The VVC, Vampire Google, and Community Chats

I realized I haven't updated this blog in far too long. There are a number of reasons for that, most revolving around that I'm incredibly busy and have been focused on other things. Not that that's particularly any sort of decent excuse, but it is what it is. I did, however, want to update some things for anyone who does either stumble on this blog or is oblivious to the rest of the Vampire Community (as a good majority of it is plastered across every corner of the VC, as well as sent as mass tons of spam emails).

First, a little about the VVC. The full name of the group is the Voices of the Vampire Community...which is all nice and flashy, but what's it mean? It means we're a group of people from around the community who've come together to talk about things, try to network, etc. We're not some mass leader group, or any sort of authority group, but we do have a number of the more prominent members of the community (though not all) in our ranks. Because of that, we get noticed, both inside and outside of the community. If you want to learn about the VVC, the link is http://www.veritasvosliberabit.com/vvc.html. Bios and list of members, and a huge links section, etc, can be found there. If nothing else, perhaps consider it as a resource for finding some of the mass tons of more legit sites and people.

Which brings me to my next topic, which is a project I kind of started on a whim and is slowly gaining some popularity and use...a custom-designed Google search engine, specifically for the Vampire Community. Basically, how it works is a long list of sites have been added to the engine, all community and real vampirism sites, plus handy things like thefreedictionary.com and thesaurus.com. The custom engine then searches /only/ those sites for the results it returns. Basically...it's a giant filter system for Google. I tried it just out of curiosity, and found it actually works incredibly well, better than most of the individual sites' search engines. I'm still in the process of adding more sites to it, but the thing is handy, and can be found at http://tiny.cc/vampiregoogle or on a few of the sites around the community.

The other reason I've been less than faithful about updating here is compliments of helping organize and run the new global Vampire Community Discussions. Now if you're fairly new to the community or have been living under a rock for the last couple of months, you my not have heard about them. Otherwise, you know that they're monthly giant scheduled chats, hosted by the VVC, and held via irc on Dalnet, in #vampirevoices. Each chat has a topic that's announced ahead of time (along with the day and time for the chat each month). Transcripts of the previous chats can be found on the VVC site and throughout the community, as can updates as they come out about when the next ones will be. Also, there's also the VVC's Vampire News feed on Twitter: http://twitter.com/vampirenews.

While I know this is fairly atypical as far as my posts go, it gives people things to read and interesting information. Also, I'd love to see anyone reading this blog come to the global discussions.

~Is