting up a few major features that have been in the hopper for a long time. Blogabond was always intended to be a place for Independent Travelers to hang out and share stories, but until recently it's been sorta tough to get a conversation going with anybody on the site. Sure, you could leave comments on one of their posts, but unless they happened to check it they might never see it. And if they replied to you, how would you know?

So now, everybody gets a little Mail link next to their name. You can send private messages to anybody on the site. If you've got an account, you can check out your Inbox under the My Stuff tab, and if you've given us your Email address we'll even forward along any direct communication that you receive. So if you read my entry about Monkey Bay, Malawi and want to know if it's worth going, you can shoot me off a private message and ask me about it.

We've also got Buddies now. You've seen this idea before, so I don't need to go into detail, but yeah, you can now start collecting friends on the site and keeping tabs on what they're up to. Less digging around trying to find stuff. Thus, more better.

There's another feature teetering at the brink of being pushed live that will let you compliment users on their cool blog entries and photos. Once we get a bunch of votes for stuff, I'll probably scrap the idea of "Featured Whatever" and just let you guys decide what belongs on the Home page by voting on it. So if you want to displace The Hulk from his seat of glory, you can organize all your friends to come onto the site and vote on all your stuff. (Or I guess you could also just let the system work itself out so that things floated to the top on their own merit. But that might not be as much fun.)

Anyway, thanks again for helping to make Blogabond a reality. Keep up the suggestions!

Jason