Friday Spark!

[Area Light Online]

Welcome to Area Light Home! This group is intended to be a home base for new and established members alike.

We invite new members to join this group upon arrival in order to get oriented to our community and services. We think it is a great idea to introduce yourself and initiate any kind of discussion that reflects your interests and hopes for what this community can offer you. Additionally, we encourage established members to occasionaly return Home to discuss the community itself and engage eachother.

We want Area Light to be your online social network of choice. We put special care into creating a welcoming and active environment for our members. One of the challenges, especially given so many different online communities, has to be the potential lack of activity and interaction. We understand your life, work, or business can make finding time to be part of our community a lot to ask. Regardless, Area Light Member Services is here to help and to create activities/ discussions you won't want to miss out on.

So we've decided to create this discussion within Area Light Home called, "Friday Spark". Here we will try to fit in a weekly recap of what's been going on in Area Light from our perspective. We invite you to join us in the conversation when you can. Once a week would be great. You can share a little about your week, comment on the news, or simply check in to let the community know you are there paying attention.

Our goal is to spark some activity in Area Light for the weekend/ week ahead. We also want to remind you that we are at your service and open to discussing your experiences in our community and beyond. It should be a great way to engage eachother, particularly for the benefit of new members and for those of you who are extremely busy.

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Friday Spark!

O.K. here we go. It's been a busy week for Area Light- though the activity onsite has been unusually slow after a great start. We think this reflects the fact that everyone is busy! Just in case there were some technical issues, we did send out a broadcast message to our established members to check in and give them an update on Area Light.

This week we were focussed on completing our Notes section which outlines the free services we intend to offer. We started some blogs to continue building on the personal, professional, and organizational services. We're still playing around with how we are going to present those. We went around and offered some suggestions for members to improve their pages and use the site features. We were able to accept a couple new members and greet them with a little service to let them know they are in a welcoming community. Please make sure to welcome Philip, Simply D, and Jared.

Anthony AKA Nascent Dynamics ( ) was busy as usual with his research & development for Area Light and a multitude of other projects. With school getting ready to start and a new job, he's reduced his participation in the Bank of America Small Business Online Community. He did, however, engage Paris on a personal discussion, "Coffee with Paris Tompkins" everyone is invited to. He has also started a new group in Sta.rtUp.Biz based on the interview idea called "Modern Business Exploration"- again, another constructive way to continue outreach and learning while minimizing maintenace and interaction obligation. He has also been actively promoting and inviting to Area Light and hopes others will do so as well.

Paris has in fact been very busy herself. We are happy she has done her part to support the community and invite others. She's also been kind enough to send us invitations to join other communities.

Doug still doesn't have a picture- which is kind of ironic given he's our honorary President! Please bother Doug so we can get him to start playing. Just kidding! He is currently on vacation and getting ready to start another busy school year.

Etienne continues to be very active in other communities. We recommend you check out his radio show if you haven't already- if even for associating a voice with the profile picture and writing. looks like he is having fun with the technology and doing his part to engage people with interviews pertaining to his interests too. If you check his page you will see he's been gearing up for a big Ramp Up and Roll Out Event. So we are not surprised he's been pretty busy too.

So there you go, just a little Area Light news to spark some interest, participation, and activity. Even better if you join in the conversation when you can. Why don't you share a little about your week and check in here at least once a week if you can. As a valued member of Area Light, we thank you for shedding some light on your world and sharing it with ours. We want you to know we are paying attention. So even if everyone is too busy, you can be sure we are going to do our part to help make this your online social network of choice.

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Happy Friday Area Light Members! Welcome to the Friday Spark discussion. We'll be posting some news about our week here. Feel free to join the discussion or even add your own news for the benefit of other members. As a courtesy to reduce e-mail clutter in our members' in boxes, we have decided not to send out a message to all members every time we do this.

We enjoyed our community this week. Thanks for being a part of it. To note:

We featured Paris's new blog "Greatest Achievement" on our main page. Great job Paris!

We are pleased to welcome Simply D. Her years of internet research make her an invaluable resource to our community. Check out her recent post on our forum "Facebook" for some great social networking advice.

