Wednesday, September 1, 1999

Personal Digital Assistant Message Boards

.KEYWORD ppcoolsite0999
.FLYINGHEAD PALMPOWER SITE OF THE MONTH
.TITLE Personal Digital Assistant Message Boards
.DEPT
.SUMMARY This month, we spotlight PDAMB.com as our PalmPower Site of the Month. If you’re looking for a new, fresh opportunity to learn and share about the wonderful world of PDAs in a friendly setting, you owe it to yourself to check out this article.
.AUTHOR Denise Amrich
This month’s PalmPower Site of the Month is the brand-spanking-new PDAMB.com, shown in Figure A. PDAMB stands for Personal Digital Assistant Message Boards.

.FIGPAIR A PDAMB.com is here!

Launched on August 22, 1999, PDAMB.com is now open to the public. The folks at PDAMB.com invite you to use their resource to find the answers to any Windows CE or Palm OS related question. PDAMB has five PDA Message Boards on which you can post, reply, and view messages. Their press release indicates that they want to be known as "The Ultimate PDA Support Center".

Normally, since we offer the PowerBoards as a part of our publications strategy, it wouldn’t be good "hard-nosed" business strategy to help a "competitor" gain publicity. After all, our ZATZ PowerBoards are extremely active and popular. But the folks at PDAMB are doing a nice job, providing message boards for all handhelds in one place. This struck the editorial staff at PalmPower as pretty cool. Since we also publish Windows CE Power (a publication about Microsoft’s Windows CE) we notice a lot of divisiveness and disharmony among folks who love their particular platform so much that it practically becomes a religion! But, in the spirit of Rodney King’s, "Why can’t we all just get along?", we decided a site that kept everyone together was worthy of notice.

When it comes to online communities, there’s a critical mass factor at work. If you don’t get enough readers, fast enough, your utopian online community can quickly become a ghost town. PDAMB.com is a new, fresh opportunity to get everyone talking. Let’s try to help these folks reach critical mass, and us folks at ZATZ to attain even more good karma points!

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Be sure to visit http://www.PDAMB.com and help them get the ball rolling.

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.H1 Your site can earn this special banner
Do you run a special site, one that provides a great resource for Palm device users? If so, your site may be eligible for consideration as the PalmPower Site of the Month. If chosen, you’ll even be entitled to display the snazzy banner shown in Figure B.

.FIG B Is your site cool enough to be the PalmPower Site of the Month?

If you’d like your site to be considered for PalmPower Site of the Month, send email to heather@palmpower.com. Please specify "PALMPOWER COOLSITE" in the subject field of your email, and include a paragraph or two about what makes your site special.
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.BIO Denise Amrich is the Managing Editor for PalmPower Magazine (at http://www.palmpower.com), Windows CE Power (at http://www.windowscepower.com), and DominoPower (at http://www.dominopower.com). She can be reached via email at denise@palmpower.com.
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?13@@.ee6d6b1
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