If you like Multiply, here's your chance to say so - Multiply has been nominated as "Best Blogging Host" in the Bloggers Choice Awards for 2008. Just click on this badge to go to their site and cast your vote.

(You'll need to register as a user there - takes about a minute, and don't worry, the only info that is viewable by others is your username and location. Once you've done that, go to Best Blogging Host and cast your vote.)

I know it's a matter of taste, and one of the things I like about Multiply is the amount of choice we have so we can tailor it to our personal preferences. Personally, I've had an on-off relationship with email alerts - started with, at some stage turned them off, and then later on turned them back on again.

Why? Well, at first I just left them on because that was the default option and it takes a while to get a feel of all this and see what you want to change. Then there came a point when I felt I was getting far too many emails, and do I really want an email telling me that my friend Joe Bloggs has entered an event on his calendar which is... wait for it... Passover is coming... no, I thought, this is too much.

But later on I found myself returning to email alerts as a way of retaining my sanity - being a member of several groups, my Multiply Inbox was full of stuff and the summary it provides is not always enough to tell me if this is really something I want to read, so I was having to click on each item just to find that I wasn't interested in it. The beauty of email alerts is they give you the full post, not just a summary, so you can easily glance through these posts in your mailbox and very quickly and easily delete what you're not interested in. (Another plus: deleting the email doesn't affect what goes on in your Multiply Inbox, so you can still go back to this post if you change your mind.)

And of course you can set up a filter in your mailbox so that anything that comes from Multiply goes to a separate folder, so it doesn't have to clutter the rest of your emails.

The one niggle I've found is in the following scenario:

Joe Bloggs posts something, let's just for example say that he says: It's raining today.

I get an email saying that Joe Bloggs has posted a new blog, which reads: It's raining today.

I choose to respond, saying: Oh really, no rain where I live, the sun's been out all day.

(Bear with me, I live in England, discussions about the weather are normal here...)

However, in the meantime Joe Bloggs has edited his post to say: They said it was going to rain today but it hasn't happened yet. (Okay, this example isn't very logical, but hopefully you'll still get my drift.)

The email alert doesn't get updated. So I will only find out about this after posting my now-irrelevant reply.

So that's just something to bear in mind - if someone edits a post, the email alert doesn't tell you about that.

(And by the way, it is raining here today. The air smells lovely - like it's been washed. The garden is looking very happy. And I'm pleased because once again I'm relieved of the responsibility to wash the car...)

At last, after a great deal of badgering from various people including me, Multiply have separated out the Online Buddy contact category, so that we can use it safely. See here for more info about how this works (and ignore the "coming soon" - it's already here).

I'm so pleased they've done this. In the past there were people who invited me to sign up as their contacts and I had to turn them down because of privacy issues. Now I've been able to go into my profile and account settings and make sure that my email address is not visible to online buddies, and for each of my posts I can choose if I want it to be available to all contacts or to contacts excluding online buddies - the only faff was going through old posts and editing them where necessary. These new settings mean I'm free to sign up as an online buddy someone that I'm getting to know online, not just people that I already do know.

I feel it's a bit like when there was this nice lady I used to bump into on the bus, and we'd sit and chat, happily getting to know each other, in a safe context - we didn't exchange phone numbers, we didn't invite each other home for a cup of tea, though of course with time we might have felt like moving it on. I feel the new online buddy feature allows us to do that kind of thing here on Multiply.

One technical point if you choose to use this feature: when posting to Network, you will see there are three boxes under Network (friends;family;professional contacts) - if you leave all three boxes ticked, then online buddies can read your post; if you tick only one or two of the three boxes, then they can't.

You probably already know that whatever you post "for Everyone" can be read by people not registered with Multiply, so when Multiply tells you your post has been viewed by x number of people and shows you their headshots, this doesn't include non-Multiplyers.

But what you may not be aware of is that there may be fellow Multiplyers who are not included in these stats, and this can be relevant even to postings with more limited access, e.g. for Contacts only.

If your friend John, who is registered as your Contact, has set it up so that he gets email alerts for your postings, and then reads your posting on the email without being logged onto Multiply at the time, then this won't register as a viewing of your posting. (If he is logged onto the website when opening the email, then it will register.)

Which is encouraging for those of us who may sometimes feel as though we're speaking into a rather empty, echoey room... though of course just because someone has opened your posting, this doesn't necessarily mean they've actually read it. Big Brother hasn't got that far yet!

Which is why it is so much more encouraging when people leave comments on what they've read. Even if they disagree with you, at least you know they've read it.

If you haven't yet had the great privilege of receiving the rather unconvincing private message that is doing the rounds, then your turn will no doubt come. It sounds friendly in a teenagery sort of way and invites you to click on a link, which hopefully we are all internet-wise enough to ignore.

