Our dev team has just rolled out another nifty feature that I hope will mean big things for the PegNews community.

Assuming that you're a registered user (which you should be by now, right?), follow this link to make your PegNews experience much more personalized, with a focus on your local friends.

First thing you'll see is an opportunity to briefly share your address book with our supercomputer. (We promise not to peek!) Right now you can upload from Google Mail, Yahoo! and Windows Live (Hotmail). We're working on support for Outlook Address books, and there are instructions for syncing Apple Address book with Yahoo! or Gmail here.

Once you've done that, two things will happen:

• First, you'll see a list of all the existing Pegasus News users who were in your address book and get the opportunity to add them to your favorites with one click. This will allow you to keep up with their comments on the site as well as places, bands and events that they've favorited.



• Then, you'll have an opportunity to invite others from your address book who are not yet registered users of the site. They'll get one and only one email from us, on your behalf, inviting them to join our community.

If you've ever enjoyed Pegasus News and thought for one second, "Gee, I'd like to do something to contribute and/or help those nice PegNewsers out," this is your chance. We're rolling out some enhancements in the next little while that will, frankly, work a lot better the more people who come to play. And because we don't believe in doing mean stuff like forcing registration in order to read more than a page or two, we need to do something about the disparity between our 392,000 monthly visitors and our 15,000+ most die-hard users.

But if you're a selfish SOB who just wants to know what's in it for you, consider this: We try to keep a tidy space for everyone, and while advertising is our lifeblood, we don't clutter up our pages with dozens of irrelevant ads or plague you with popups and the like. Our ad team has been working overtime of late and the folks they've brought in are getting the type of results that leave them shouting for more and telling their friends. The upshot is that we're fast running out of ad inventory and there are only two levers we can pull: more ads on a page or more people reading more pages.

We much prefer the latter, and imagine that you would too.

We've gone through a lot of little growth spurts since we launched -- With your help, it's time to take a big jump and add more smart, fun local folks to our community. We've tried to make it easy for you to get your friends to join the party -- please help us welcome them.