Also welcome Jared. He has also recently launched his own website mindfrenzy.com and we encourage you to look into it. In particular, his concept encourages the creative process that people go through when they think of ideas. So why not post an idea to see what comes of it rather than forgetting about it.

We would like to pay a special welcome to Susan who has been discussing a great idea she had for a new group here in Area Light. Check out her discussion "Life Experiences" for some good tips on building your own group or to respond to her request for suggestions.

You might also look into Jonathan's group Montreal. Networking by location is a great idea we want to see in Area Light too. By the way, Etienne has a very informative group you should look into. Has anyone had a chance to catch his live radio interview yet?

Finally, this week we are continuing our featured interview/ discussion series with Sarah in the group "Coffee with the Oracle". Check it out, she came up with a random subject we'd like to see what others have to say about. It also gave us a good laugh- or at least something to laugh at Anthony about!

Return the favor! Invite others you know to join us in the light.ning fast social networking phenomena. Why not check in at least once a week to support the other members in this community. Have a great weekend and we hope to see you around.

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Hello, and welcome to this week's Friday Spark.

We had a relatively quiet week around Area Light. Contributions were at a minimal- which is not too surprising since we have not been aggressively promoting the site.

We did enjoy this week's discussion with Sarah in Coffee with the Oracle. We will probably approach a new member this weekend.

Susan decided not to create a group, but rather look into forums as an option for her Life Experience idea. We fully support her. This brings up an interesting matter. We were thinking about just going ahead and creating the group/ forum, but wanted to afford the member the courtesy to follow through with her own idea. This could be an instance where maybe we overthought things. We will be continuing our development of Area Light and highly encourage the members to make it their own too.

Along those lines we have featured one of our Notes- Notes Home which now should appear on every member's page regardless of where they are looking at on the site. This note is our introduction to Area Light services. Again, this is something we want to offer as a courtesy but not sell to people.

We are pleased to report we have introduced the new chat feature. As mentioned to most new members, joining our group Area Light Home is one way of being involved in the development of this community. We also may send broadcast messages to members of this group to announce new features or we have been considering the development of a periodic newsletter.

Finally, Jared was kind enough to post some new content on our forum LinkedIn.

Thanks to everyone who has decided to join this group. We feel it is a show of some support and gives us an opportunity, at least, to offer avenues for members to get involved. We are proud to have reached a full month of existence. The future looks bright!

Yours, Area Light Member Services.

[Area Light Online]

Happy Friday Area Light!

We are pleased to welcome two new members to the community as we kick off this week's Friday Spark. Please take a moment to greet and introduce yourselves to Maureen and Jimmy.

This week has been very slow in terms of Area Light activity. Anthony A.K.A. Nascent Dynamics ( ) has remained active but has been extremely busy with school and work. You might check out his new blog Area Light Social Networking Experience. It's our recommendation to adopt the same theme to use for your own blogs if you don't already have some ideas in mind. We will look into those as a form of feedback to improve our services and do what we can to help Area Light become your online social network of choice.

Anthony also has had some offsite conferences with Jared and Doug. They are both very busy too but seem to be doing fine. If you haven't had a chance yet, we recommend looking into Jared's website www.mindfrenzy.com Anthony touched base with Paris who seems to really be moving forward on her vision for a business now. How terrific. When you get a chance, be sure to offer your attention and moral support to what she is doing. She deserves it.

Anthony took his camera out to the local farmer's market but couldn't get to it this week because he was running late for class! We've invited some members to try to capture footage of local events/ seasonal festivals to share with the community. We'll try again next week. We also invited a couple members to our featured discussion group Coffee with the Oracle but got no responses for this week's interview/ expose. No problem. Anyways, we don't want to push the issue. We want to remind members that we avoid too much correspondence between invitations and even mass sharing these weekly updates as a servive- that is not being a nuissance!

Finally, we are very pleased to have our two newest members. Jimmy has chef experience and may be able to contribute to some of our food topics. He's also got some SEO experience and events he puts on free of charge we will be looking into. We think he has a philosophy that may be highly aligned with our own. Great!

