Those of you that use the chat bar will notice that there is a little playing card icon now in your private chats.

If you click on this playing card, you will send a game request to the person you are chatting with.  If your chat partner accepts the game request, you will be shown a link to launch the game window.

The video contest is coming to a close soon... here is how the judging is going down:

The last day to enter videos in the contest will be Friday January 29th, 2010.  No more entries will be considered after January 29, 2010 at 11:59pm GMT.

Just a quick one to announce that the reviews tool is ready to go now.

There are not a lot of listings yet, so you can safely add a listing without creating a duplicate, but in the future please search before creating listings.

If a listing already exists (I created listings for Thoughtless, Tarantula and The Paper Engine so far), you can just go ahead and write a review for it.

If a listing doesn't exist, you will need to create the listing and the review.  When creating the listing, please try to add an image and YouTube Demo video if possible.  For the description, you can just copy the description from Murphy's Magic or any other dealer's site.

Have fun with it!  The Advanced Search is awesome... you can even search based on price range... so if you are creating a listing, please enter the MSRP in USD if the item is not discontinued or out of print.

Right now points for reviews are not automated, but you will get 5 points for a review and 5 points for a listing - so if you create a listing and review it you'll get 10 points total.

Let me know if you create a listing and/or review for now so I can be sure to give you the points until I have it automated.

Also, now you get six points for each blog post that you post here on TMN under "Manage Your Blog."  One or two word blog posts don't count :-)

You may have noticed some changes around here lately....

The Magic Network 2.0 is almost here... once the Reviews tool is added, and I update the points article, the transition will be complete.

Its that time of year again, when we're never sure whether to say, "Merry Christmas," "Season's Greetings," "Happy Holidays,"  "Happy Hanukkah," or even say nothing at all.  So wherever you are, and whatever you celebrate, if anything, I hope you have a good time and get some rest while visiting TMN often :)

I wanted to take this opportunity to say thank-you to you all.  If you are reading this, you are probably one of our regular members, so the thank-you is well directed and well deserved.  While it is great to have grown to nearly 300 members here in our first 6 months or so, it is even greater to see those that have kept coming back and building the community here.  In typical online communities, about 5-10% of the members create about 90% of the activity and content, and we are pretty much well within that statistic here as well so far.

Since we have had a bunch of new members here lately, I first off wanted to say "Welcome" and also write this post to introduce you all to some abbreviations we have going on here.  As David Leon said so well, "Welcome to our little cult..." and here is some of our "cult" language:

TMN - The Magic Network - the great site you're on right now

I was lucky enough to get David Leon's Intuition effect recently, and let me say up front that I like it a lot!

Here is the premise and how it plays out:  You put an envelope with a prediction card inside onto the table.  You can also just write your prediction on a piece of paper if you want and hand it to your participant folded up.

Blogging at The Magic Network just got a whole lot better!  Now we have kick-ass blogging that is fully featured, including comments, images, and even video embedding.

So, I really hope everyone will use this and start blogging here more and commenting on other people's blogs.

Testing out a new feature here at The Magic Network called "Tweetboard"

You'll see it on the left hand side of your screen.... a little bubble called "Tweets"

Most of you have probably noticed that we had a new chatbar for awhile, then we had the old one again, and now we have the new one again.

If you don't see any chatbar when you login to The Magic Network, clear your browser cache and refresh your page, and it should come up.