Circle of Hope

we’re just about ready to “go live” with this new site. Thanks for checking it out. Some of our functionality has gotten worked out and we’re trying to get as much of the content as possible up in the next 2 days so we can launch.
Thanks a ton to Mark Schoneveld for all his work on this! Thanks also to Justin Kay, Chris Vasquez, Paul Schoneveld, and of course NICK and JUSTIN at Martnet.

Our hope is that the new site can be used exactly like the old one, for people taking information away. The paradigm shift is that if you want, there is much more. The direction that the web seems to be moving is to where users add info to the site to help people interact virtually and get cross-pollination of lots of different kinds of folks and ideas. Obviously, face-to-face relating is what we are about and multiplying cells is how we typically do that. This site is to maybe find some more partners out there (I know there’s at least a couple thousand out of the 5million in metro Phila), and help some of the people already connected to be able to have some way of interacting together on the web.
3 of the biggest new features right now are the Google Calendar, the Flickr Group, and this blog. Sorry that taking full advantage of these features requires that we at some level bend the knee to the internet corporate giants Google, Yahoo!, and some others…as well as having several email accounts. Some of you already have 5 or 6 email accounts and 2-3 myspace profiles so it’s no big deal, but there are some out there who aren’t at that level and I want to especially let people know who don’t have all those accounts and don’t know what RSS feeds are that we have you in mind, too, while we are building these sites.
If you have a gmail* account you go to http://calendar.google.com and search for “circle of hope” or “circle venture”. This new calendar feature can help you to find out what events are going on across the network. You can view the public calendar on your own google calendar or you can check out the “what’s new” section of our site.

Mark explained the Flickr group in a previous post. Click on any of the randomly selected images to the right, here, and you can view the whole group. You need a yahoo! account to post pics to the group.

This “Interact” page will have something new pretty often (every day, or a couple times a day) once it gets going. You can look for articles or thoughts from us, with the hope that you’ll want to comment and INTERACT. I hope you can find some meaningful ways to connect.

*if you don’t have a gmail account and you would like one, they are free. Go to http://gmail.com and follow steps for “sign up for gmail.”