January gave us a new record in site traffic. We nearly doubled the number of page views and visitors, when compared to November last year. At this moment 450.000+ unique visitors are viewing over 1.5 million pages each month! If your Gemzies page is up to date, and contains quality information for visitors, that means LOTS of traffic to your page as well!

You can now share all your new entries on Gemzies with your Twitter friends. Go to you profile page and simply fill in your twitter details. From that moment, all your actions on Gemzies.com (like: commenting, adding content, or creating a new page) will be shown on your Twitter account. So all your friends see it immediately as well. Cool.

‘In the old days’, during our Alpha-release, you had to add items to Gemzies by going to a Gemzies page and use the ‘add an item’ button. With our new bookmarktool you can now add new entries anytime and anywhere, while browsing the web! You can simply add this new tool to your browser, enabling you to add the photos, videos, websites or books your are currently visiting. See the ‘Start bookmarking’ button on the homepage!

The profile page was fully upgraded during latest release update. As you might have seen, the profile page is now fully editable. We invite you all to update your profile page. Please fill in a short bio, upload a photo or add expertises. This way, there is a big chance that other Gemzies members will contact you using the ‘send message’ button or try to add you as one of their contacts with the ‘add to my contacts’ button. Hence get into contact with likeminded experts or fans!

Some best practices in making your Gemzies-page as popular as possible! 1. Invite fellow experts to join your Gemzies page. Interactivity on your Gemzies page will attract others to improve the quality of your Gemzies page. You can do this with the ‘invite’ button on your profile page. 2. Create multiple external hyperlinks to your Gemzies-page on relevant websites. This will make your Gemzies-page even more interesting for search engines like Google. If other site owners only want to exchange hyperlinks, they could always join Gemzies and write a review on their own website themselves. 3. Post your Gemzies-page on other social networks (for example Facebook) and social bookmark websites (for example Delicious). This will stimulate search engine traffic and will give you more exposure. 4. Try to contact other relevant communities, fan-sites, websites etc. There is a big chance that they would like to join your Gemzies-page or promote your Gemzies page. 5. Register your Gemzies page at several RSS aggregators (see a great list here). On every Gemzies-page, you will find the RSS logo in the top navigation bar; click on the logo to find more information on how to proceed. 6. Use keyword-rich texts in your entry’s title, description and tags. Specific words such as names, locations, dates, events etc will higher you chances of being indexed by Google.

We are very excited about our upcoming 'beta' release, planned for early November this year. Gemzies will have a new, 'crisp' design, it will be easier to browse through content, and, most of all, we will have a FAR better way to update your Gemzies pages. We will start using a 'bookmark-button', available in your browser, that enables you to 'bookmark' content for Gemzies while browsing the internet! More on this in a next announcement.....

Today, we passed a first 'milestone' in terms of topics covered on Gemzies: we now have 250 topics, ranging from Al Gore to Wallstreet, covered by over 600 members so far! Of course, we thank everybody for their contributions, feedback, and enthusiasm. Please help us to 'spread' Gemzies to your fellow experts out there, and keep your valuable feedback coming! 

Yesterday, we made it 'big' in Metro Nieuws, a free newspaper distributed in a series of 500.000 copies nationwide in Holland, with an estimated nr. of 1-2 million readers. Let's see what it does for new experts and pages!

We are approaching the '200' mark, in terms of Gemzies pages! Check out our latest additions, e.g. cabaret, HRM, Coelho, Angelina Jolie, Human Rights, and (why did we not think of it) coffee. Keep up the good work, we are keen to see what other topics you all have a passion for.

Gemzies is now consistently viewed over 1 million times per month! It is just great to see how many of you know how to find us. It is ALSO great to see the average 'time per visit' growing steadily. All this good news, even before the official international launch. Muchos gracias!

Since the launch in Holland, we have received around 70 'serious' requests to publish a Gemzies-page. As a result, the first 10 new Gemzies pages are now approved and published to the world, on a range of topics varying from Citroen (the car manufacturer), via Neuro Linguistic Programming, to Pathology! Now we have seen the amount of energy put in these Gemzies, and the resulting links to relevant sites, videos, books and images, we are convinced of the potential of Gemzies. A big THANK YOU to all of you who have embraced Gemzies so far! Meanwhile, we are preparing the international launch.

Today, Monday February 25, Gemzies was disclosed to the Dutch press. An interview on Marketingfacts.nl scored over 2000 views in one day, and roughly 30% clickthrough rate. Not bad for a 'local' release! Even better, we can now see the requests for new Gemzies pages coming in. On average, they look serious, and the requestors are clearly 'connected' to the requested domains, either via professional interest, serious hobby, etc.

In the background, the first well known, international experts are on board of Gemzies. We do acknowledge the value of Gemzies increases when the initiator of a Gemzies page is well respected. As a 'preview' of what's coming, go take a look at the Gemzies-page of professor Walther Ploos van Amstel on Supply Chain Management!

Good news! The steady rise in traffic on gemzies.com in December proved not to be an incident; in January, we are 'steady' above 10.000 unique visitors a day (on average: 13.000 unique visitors a day). And rising....