Maureen has some free services too. She offers some free coaching with graphic design that some of our members might like to look into for their pages and groups. She also has her own Ning which is very exciting to us. One of the concepts we have been looking forward to employing is using Area Light as a network directory across social networks so this is something we hope to try with her.

O.K. fantastic! For what would seem to be a quiet week, there is still that spark to build on. Have a terrific weekend and please explore, interact, create, and most importantly...enjoy!

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Welcome to this week's edition of Friday Spark!

We have had a wonderful week thanks to the addition of a handful of great new members. Make sure you all get a chance to welcome Maureen, Lisa, Jimmy, Reginald, and Mari to the community. We've seen some of you out there commenting and making friends. Great!

Reginald decided to join us after a comprehensive public interview with Anthony featured on Star.tup.biz. We encourage those of you who are members of that community to check out that discussion on the group Modern Business Exploration. Reginald seems like a wonderful person to meet and we highly recommend you do so. Also, he has a sports themed group for Cricket we want to work with him to represent here on Area Light next to American Soccer.

The other new members joining us met Anthony either through chat or discussions. We have a feeling we are going to be able to do some great things with these members. Maureen has her own Ning and we are hoping we can make this the first Ning showcased here within our network directory/ hub concept. She is just getting started with her graphic design/ photoshop training services and we are discussing possibilities for offering those to the community.

Jimmy- Millionaire Minded is a person we are really interested in learning more about. We've noted he is the CEO of his own travel focused business and that is just a perfect fit with the geographic networking concept we want to employ in Area Light as well. We also found it a pleasure to chat with him. He seems to have a dynamic range of interests and we bet can contribute to a variety of topics here. Take a gander at his page, he's already started moving in. He was also the first member to join our group Community Sponsor Spot Light. So we are going to offer him one week of complimentary promotion spot light time to use when he is ready.

Lisa was specially requested to join by Anthony. Here is a great example of the entrepreurial spirit to create products that help people- especially those who may not be able to help themselves such as very young or old people. Her watch is an innovative invention more than simply multiple alarms. It's flashing lights (and vibrating?) combine to offer a reassuring reminder support system that is simply hard to ignore and can really make the difference in tackling some difficult living issues. Not surprising given her background in healthcare. We recommend taking a look at her new blogs on Area Light where she is introducing her work and sharing with us ways to be a part of her next phase of development.

Last but not least we are very pleased to welcome Mari. Anthony met Mari and learned she has an innovative social network focused heavily on relational marketing- actually an elite team of professional coaches who offer sessions and videos that can help you get the best out of your business and networking. We are so impressed by how aligned she is with our vision and the possibilities of what she can offer simply by associating as a member of our community, we can't wait to work together.

Paris shared some great news that her product is about to hit market. This is significant as it represents a benchmark culmination of almost two decades of work! Paris has been a supporter of Area Light from the beginning and she is always one of the first to thanks us for being a part of her vision come to light. This puts us in a great mood. We invite you to take a look, if you haven't at her featured discussion on our group, Coffee with the Oracle, if you have not already. Let's see if we can't keep the conversation going and achieve even more together.

Deborah was kind enough to start getting involved. She has some interesting comments on our forum, "First Impressions", and our grou

[Area Light Online]

Whoops! Looks like we ran out of space. This week's news is too good to cut short. So...

Also check out Deborah's comment on our group, The Next Big Ning.

Susan did an AMAZING job taking advantage of our customizable member pages. We decided to take her up on her idea for a forum. Check out Specialty Area Forum. We are going to encourage members to support the reference utility of the forum by taking general conversation about sharing experience over to Susan's thread "Life Experience" on our group Area Light Home. Also, another way to maintain the list structure of the forum would be to take specific questions and answers over to the respective resource member's page- maybe using comments.

Area Light is undergoing some enhancements too. We want to pay special thanks to tu-torial.com for letting us use their artwork for our site theme. Few people know squirrels are taking over the world (Doug knows!). we're going to have fun playing with this theme.

