What a curious site. iContact Community merges blogs, forums, and voting into a single site. There are two main kinds of users:

1) Publishers
2) Members

It appears being a member is free. The idea is that you can browse through the publisher's blog posts--which are pretty much advertisements. Publishers pay a fee to blog and send newsletters to a mailing list that they create through the site.

Publishers can:

• Create a list
• Add a contact
• Create a message
• Create a campaign
• Create a blog

The publishers are broken up into:

I've signed onto a service called Blogsvertise. The idea is that they email you goods and services to write about. You can use the content any way you please but you need to link back to the good or service that you have been assigned at least three times in your posting.

It looks like another way to monetize a blog--they indicate they pay anywhere from $2.00 a post to $25.00 a post. It will be interesting to see what kinds of assignments that they send and if they will mesh well with my current content.

I'll share my thoughts on Blogsvertise as I dig deeper into who and what they are and what I think of the community.

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I'm off in Kansas right now visiting with the Smith clan, Paula's Mother's side of the family.  I don't have access to the Internet on my laptop--DUN isn't working right--so I am blogging old school on Paula's Uncle's computer.  This has given me my first taste of Windows Vista.

1. It appears many of the new features in Vista have been pretty much embedded in OSX for quite some time.
2. Many of the old, annoying, warning messages still pop up--all be it in a more attractive way.
3. I do think that the interface is much more intutitive than XP.

I wish that I had more time to mess around with the software.  I tend to think it is a huge step forward for Windows users.

I was asked by a colleague if I would write a "How To" on Qumana.  I've been using Qumana now for several months to post to three different blogs--dogstar.org, imagespace.blogspot.com, and secondlife.techsoup.org.

What is Qumana?

1. Qumana is a free blog posting package that allows you to craft offline and post once you have completed editing your narrative.
2. Qumana is a tagging tool that allows you to easily control what tags are used.
3. Qumana allows you to insert ads if you want.

The software includes a very simple text editing menu bar that allows you to colour text, use bold, italics, underline, and crossout.  You can justify to the left, center, right or full block.  You can use bullets or numbered lists.  You can quote and indent.  It makes embedding pictures simple, will link for you and has spell check.

Tagging on blogs can have multiple benefits.  The first is, if your blog is searchable, the tags prove to be a way for readers to find like content.  For example, on this blog (built on Drupal), if you click on a single tag it will return all results that match that tag.

Try clicking on "npsl" and see the result.  In Drupal, a function called Taxonomy makes this magic happen.  We could, in fact add navigation to the site that would match a given tag essentially creating navigation to content that will for ever expand.

I am on my way to Rapid City, SD for the annual gathering of Western States Folklorists. Normally this meeting takes place somewhere in the in the West. This year the meeting is in the Midwest and Folklorists form the MidWest have been invited to participate.

WESTAF supports this gathering each year and sends a representative. This year, that person happens to be me. I will be doing a little presentation of The Ties That Bind web site that I've been working on. The site has a few cleanup items, but is for the most part complete. I'll also be doing a workshop on Monday on Web 2.0.

Apparently at some point in the last 24 hours, Blogger reviewed my site and made the decision that it wasn't a spam risk and unblocked my ability to post via an offline client.  The last posts that I pushed through using Qumana published seamlessly.  They had indicated that they would email me with a decision--no email, but who cares.  I don't suppose I need MORE mail in any of my email boxes.

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This isn't a flaw in Qumana.  It isn't a flaw with Blogger either.  When I post to my Drupal site, the process is seamless.  I type in the Qumana screen, edit, spell check, link, embed.  The process is slick and quick.  In many ways it is a better experience than typing into the blog itself.  This morning, when I connected via DUN, and posted my previous entry it was lightning fast even on the Treo 650.  In other words, I think that Qumana will ultimately make me more efficient.  I may well load it onto my iMac at home as well as the portable I carry for work.

Qumana is a online/offline blogging tool that allows you to post to multiple blogs in one fell swoop.  Given that I've been spending quite a bit of time since switching to Drupal crossposting to my old blogging site, http://imagespace.blogspot.com, I thought I would try this tool out.  Add to that, that it is common for me to write when I have no Internet access.  Rather than compose in Word and then cut and paste, this may end up being a better way for me to blog.

It includes a text editor, that looks an awful lot like TinyMCE.  It supports a ton of different blogging environments as well.

I popped into my Gmail account today to find that I had been invited to join a group called Apple-computer-bloggers.com.  Presumably I was invited because I do have a fair bit of content related to the Apple, Macs, and iPods.  Often this content is related to the Arts non-profit community, sometimes not.

Going to the site, it looks to be a news aggregator.  It solicits content creators to insert RSS feeds into their site and aggregates that content into a single digestable source.  If they can get enough Apple writers, it could become an interesting resource.  I'll quietly continue my writing, allow it to be aggregated, and once again see how it impacts traffic or not.