Come out, come out wherever you are...

I'm not asking you to come out of the closet :lol: I'm asking you to come and play on the site --especially if you are one of the thousands of people reading us through our feeds.

In the past few weeks I have been working on the technology and design of culturekitchen. Check out our growing list of features. I actually have a longer post to make about what I am rolling out this weekend; but right now I need your help with two things :

1. Mapping our membership : Check out the GoogleMap we have for our membership. I am the only one there at the moment. Click on the marker and you'll see what happens.

   The map is created when you add either your address of your Latitude and Longitude coordinates . I chose to use an approximation of my address since through The Daily Gotham most of my readers know I live in Manhattan's Stuyvesant-Town. If you so choose to participate without giving away your exact location, just give the coordinates for your city, state or country using this GoogleMaps Latitude and Longitude locator.

2. Using the Forums : Did you know we have forums on our site? Yeah, I know, I haven't told people about it. In the old system we had a problem where they would "disappear". Now that problem has been fixed and the forums are ready to for us to use.

   Please take a good look at all the sections. Do you think we need to add a new one? The forums are there for several purposes :

   • Short posts, introductions and chitchat
   • Announcements and PR
   • Networking projects
   • Site issues

   I understand the anxiety of writing a blog or posting an article. Make the forums what you want of them. They are there for people to use as a semi-private space for participation.

3. Testing the new chatroom feature : At 11pm EST I am going to test one of our newest features. The topic : The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. So we will be commenting the show as it happens.

   You need to be a full-fledge member of our site in order to participate in the chatroom. Check in your account/home page if you have been upgraded to member. If you have not, just leave me a message here.

   I honestly do not know how well the site will withstand a chatroom; but what I like about this feature is that chatrooms can only be opened by the people I grant the permission to do so. Chatrooms are also archivable --and given they are happening on a public space, we can use the chatrooms for anything from commenting in real-time events like conferences, TV shows, the Oscars, election day, you name it.

   So, just to be clear, people who are prepared to go on record on a certain subject should participate in the chatrooms.

And that's that for now.

Questions? Comments? Just hollback!