If you get this or any other spam, you have the option - and some might suggest also the duty towards fellow multiplyers - to report this so that the user can be deleted. I have recently discovered that there is a way of doing this without visiting the perpetrator's site - use this link, just substitute "useridgoeshere" with the spammer's user ID:

http://multiply.com/info/inquiry?report_user=USERIDGOESHERE

And by the way, you may or may not be aware that in your profile settings you can choose who can see your email address and other basic contact details - if you set it to Contacts, which is the minimum level allowed, then the spam you get will only be in the form of Personal Messages delivered via Multiply and not in the form of a direct email from the spammer.

P.S. Reporting abuse is of course not only for spammers but for anyone else who breaches the terms of use. You can also block a specific user if they cause you aggro, though so far I must say I haven't come across any nastiness here.

Some people have asked me why I use Multiply - what's the point when you can use email?

One major difference between Multiply and email is that what I post here can be seen by people who don't necessarily know me.

But for those who do know me, this is where you can read things that I wouldn't dream of sending you by email as I wouldn't dare to presume that you would all want to read them. I would not send an email to everyone I know telling them about the latest idea to hit me when I was having a shower, or about my car not starting one day, or about my hunt for beef sausages in the supermarket. So this is where I can post all these things and leave them there so that whoever wants to, when it suits them, can have a look. But just like with a newspaper or magazine, you are free to read the bits you like and ignore the bits you choose to ignore.

I also like the way group discussions can easily develop here. And I like the way I can define access rights for each posting, so that some things can be visible to everyone, some can be accessible only to people who know me, whilst I can even define some items as for family only, or for a few individuals.

When Gerry invited me to join Multiply a few months ago, I thought: oh well, okay, but what's it for? But very soon I started to see what I can do with it, and a few months down the line I can hardly imagine life without Multiply. (Thank you, Gerry!)

So what am I saying? You don't have to be like me, you don't have to start posting stuff, many people don't - many just join so that they can look at what their friends/relatives post here and add the odd reply. It costs nothing to join - the payment, as with all these free websites, is your consent to the appearance of adverts on your computer screen - and there is a huge amount of flexibility here, so you can decide how much of your profile is visible to the rest of the world, and you can say whether or not you want email notifications about postings. I started off with email notifications and quickly decided to go without, as it got a bit tiresome to get an email telling me that Richard sneezed... (Sorry, Richard!) [Actually, since writing this I've gone back to using email alerts, as I find it so much easier to glance through the emails and choose what I want to pause and read. If you choose to do that, I highly recommend that you log onto the website before reading the emails, as that way we get to know that you've read what we posted - a bit more encouraging! ed. 8 Jan 08]

[Ignore this bit - see my reply - this has now been done. 8 Feb 08] One thing I'm waiting for them to change is this: I would love them to set up a separate category of people you don't really know but have bumped into online and would like to keep in touch with. When I first saw the Online Buddies category I thought that's what it was for. But when you post something you can't specify access for Friends but not for Online Buddies, which is why I have to keep saying No to people I don't know who invite me to be their Contact. Which is a shame really, as it could be a nice way of getting to know people. [Ignore this bit - see my reply - this has now been done. 8 Feb 08]

But apart from that - I think it's great.

End of sales pitch for now

For those who haven't worked it out yet, here are some ways in which you can send someone a personal message on Multiply:

1. Right-click the person's thumbnail picture and you get a menu which includes an option called "personal message".
   
   
2. If you are reading someone's posting, click on Reply and you get two options: either a public reply or a personal message.
   
   
3. If you are visiting someone's website, underneath their thumbnail picture there are various options listed, including "personal message".

I have found this very useful as some things do need to stay private.

Isn't modern technology great when it works...

I came across a problem with the Guestbook but have now found the solution, so here it is just in case you come across it too.

I had posted a reply in a Guestbook but then wanted to delete it but couldn't. This is strange, I thought, as I knew very well I'd edited my own reply previously and this time I wasn't getting either the Edit option or Delete.

What I discovered is that if you click on the bit where it says "view all" (at the bottom, underneath all the replies) it then gives you a different view which includes Delete or Edit for your own postings, and indeed for anyone else's if it's your own Guestbook.

Phew!

See staff blog Link

I'm sure not everybody was aware of this distinction! (and I'm sure we don't all keep up to date with the staff blog - this is the first time since joining that I've bothered to read one...)

P.S. Having read this, I'm now going to try and change some of my so-called Online Buddies to Friends status!

Have discovered something which may be of use to others, if you haven't yet discovered this yourself. (I know, I know, some people do have better things to do with their time...)

When you go to the Multiply Inbox - the page where you see the list of new postings etc - there's a Preferences button which enables you to customise the way this info is presented. I tried some different options and decided that the Table option is much better than the default - much more concise, and you can choose which info to include in the table. (The Compact option I found a bit too compact for my liking.)