Well, this blog has been quiet over the last 3 weeks, and for that I apologize.

However, the explanation for this radio silence relates to the well-known inverse relationship between doing stuff and talking about doing stuff. We’ve been conducting our own surge of sorts over here, increasing not troop levels but instead our collective capacity for sleep deprivation The difference is, our surge has been working.

On that note, we’ve got some exciting new goodies for you today!

First up - My Trips. It’s pretty simple, really. Simply AWESOME! Post and share your trips. See where all your friends are going. All on your Me page. Now you can keep track of your jet-setting friends as they bounce around the globe living LIFE. And where are YOU going next, huh? Booked your accommodations yet? Reviewed it yet? What are you waiting for - seize the carp!

My Trips is not quite the endgame, but we hope we’ve provided a nice platform for our collective future and I bet you can see where we’re starting to taking this. As always, your input is welcome and very much appreciated.

Today we’re also launching several other new features and improvements on the site, related to our signup process, meta-search, our hotel pages, and hotel reviews.

You’ll start to see some great new avatars on our site. We’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with the legendary Paige Pooler to create a customized avatar set just for VibeAgent! We absolutely love love love them! Thanks Paige!!! Now you shy folks that don’t want to upload your photo can simply select one of our 10 VibeAgent exclusive avatars for your personal image. Neat, huh!

You’ll find bigger, better photos of our hotels in the search results and on the hotel detail pages - 1,000 words and all that. They’re pretty.  freakin’.  awesome.

You can also now add dates for when you’ve stayed in a hotel, and the purpose of your visit, in your hotel reviews. Feel free to click “edit review” at the bottom of the reviews you’ve already completed to add this information.

There’s a bunch more stuff, but I’ll let you discover it yourself. I’ll leave you instead with a neat quote from Bill Clinton’s commencement address at Middlebury college this year (Charles’ alma mater). In talking about communities, President Clinton said,

“Every successful community has three things, whether it’s a university, a sports team, a business, an orchestra, a family; you name it. They all have three things: a broadly shared opportunity to participate; a broadly felt responsibility for the success of the enterprise, whatever it is; and a genuine sense of belonging. “

We hope that together, all of us can grow VibeAgent into a strong and compassionate community that lives up to these ideals. Participate, with integrity; Help others, as you would have them help you; and of course, understand that you belong here!

Happy travels.