I'm all for it!

I'm new to Silkfair and I would love to meet everyone. I am a buyer only so I'm sure you would love to show me your items!! Hope more people decide to do this!

Hey Angel, of course we would love to have you stop by!

What day are you thinking and what time zone would noon-2pm be? Eastern?

(Noon eastern is 9am for me-- a bit earlier for this night owl, but I'd make the effort)

BTW, in the spirit of chatting, I just blogged about a commission I worked on today. The the work that inspired it is below--as well as photo of the work-in-progress of 3 variations I did. The "result show" comes soon!

I'm in unless its a Monday or Wednesday morning, I've got school then, but if you said around noon, I'm usually home by then. I'm on Central time.

We're experimenting right now with placing a mini-chatroom inside each shop, so that you can keep your shop open for someone to stop by. Chatroom room name would be your ID / shop name. There is a screen that we're also making right now that will help show who's online. That one should be up some time next week. That will be followed by person to person instant messenging. Your online status should be reactivated around that time (that function is deactivated right now)

Well that will be fun and interesting!

Will be interested in feedback from shoppers about how comfortable they will be to do that. But if they initiate the conversation by entering the chatroom, presumably they won't be skittish ? (As folks sometimes are when they enter a store or booth...)

Looking forward to the roll-out!

Well, don't know, but all can be said is, it'll be good to try out. Also, what we don't know is if we can somehow do something similar with blogs and forums.

Most online activities are visitors without login, and we checking to see how we can get anonymous users in.

I'm finding more and more, you can't view/navigate many sites without joining, and unless someone specifies "Name/URL" as an option, you can't comment in a blog either without having an account with that blog site. Frankly, I usually don't bother with those sites because I don't need a bunch more accounts and passwords to memorize.

Delicate balance between security/accountability and convenience, huh.

the abundance of bots that spams is one reason for that.

I hear ya flowers! I cheat ... my Norton has a password storage and fills in for me so I don't have to remember! Windows has that option too! I have a back up on a spreadh sheet in case of "systme failures" LOL!
I sign up just to get more exposure... the downside to that however is I get a ton of emails as a "Newbie" but then it calms down. You can make it so the emails stay on the blog site too - so there are many variables.
I like the idea of the chat with the shop... especially if there is a buyer interested and you are on line... great way to quickly answer any questions, etc. Open dialog... makes it like there in the store with you :)