Ha. I love how your keywords have everything to do with this post.

Hi Marc, welcome to the site. While anyone can point out the deficiencies of our navigation, which I at this time have no control over, or as someone not in the advertising industry wonder if it's a dating site for ad folk, in the 5 weeks that this site has been going, we've had a lot of really great things happen. First of all, some pretty important people in advertising are lurking here, which means if you're active on the site and posting a blog, the right people might be noticing you. Second, I alone have hooked up two people with interviews, found out about freelance opportunties, met people at agencies I might want to work for, referred someone looking for an art director with S.E. Asian sensibilites with an A.D. at O&M Jakarta, and have introduced tons of friends who I never would have had time to connect through traditional means, whether because I know they went to the same college or share a love of Pez dispensers.

Anyone who works in the advertising knows it's all about who you know, and that through layoffs, mergers, job changes, etc., who you know can disappear very quickly. Those in the know see how incredibly useful this site is to solving this problem and others.

I see you as someone who can make a positive contribution to this site. Perhaps you can start with what you think you can offer the ad community--certainly a lot from reading your blog--rather than what we can offer you.

Again, welcome and I'm looking forward to reading more.

Hi Marc much of the occlusion is intententional. Just like a yahoo group you get Ads on the bottom of the page and you have to pay for a cleaner look. On the free stuff you do not get groups classifieds a calander or photo albums because these things take up space. To create a free one you can log into netmodular.com and and hit the create button and have one in less than five minutes. So people who are not programers and cant FOAF can do there thing. We want to give away as many as posible. Then our means of making a living is the upgrade that is no secret. The point is not everyone can afford to build their own or wants to build and dick around with open source. The people we are serving are just regular folks. In Advertising freelance people go from job to job in building relationships their life is better. More work better pay. They also want to talk about things like why am I selling toothpaste shall I jump off a bridge. Airportlive has IM and all kinds of geeky things. It is not enough to have a site to meet people their must be a reason to meet. Besides Sex and Love. In order to serve the customer we must understand what they want not what is interesting technically. For zero dollars and no programing you get a stand alone platform for your group.