Getting famous is all about who you know...

I’ve long been a proponent of Yahoo Groups for creating a sense of community in my classes and groups. They’re free, easy to use, and deliver the group’s messages to each other either as single or digest-form text-based email. You don’t have to go anywhere to read them but your email in box. Easy!

But that pundit on tech, Lena West says there actually is a new, better alternative.

Gather.com is an online area where people can share anything. And like Yahoo Groups, these are public groups you can create for free. Post feedback, articles, pictures, reviews, audio, etc.. - basically anything you like.

You are notified by email, but these are delivered in html so you can dig into how things actually look more easily. Lena calls it "a Yahoo Group on steroids." 

You also get paid for usage! In an extraordinarily fair deal that rewards frequent users, you can get ‘Gather Points’ for purchases from other Gather members, or even a percentage of advertising revenue from Gather administrators.

Gather is relatively new … so they might get bought out and something may change.
But in the meanwhile, they’re definitely worth a look-see. Perhaps they’re even a viable way to build some platform.

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