It's almost two years since I ran the last Winter brain meeting. Doing the meetings for 15 years was a wonderful experience in building a temporary community for sharing ideas and resources and making friends. Marriages were started, babies were made...

I've been working long and hard at a new approach to building a community of biofeedback and neurofeedback practitioners and people who are interested in the field and related areas.

After a lot of time, work and web software development, we're finally very close to taking a re-invented futurehealth.org live.

The plan is to turn futurehealth into a media/community blog site and news aggregator like my site, www.opednews.com, which has grown so it will reach over 800,000 unique visitors this month. That site has over 20,000 members, over 40 volunteer editors and publishes about 2500 content items (articles, diaries, polls and news links) a month.

My hope is to provide the resources to build a community on-line that supports sharing of information and support regarding biofeedback, neurofeedback, behavioral medicine, various models of psychotherapy and treatment of a multiplicity of diagnostic cateories-- for both practitioners and laymen.

My hope is YOU the members of the biofeedback community, will post articles and diaries/blogs to the site, using the site to get the word out about the field. Early adopters will get their own free member page and archive where their articles, comments, etc. will be accessible. Unlike listserves, which serve a great purpose, the community blog pulls discussions together based on articles, diaries, polls and news links, with comments threaded at the end of the different kinds of content. And the "Long tail" keeps them alive and accessed for years.

The goal for this email is to encourage a number of you to post articles to the site-- either new or reprints. You'll sign up as a member, create a bio and profile, including an image of yourself, if you like. This can include your website. Commercial providers may create personal pages, without their commercial site and may buy advertising.

It's easy to post articles. Once we have a good start on articles, we'll go live and submit the site to be crawled by google news, like OpEdNews.com has been, for the past five years. This will really help expand coverage of biofeedback in the "news-sphere."

Some content will be more conversational. That will fit better as a diary/blog. We'll also be signing up with technorati, to maximize blog posting pickup and indexing as well.

Articles can be 300 words on up to thousands of words on almost any health/mind/body/heart/spirit topic you like-- client oriented or scientific, data-based or speculative.

To make the site really soar, we'd love to have some volunteer editors to help evaluate articles in the article queue, cover specific topics and recruit new authors. If you have any interest in getting involved as a volunteer editor, please drop me an email, even if you only have an hour a week. This can be a stimulating, fun role where you can develop new skills, relationships and projects dear to your heart.

Remember, we'll be happy to work with reprints of articles you've published elsewhere. I encourage you to sign up as a member and post content. Eventually, we expect to charge practitioners to be members and use the site. For now, the first 200 practitioners/educators, etc. to sign up and post content will be grandfathered in free for at least three years from when we go live.

If you are a vendor, with a product, course or book to sell, please get in touch with me to discuss special ad rates to those who are founding advertisers with us. We already reach a lot more people than AAPB or ISNR. I expect that once the site goes "dynamic" with regular addition of new content, the traffic will soar. This will be good for the whole field and particularly those of you who have posted content to the site.

So sign up as a member here. You'll be submitting to a back panel setup that we expect to take live in 10-20 days, absolutely by the end of November.

BTW, we will not be doing "links" because each member can include links to his or her non-commercial site. If you are an individual doing training, you ARE permitted to list your training, though we reserve the right to change our policies.

Cordially

--
Rob Kall
opednews.com, (reaching 700,000+ unique visitors, 200 countries a month)
The Rob Kall Radio Show 1360 AM, reaching metropolitan Philly and South Jersey
www.futurehealth.org, www.storycon.org, www.positivepsychology.net, www.quotationscentral.com, www.sphincterpolice.com,
211 N. Sycamore St. Newtown, PA 18940
215-504-1700, fax 215-860-5374
Follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/robkall

"I honestly believe the future's going to be millions of little things saving us."
Pete Seeger on Democracy Now

"Sometimes the head steals the heart's best blood."
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.