Hi Fiona it is great to see you here I hope this site is interesting for you I am not quite sure how people will use the site but it is a community site so all ideas are welcome.

At the moment I see it as a hub of sorts because there are loads of blogs, yahoo groups, flickr sites etc but not too many ways of bring them all under the one roof so that people can get a sense of what is going on in the community.I hope this might go a little way to solving the problem rather than adding one more site to see!

The forum is the place to watch and see - swaps and challenges have been proposed but it is early days yet and all ideas on how people might like to use the space are welcome.

The forum I imagine will be very active anyone can start a new discussion by clicking "Start a New Discussion"
To see discussions you have started or participated in you can go to the Forum tab on your network. Click the "My Discussions" link at the top of the page to see all posts you have made

Members of of the group have his or her own page, including a space for photos and blog if they want

Discussions, photos, and videos can all be categorised by tags. Tags are just keywords that can be applied. I think those who are already users of sites like flickr and/or have blogs will see how useful this is.

Ning finances the service with the adverts down the side. That said the network’s quota, before we have to buy a premium service, is 10GB of storage and 100GB of bandwidth per month. If the group is large and everyone load lots and lots of photos we will use that up really quickly. So I am asking people to load images to share with the group but not to use the site as a photo storage place. Basically I see that if everyone is considerate about this all should be OK.

That said Ning provides some really useful tools its up to us to decide how we might use them.

Anyway as you can see I have finally drafted out some sort of welcome note but even though its a cut and paste I do want you to feel welcome