Another special thanks to Jared for commenting on topic in our group American Soccer. Perhaps most of you don't know, an entire social network for soccer was sacrificed in order to create Area Light. Nascent Dynamics ( ) has just updated his profile page to include a little BETA video commercial for the soccer line. Check it out!


So take into consideration what this community is intended to be to support personal visions. Anthony's key area here will be realizing his dream for playing soccer. To facilitate this we'll be putting work in to help build the group to help people represent their professional and organizational interests too. Keep your eyes on our groups, "We Didn't Get All Dressed Up For Nothing!" and "Online Business Communities". These will be areas where we really start to dive into the enterprise concepts of Area Light and anyone is welcome to explore being a part of that as they develop. Refer to our Notes section, Area Light Blog, and Member Services' Blogs.

Soon, we expect to begin expanding our outreach and campaigns to attract many more members. We are working on a plan to promote Area Light to our own geographic community in NorCal and invite others to do the same. Let us know and we'll share with you our template for a business card. We are also looking to create a prime time featured chat discussion. So lots of work to do!

There's no hurry nor obligation to any member. However, we're letting you know what we have in mind so you have the opportunity to finish moving in and positioning yourself for rapid growth and real business. We want this community to be for everybody and open to the broader theme of our vision- not just business. Supporting that vision by what you do here will help make Area Light an online social network of choice. So please enjoy yourself and enjoy networking, exploring, interacting, and creating! Though Area Light Member Services is still in BETA, we want you know that were are at your service to help.

Yours, Area Light Member Services


Return the favor!

Invite your friends to join Area Light to enjoy the same services and to help us develop a reputation as the leader in the light.ning fast social networking phenomena.

[Area Light Online]

As we turn to this week's Friday Spark!, we're wondering if we put in enough correspondence or placement to let people know about the occasssion. This is live and in public- let's keep it interesting and entertaining! This week has had it's share of excitement. We'll start the update process off and then let others add in about how their weeks went. If you want to start it off earlier, be our guest!

We found out just after last week's update that Maureen had changed the theme of her page quite nicely too. Great Job Maureen! We have yet to set up a connection to her Ning. However, we have an announcement to make about that.

We are creating a special group for exploration called Area Light Explorer. We are going to go out and check out what's going on online. Area Light Member Services will transform into Area Light Explorer when venturing offsite. When returning, will report on explorations and outpost status. You are all invited to visit our group when noting places you have been or are planning on going. We just might go with you!

We were wondering if anyone had a chance to check out Lisa's blogs or Carol's Event. Jared had an event and video to which Nascent Dynamics ( ) blogged about all excitedly. He was totally stoked.

Anthony also blogged somewhat about his ideas for improving Area Light Member Services and turning this entire social network into an enterprise everyone can look into if they are interested in being a part of it.

We are pleased to welcome Steven and Jodie. We haven't had a chance to really get to know them. So we are going to be rolling out more of a social engagement platform with Area Light Member Services. We are going to do some revamping and you should see the new ideas taking shape as we release them.

If you didn't get a chance to check out Susan in action, you might follow a back and forth conversation that occured between her and Nascent Dynamics ( ) referring to her specialties. Specialty Area Forum stands a chance of being a premier interactive feature for joining this community. We invite you all to take a look into it.

So a relatively calm week compared to last week. However, we are zeroing in on some exciting endeavors and have been enjoying every minute of it. Take a look around for yourself. Join us for Friday Spark! every week and let us know how your week went and share any interesting news. We are particular gload to here news of your interactions and experiences here on Area Light.

Yours, Area Light Member Services.

[Area Light Online]

Time for this week's Friday Spark! Happy Friday everybody and we hope you have a great weekend.

Area Light has been rather quiet this week. Anthony checked in on the thread "Hi there!" here on Area Light Home and mentioned how this can be good for a developing social network sometimes. We put our energies into taking Area Light to the next level. So let's offer some news about our work this week. Feel free to join the discussion here every Friday and let us know how your week went.

