Examples of activities that can trigger alerts include someone leaving a comment on your public profile or on one of your blog posts or reviews, or someone becoming a fan of you. All of these alerts can, of course, be modified by every member. As a convenience, we've turned them on for you, so if you want to disable some or all of the alerts, you can do so from within a new panel in your Dashboard.

We, along with those who requested this feature, think these simple alerts will go a long way in further engaging every member in the Thotswap community.

There was one greater issue with Internet Explorer 8 that caused some of the functionality of our website to break. This would occur through the use of functions like rating someone's entry or retrieving a user information tooltip, and would result in an undefined error. We've since corrected this problem, but some of you may have cached files on your computer, which don't contain the fixes we implemented. If you see this error, simply force-refresh the webpage and the problem should disappear.

For Internet Explorer users, you can force-refresh the webpage by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing the refresh button on the browser.

We're aware that at least one user is affected by this and will probably be unable to log into his or her account because the account was created after the server went down for maintenance. In addition, any activities on the website such as posting comments or creating and updating reviews and blog posts performed late last night (or early this morning) will not be present on the website.

If you notice any of your activity missing from Thotswap, we would appreciate it if you could perform them again, such as re-posting comments or re-registering for your account. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Secondly, we'd like to introduce you to a new feature we added today: favorite links. Do you have a favorite website or blog that you would like to share with your friends and visitors? Now, you can add a list of favorite links to your public profile for everyone to see -- like a blogroll for those of you familiar with blogging terminology. You can manage your list of favorite links right from within the Dashboard, under the "Profile" tab:

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

Please be advised that we're currently looking over the interest-based program for AdSense and to ensure that Thotswap meets the requirements of this new form of advertising.

When you create an account, you will now be automatically given the URL http://yourname.thotswap.com, where visitors can find your public homepage. Additionally, all your blog posts will also be published under this domain.

We feel this is an important change that will help to personalize the Thotswap experience for each and every member. By having a shorter and more concise URL, it will now be easier for you to tell your friends about your homepage on Thotswap -- plus we also think it looks a lot more impressive!

First and foremost, we modified our homepage a bit and moved some stuff around to put more of an emphasis on user content. You'll notice that we've moved the Latest in Blogs box to the main section, giving it a more front and center appearance. We also introduced a Last Commented On box to give visitors a heads-up on the conversations that are going on around the community.

In addition to the homepage, we tweaked and added some more usability features to bring together user content. Things like the new Latest By... box found on all reviews and blog post pages (like this one) should help point readers to other content more easily.

By getting your friends to join as your referrals, you receive up to an additional 20% of the total advertisement impressions your referrals generate! That means that you can potentially earn a bonus continuous stream of cash just from your referrals on top of what you can earn from your own Thotswap activities!

If the potential to earn even more money isn't enough, here's three more reasons why you should get your friends to join Thotswap today:

You can see these social bookmarking links at the bottom of every blog post or review.

What exactly is social bookmarking? Quite simply, it is a service that allows you to store, share, and manage bookmarks of web pages that are of interest to you. You can then access your bookmarks from any computer with an internet connection or choose to share these bookmarks with your friends.

If you haven't noticed it before...If you're curious to try it out, just create a new blog post or review (or edit an existing one) and you'll notice a new "Insert/Edit Image" button within the main editor (you don't need to publish your entry in order to try this out).

We've tried to structure the image dialog to be as intuitive as possible. Note that you can also add a caption to the image and set its size or alignment relative to text around it by selecting the corresponding tabs, which will activate after an image has been uploaded to your account.

Since mid-November of last year, Thotswap has been available for testing by a select few. The feedback that we've received since then has been both helpful and encouraging, and we've slowly improved on our website to the point that we are now ready to open it up for you, the public, to try!

If you haven't already, we urge you to check out our tour page to get an idea of what Thotswap is, and why you should join us today.