Who are you? Why are you running this website? You don't seem to identify yourself.... Where do you get your reviews, spec sheets, and other posted information. There is lots of information here, but your apparent anonymity is puzzling. Did I miss your "who we are" explanation.....

-- Lon Jones (homeless@ktc.com), August 02, 1999

Answers

Hi Lon: The mystery host appears!

(And thanks, Dan for the kind words - I/we really appreciate all the support you've provided in the forum here!)

We really *do* need an "about us" page - along with a jillion other things that perpetually take precedence. I've just hired a couple of people to help with web work, and am in the process of bringing on another writer to help with reviews, so maybe we'll start to be able to get some of these other things dealt with that have needed doing since day one.

There are two of us that work on the site more or less full time: Myself (Dave Etchells), founder and try-to-do-everything-that-needs- doing guy, and Mike Tomkins, our news editor. Mike does the News (obviously), but is also working on several background projects, one of which was getting the cool new "news script" working, so we can update news items easily during the day, without a lot of laborious manual FTP'ing, copy/pasting, etc. There are a couple of freelance writers who've been helping with some of the grunt work on the reviews, and my lovely assistant Marti, who ships products in and out, tries to keep some semblance of order, and poses with unbelievable patience for the "girl with flowers" test shots.

Pretty much all of the stuff here is self-generated by the crew just described. Spec sheets data comes from the mfrs product manuals, supplemented by our own findings, where appropriate.

We probably seem mysterious because there's so much to do that we're perpetually overloaded, to the point that I seldom have the time to drop in on our own discussion forum! (I've been trying to post on rec.photo.digital more lately, but the last week or so, have fallen down on that too.) I've been trying to think of a way to trim the reviews, to open up more time, but all the stuff that we report on in them is there because readers have asked for it. What to do? The reviews have grown to absolutely brobdingnagian proportions (probably butchered the $0.25 word there...), but I haven't seen how to cut them down to a more reasonable size. If I could, then there'd be more time to correspond, etc. (OTOH, I'm sure I'd fill all the available time back up again with other stuff.)

Hope this helps remove some of the mystery, hopefully we'll be able to act on the suggestion for an "about us" page before long!

Cheers! Dave E.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), August 05, 1999.

...Spooky? I think if you hang around here long enough you get a good "feel" for the folks who run this. I too would like to see a "who we are" page though. It's certainly helpful for newcomers to understand where they are getting advice from.
FWIW - I think this is one of the nicest digital sites on the web with unbiased information, and biased information presented in the proper light.
Des

-- Dan Desjardins (dan.desjardins@avstarnews.com), August 03, 1999.