As real NEO is a huge place, with years of content or every sort on a broad range of subjects from 100s of sources, I thought I'd share some of my experiences navigating this community.

First off, remember you can simply "Search" the site for any keyword... go to SEARCH here.

If I'm browsing rather than searching, the first thing I check out is the center column of recent posts to see what's new - always surprising.

Then, I watch the blocks... in the right margin top are comments - those are always fascinating, and I like to interact with the other members here.

Then we have today's popular content, and below that is especially revealing... "Last Viewed". You may not realize that REALNEO gets 100,000s of hits a month from all over the world, and postings are also published to a huge number of news-readers and aggregators around the world - we're read in CEO aggregators, and Technorati, and urban planning sites - the RSS feeds 1,000s of minds a day... and the technology searches like a dream... post something today and it is on google in 24 hours... "Last Viewed" shows what the world is actually reading on realneo real-time, so I'm fascinating what people are reading about NEO at any moment, as that is our imprint world-wide... at the moment I'm writing this the world is reading:

• A Utopian Vision
• Vision Downtown
• Ideas reports on FFOEF seeking Voices & Choices for NEO, led by America Speaks
• City Club 01.19.05: David E. Gilbert - CEO, Greater Cleveland Sports Commission
• 04.08.05 - 04.10.05: Notacon - Exploring Community through Technology
• Dashboard project
• Origins of the word 'burbilly
• 04.12.05 REALNEO@REI Orientation
• Midwest BioFuels Announces its First Retail Biodiesel Pump in Northeast Ohio

Active Foum Posts could be exciting if we used forums more centrally - most of the realneo content gets posted as pages, blogs or events so forums don't change as ofter... we'll make better use of this content type in the future.

Then, there's "My Buddy List" - I use the internat messaging alot and putting friends into the buddy column makes then easy to find... below the list it their most recent posts.

Below that is a feed of content from other NEO blogs, which could stand for some updating.

In the left top block is the Forum navigation - these are in categories, which need to be ipdates, but here is where to go see the lists of forums by category, and add forum topics - check them out.

Below we have search, and then upcoming events, whch are not very complete these days, as people are not posting them... I can't keep up with my own events much less everyone elses so pleae add these yourself.

Below is the very important "Navigation Block" - of course you should be familiar with all these links... if not, take a look. With the upcoming upgrades to the REALNEO technology, and if you decide to become a REALNEO editor or admin, you will have lots more of these to navigate... as an admin, I have dozens, at several levels.

Then we have a block that says "Who's On-line" and even now, at 1:37 AM, there are 10 people on REALNEO, including three of my buddies... if I want to say hi, I can click on their name and the contact tab and send them a message... that is a very useful feature.

All that said, I skipped over the top left navigation menu, of the primary "sustainability" community topics... like the sections of a newspaper... and the top right menu has quick links to

calendar   create content   forums   blogs   RSS feeds   updates   search   about

    contact REALNEO

   updates  is especially useful to see what's happened on REALNEO when. A huge number of people go to "about" so that is an area in need of more attention.

That's enough pointers for now... and since I've been writing this, in the last few minutes, here's what others have been doing at realneo...