You might notice Area Light is going through a bit of an overhaul. Ning rolled out a long anticipated update this week which changes some of the look, functionality, and tools we have available. We've been playing around with it a bit. Most recently, we changed the Notes tab to a sub-tab of the Main page.

We have decided to go back to the drawing board regarding Area Light Member Services. You are likely to see a lot more focussed activity to help make this an online social networking community of choice for everyone. At the same time, you will find us courteous enough not to sell nor mass message untastefully. This is a service to our members.

As the services evolve, we're going to be blogging about our major areas of market focus from personal, professional, and organizational/ business. We've got our work cut out for us and we're just getting started. Check out the Area Light Member Service's page for quick access to the blogs. We have gone back and decided to make sure the tone of our blogging is alive and personable. We feel you deserve to be in the loop. We offer what we have time and words for. If you have a specific interest or question to discuss, you can do that on Area Light Home for the benefit of involving anyone else interested or message us directly.

We also have a couple new blogs we will be maintaining from the Services perspective. Just like the CEO started a blog called Area Light End-User Experience, Member Services will also blog about it's own experiences. If you want to, we recommend you all create such a blog to journal your experiences for the benefit of anyone interested. You will probably find that we are interested and ready to do our part to ensure you have the best possible experience. Keep in mind, we are limitted in how much support we can offer for free. Another blog we'll be building is a tool that works with our new group Area Light Explorer.

The CEO has been weighing his options and ideas for a better way of exploring all the people, businesses, sites, and networks out there. With Area Light Explorer, we will take the lead in outreach, but want to encourage everyone to contribute as they enter or leave Area Light. Do your own explorations. We'll be coming up with a directory tool to help organize everything we have for the best accessibility to our members.

One of the things we're going to do with this is join and set up on other sites as a decent guest. This outpost can serve as a bridge in or out of Area Light. We will reference our discoveries in the group and elaborate on our findings/ update regarding interesting activity on our blog. Ideally, we'll meet some great people who want to be a part of our community. Even better if some are the network creators or owners of sites we visit. We are developing our services to support these individuals to represent their communities here while attracting the visitors that will make both the creator and guest most satisfied with what they find. It's all a work in progress. Keep your eyes open as we begin to execute some next level strategies.

Finally, our most recent guests have been rather quiet with the exception of Pierre. Congrats to Pierre for engaging the community. Here is someone with something special to offer- particularly if you are into art or art auctioning. He is also quite experienced and knowledgable about the dynamics of growing a network and trying out some of the same ideas we intend to employ. Should be great to bounce ideas off him as we look for ways to help him feature his community. For now, take a gander at his page and let him know you stopped by. He has also recently posted on Area Light Home. This is significant to us.

Some of the advanced dynamics we will be aiming for here include a culture of community where other members offer the same or similar services we do in order to welcome and support every guest. If you appreciate what we do, one way to thank us is by paying the courtesy forward to other members. Another way to show your appreciation is to proactively engage the community. We encourage you to do this on your own accord. We'll try not to get in your way or step on your coat tails. At the same time, we will position ourselves to follow your lead at our discretion. This supports the broader theme of a shared vision and a site utility that is mutually beneficial across the board to you as it is to us.

Getting the idea out there we are in this together, we are going to be taking the lead in our own way and are happy when others pick up on it and engage as recommended. So congratulations again for Pierre for doing this "with" us. In order for some of our ideas to work as intended, we will truly need to inspire others to act intelligently together. It's going to be a challenge and fun we think.

This week, our primary focus has been on preparing to outreach to our local geographic community. The research and development has gone well. Fairly soon, we'll have the confidence to go out there and connect with people through "real" networking. So there you go. A week in the life of Area Light. If we're getting any good at this, then maybe you'll get a little fired up to get involved this weekend- or take off with some of the concepts we've laid out. We'll be around to respond and help as needed.

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Happy Friday Spark!

Another relatively quiet week. Thanks again to Pierre for continuing to engage with some interesting discussions. In particular, we enjoy his sense regarding the social networking phenomena. We look forward to working with him for a mutual satisfaction.

