archive for May 2007

Family Travel Planning Poll

May Poll Results

We asked who planned the family vacations in your home and the results are in! 86% of all vacation planning involves Mom and over half of all trips are planned by both parents. In a sign of the times, travel agents didn’t play a role in any of the respondents’ planning and dads were the solo travel planners in only 5% of the cases.

Here’s a short write-up on the results from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

What Makes a Town Family-Friendly?

Morgan, one of our Parentographers, recently wrote on her blog about the things that make a town family-friendly.  Here’s her list:

What would you include on your list?

Disconnected, TV Nation

Two articles have recently caught my attention.  The first reports on data from a recent study about TV viewing among toddlers and infants.  The researchers were surprised to learn that 90% of two-year olds watch some television on a regular basis — most of it “educational” in nature.  You can draw your own conclusions about whether this programming is really educational or not and whether it might cause any long-term harm to have your children mesmerized by TV (disclosure: our 2 year-old watches TV and I think she’s developing into a fine human being).

The second article reports on the annual National Travel Monitor published by Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell.  Of note to parents is this:

Family travel [and that includes grandparents] this year will continue to grow faster than all other forms of leisure travel,” …But in 6 of 10 households, both Mom and Dad work full time. This means they are trying to juggle all of the other commitments in the family’s schedule at the same time, [Peter] Yasewich said.  “Booking a vacation becomes a Herculean challenge for them. And that translates into a growing sense of parental guilt — that we don’t spend enough time with our kids”.

I guess it is good that we’re all working hard to enjoy vacations with our families, but somewhat troubling that this activity also produces a fair amount of guilt.  Hopefully resources like Parentography can help to make the process of planning vacations and regular outings more enjoyable and less stressful for parents and their families.

Parentography Adds New Social Networking Features

Since our launch just over three months ago, we’ve been working tirelessly to make Parentography not just a valuable travel and activity planning resource for parents, but also a vibrant and tight-knit community that encourages sharing and interaction among our members.  We’ve felt satisfied with the success we’ve had in creating a tool for users to rate and review their favorite family-friendly places and activities (although we know we can make that part better, too), but have recognized since early on that we needed to do a better job of enabling Parentographers to interact with one another.  Today, I’m happy to share some new features on the site that we hope will foster a much greater level of communication and build a much stronger community.

The new enhancements include:

• Friends
• Messaging / Enhanced Comments
• Alerts
• RSS feeds for places
• New privacy settings and more user images

FRIENDS

If you visit your Account page on the site, the left side of the page now has a friends area that displays up to five randomly chosen people with whom you’ve established an online link through the site.  By clicking on the “manage/view all” link, you can see all of your friends, confirm new friend requests, send private messages to your contacts, and remove someone from your list (although we hope that people don’t find a regular need to do that!). 

 

 

We’ve also pasted a large orange “Find Friends” button on Account pages and on the main Friends page.  We’d like to make it easy for you to find out if any of your offline friends are Parentographers and, for those who are, to send them a ‘friend request’ and, for those who aren’t yet part of Parentography, to invite them to check out the site.  Right now, you can choose to either upload an address book file from an email program like MS Outlook or you can manually type or cut and paste email addresses into our form.  When the email addresses are submitted to our system, we look for matches with accounts already in our database.  If there are any matches, we make it easy to send out friend requests to those users.  We’ll also show all of the addresses that we didn’t find and ask if an invitation to visit Parentography should be sent.  We don’t store any of these email addresses and only use them for this purpose.  Soon, we’ll also be adding the ability to upload your contacts from web-based email programs like Hotmail, Yahoo, and GMail. 

Another way to invite a Parentographer to become a friend is to visit their profile page and click the small exclamation point icon on the right side of the page that says “add as friend” next to it.  One of the great things about adding friends is that once someone becomes your friend on the site, you will automatically be notified of changes to their profile and when they post any new reviews or excursions. 

MESSAGING / ENHANCED COMMENTING

 

  

Each Parentographer now has their very own mailbox on the site.  This is where you’ll be able to receive private messages from other users, reply to messages and get updates on things like new friend requests.  You can also review all of your sent messages.

Whenever you receive a new mail message and are logged into the site, you’ll notice that the mailbox text in the upper right of the screen will show that you have a message waiting for you.  You can also choose to have your messages delivered to the email address we have on file in addition to receiving them on the site so that you don’t always have to log in to see if you have any new messages.

The ability to comment on other Parentographers reviews has also been enhanced by enabling users to reply to comments.  And, on each Parentographer’s profile page, we’ve also placed a comment area (it actually says “leave [user name] a note”).  When you leave a note, it is viewable by anyone who visits the page, so this is a great place to ask questions, give compliments, or just socialize with other members!

ALERTS

We wanted to make sure that when something happened on the site that you might find relevant, that you were aware of it and didn’t have to rely on lucky searching to stumble on it.  Our solution was to create automated alerts that appear at the top of each Parentographer’s profile page.  We’ve set it up so that alerts that will appear when someone requests to be your friend (or when someone accepts or declines your request), when a friend posts a new review or excursion, when a member’s own review or excursion receives a comment, when new messages are received, when a friend updates their profile and in a few other minor cases. 

RSS FEEDS FOR PLACES

We’ve always had bookmarks so that you can maintain easy access to the pages on the site you visit most frequently.  We’ve also had RSS feeds (news items that are posted directly to a news reader’s page, based on a user’s subscriptions) for reviews, parentographers, excursions and a few other things, but were lacking the ability to subscribe to a feed that deliver an article whenever something new was posted about a place or activity in a city of your choosing (like your home town or a vacation spot you enjoy).  Adding this functionality will be very handy for those who wish to use it.  All you need to do is type in a search using the following format: “What”=[blank]; “Where”=[city, state] and then find the RSS feed icon (it varies depending on the browser you use) and subscribe to the feed like you would any other.  Then, without any effort at all, you’ll always know the latest places and activities reviewed on the site in the city of your choosing.  There’s no limit to the number of feeds you can receive, so subscribe to as many as interest you!

PRIVACY AND IMAGES

Every Parentographer’s account page has a Settings area that includes two customizable areas: one for alerts and one for privacy.  Until now, these weren’t fully functional.  With this new release, you can now choose to receive messages and alerts both via email (using the address you provided during the registration process) and in your Parentography mailbox or just have delivery made to your Parentography mailbox.  We also wanted to enable you to keep some of your information private, to be shared only with friends on the site, so we now allow you to select either a Public setting or a Friends Only one that controls access and viewing to a your biography, public notes (the comments people can leave on a member’s profile page), and friends list.

 

 

In response to feedback, we also are giving you the opportunity to share more photos of yourself and your family.  Each account can now include one main user image and two additional photos of a your choosing.  These photos can always be replaced by new ones — you could rotate seasonal pictures or update your profile with the latest school photos or snapshots from a recent celebration…whatever you want to showcase and share with other Parentographers!

Since we’re just introducing all of these features, we would love to get feedback on what works, what we should change, and what we’ve left out.  We are also working our way through a long list of other features to continuously improve the Parentography experience.

Thank you all again for your outstanding support and participation in the community so far.  Parentography is quickly becoming a time and money-saving resource for parents all across the country!  Now, we hope Parentography also becomes a favorite retreat where you’ll share parts of your lives, make new friends, and create a welcoming and tolerant community for everyone who visits!