Many thanks to all who gave us some feedback on the future of Notes from Spain.
The main conclusion (yours and ours) was not to meddle too much and to carry on doing what we have been doing so far, which essentially means producing lots of podcasts and, to an extent, making the rest up as we go along! So nothing will change too much, but we certainly do intend to expand in new interesting directions.
For a start we hope to get the Spanish conversations going a bit better in the forums (maybe with the help of some competitions – if anyone wants to offer a prize, please contact me!), we want to add more video and pictures (including billboards and ad hoardings, as requested 
), we are going to make it possible to put your video in the forums and, above all, we want to carry on building on and encouraging the fantastic Spain and Spanish-loving community we have in the forums.
Finally, we want to make NFS more useful, by offering useful services to visitors to the site. I have no idea what that means yet, but our aim has always been to make this one of the best Spain sites on the net, and as such the more useful it is the better. Any ideas?
One of my favourite bits of your feedback, which we shall try to follow to the letter, was that it is better to be “slightly arnarchic, unplanned and flexible. Embracing serendipity, idulging your instincts and seeing where it takes you could, as it has, be the most successful plan.” Sounds like fun to me!
Frank
17 Oct 06 at 12:26 pm
As the site gets bigger, and content expands, you’ll probably find the need for more advertising to fund this, and hopefully make you some money! All of us are adult enough to know that advertising is what keeps these free sites going eventually, but I just hope you do not go the way of a particualar photographic site I visit. There it started very small, has now become very successful, taken on quite a lot of staff, and the advertising has now become overpowering, especially as they have lots of the flash adverts, all flashing and cycling, they drive you mad! (or they do me!) The only way I view the site now is in Mozilla Firefox with the extension Adblock running, which blanks out the adverts. It seems the advertisers are calling the tune as to what type of adverts the want on the site.
Just my 2p worth!
Ben
18 Oct 06 at 4:29 pm
Don’t worry, I know advertising will play its part, but not the horrible ugly kind!
Seán
27 Oct 06 at 8:02 pm
Advertising isn’t always an evil to be avoided at all costs; it can, in fact, be very useful if truly relevant to the site content. I have just found a very useful ad for a publisher of Hebrew children’s books on a free site. It would never have occured to me to go looking.
Summary: pertinent advertising is a complement to a good site not a burden.
Seán