Otherwise, not much activity. Thank you to Lisa and Paris for stopping by briefly. We also want to send out a quick Hi to Sarah for revisiting. We are continuing our segments to feature discussions with members and though we'd restart by keeping previous discussions active. The idea here is you can go to our group, "Coffee with the Oracle" and pick up on conversations with any member who is participating. We tried doing invitations but realized we were dedicating too much time to hear back from members who were not internested or did not have the time. Now that we've rekindled some dialogue, we'll be going through the rest of the members to initiate a discussion and hopefully catch up to the new members as they join.

A quick note regarding our group, "The Next Big Ning"; we contacted Diego, the blog writer who we are RSS feeding to the group and where we got our graphical representation of Ning networks from. We're hoping he will join and contribute, especially in that area.

We actually did some outreach in our local community this week. We've contacted three or so local businesses and have begun discussions on what Area Light might be able to offer them. We're hoping they will join too! We have but finished our initial marketing materials and are planning to begin a gradually building campaign next week. So you might notice we've put on an Area Light Intro video on the main page that speaks directly to local Chico business owners. Keep in mind these same services are essentially being offered to anyone in the community. Contact us if you are interested.

We'll be putting more work into our blogs and groups starting this weekend. We'll also be doing some internal outreach explorations within the community and externally across other networks. Let's see if we can't infuse some action around here for this next week! Besides Area Light Explorer, we have just about finished initial set up of an Area Light Wiki. So once we really start our explorations, then we'll be organizing the resources we find into directories and other usefull references as a service to our members. We liked Pierre's comment that we should make Ning great for managing content. We agree it is worth playing with for many reasons. Anthony is doing some minor experiments with Notes and new pages you should see come into play. Pierre's other point regarding control of site structure is equally interesting. So check out what we do to address these issues and the discussions about our work that might offer you some great insights into our concepts.

So here we go with an Area Light Member Services outreach. We'll be posting comments on walls for the most part. As we do this, we may do some activities on Area Light Explorer and "think out loud" about our discoveries on our blog Area Light Explorer. This is an exercise in joining the utility of blogs with groups. Should be interesting. Also, we'll be looking into our RSS feed on that group that links to the Ning Creator's Blog. There are always new Ning sites and we'll be orienting some of our explorations in that direction. Everyone will be welcome to join us in this. We'll also be blogging about our Area Light End-User Experience- so please be nice!

Last but not least, Anthony has an idea to put together some more entertaining groups/ discussions. So Keep your eyes open for our new Holonics group and his discussion Centerplay on American Soccer. We're hoping these turn out to be as good as radio before T.V. if not better!

O.K. everyone. Have a great weekend and enjoy networking!

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Happy Friday!

I'm going to make this Friday Spark short and sweet.

We did a mass member message inviting members to work with us to take this community to the next level. We also created starter discussions for each member in Coffee with the Oracle. Sarah was kind enough to raise an interesting issue about thrift shopping. Pierre was kind enough to continue discussion on Ning networking.

This week, we began reaching out to and promoting Area Light to our local community business owners and students in Chico, CA. We engaged several in detail. We'll see if any decide to join. We also did an online promotion on Sta.rtUp.Biz's new market classifieds system- which supposedly should be pushed heavily throughout the internet.

We have started moving forward with the Area Light Explorer group. We are now setting up as Area Light Explorer on some different networks. Explore with us!

Anthony managed to canvass a lot of the groups here with new content. He has also started a unique organizational level discussion on Holonic Organization group. He's also engaged the professional networking projects and services for Area Light on the group, We Didn't Get All Dressed Up for Nothing. You might also note the introduction of the Area Light Collective, a wiki based project for the benefit of indexing and managing content references/ directories etc. Find that as a subtab below the MAIN tab.

So...how was your week?

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Happy Friday Spark!

Member activity was rather low again this week. However, we really appreciate the quality contributions of those members who did check in. This week, we followed up on our mass notice and starter discussions for every member in our group, Coffee with the Oracle. We took the time to "share" the personal discussion with each respective member. Not a lot of response, but we feel it is important to show a sincere proactive interest in each valued member and to engage them in an ongoing featured discussion. Special thanks to Pierre, Jen, Lisa, Carole, and Simply D for checking in.

We also kicked off our group Area Light Explorer with a new approach. We unfortunately removed our thread on Jodie's network, United In Spirit- but we do plan to continue exploring that fascinating network in detail. We did manage to hit on Mari's online talk show, "That's My Word" and post a reference on the Area Light Collective wiki. Thanks to Mari for responding back with some insight.

Once again, Pierre is advocating the full utilization of the Ning platform and we really support most of his suggestions. Today, he posted a suggestion for everyone to start a Ning social network. Great idea Pierre. If you haven't looked into our MAIN page vision statement, we have positioned ourselves to really support and promote Ning for it's ease of use, free availability to anyone, and for the dynamic possibilities it represents.

Hopefully, the more you look into what we are doing, the more you will find that Area Light is really doing some special things that set us apart. On top of that, we include a highly service oriented approach to ensuring your online experience is the best it can be, to support you in your ambitions, and to build our social community to support representing your interests- just like we are doing in support of Nascent Dynamics ( ). This is all part of the Modern Business for the Modern Environment methodology playing out and developing transparently right before your eyes. Be sure to check out our activity in various specialized project groups and our blogs for more information.

As usual, we are going to avoid a mass message/ newsletter announcement as a courtesy to our members. However, we truly hope you enjoy these weekly updates- especially for those of you who do not have a lot of time to follow everything that is going on.Our intention is to help kick off the weekend in a positive light and spark some social networking activity between members on Area Light. Join the light.ning fast social networking phenomena. Return the favor, invite your friends to experience all we have to offer and do your part to make Area Light an online social network of choice for everyone.

By the way, you are welcome to add to this thread with a post about how your week went. You can subscribe to this thread by selecting the "Follow this discussion" option at the bottom. Enjoy networking!

Yours, Area Light Member Services

[Area Light Online]

Welcome to this week's edition of Friday Spark!

Happy Halloween by the way! This week we started making some progress with our new group Area Light Explorer. This is sort of an online magazing that explores anything and everything. Complimenting the journey, we've set up a wiki to help organize the information and resources we cover called the Area Light Collective. You can find it as a sub-tab under MAIN. It's a work in progress. If you are interesting in helping with the project, you can learn more by visiting our group, Holonic Organization. We also intend to journal by way of blog the things we find from the perspective of Area Light Member Services. So look for that in the near future. We continue to work on some of our blogs and group discussions. Take a look into some of them. You might find these are intended as services to help you get the most of your online experience. As usual, we avoid mass messaging and overt soliciatation, even when we feel it is in your interest to check something out. We might broadcast a message on occasion, however we feel it is more of a service not to crowd your inbox!

Now this week was enjoyable. Not a lot of activity, but the contributions were high quality. We were fortunate to get a visit again from Etienne. He presented some interesting resources for internet security and also posted a video about the future of technology we consider a must see.

Also thanks to Jared for creating his group Mind Frenzy. We highly recommend checking out his website www.mindfrenzy.com He's really got a nice concept going and participating in it can really be enjoyable and stimulating. He has RSS feeded his blog to the group and started rolling out with the discussions. We highly recommend looking into it.

Area Light made some progress in our outreach activities to our local community starting with the organizational or "business" level. Check out our trial group Euro Cafe in Chico for a look at the project. we're hoping to get this small business owner to join the Area Light community and help us promote Area Light to our town. Networking by geographic location is one of the primary concepts we want to employ on this social network. So keep your eyes open for activity in our town and in your locations too. Part of what we hope sets Area Light apart is our interest in genuine networking to include "in-person". We also have ideas for how this can support professionals and businesses alike. We expect to be able to help create opportunities for our members just as we are creating for ourselves. So it's nice to be breaking some ground on that aspect.

Thanks for keeping up to date with us on this weekly update. You can essentially subscribe to these updates by selecting Follow at the bottom of the page. Or you are welcome to jump in and share how your week went both in and outside of Area Light.

Yours, Area Light Member Services