It's simple enough. There are a lot of great things to do and see in the Chippewa Valley. And there are lots of businesses and organizations that get lost in the mix because they're

• Small
• Don't have a lot of money
• Don't have any good ways to promote themselves
• Are local - they're not Wal-Mart, or any other sort of big business that has a big budget and a lot of name recognition

So - we're trying to help with that.

The Chippewa Guide is a guide to all the things that make the Chippewa Valley special. Local organizations, businesses, restaurants, web sites, and people. It's a collaborative guide. What we mean by that is that it will be built by the community. You can all contribute - and we're hoping you will.

In the long run, we hope to offer a lot of different services, but for the moment we're going to be starting small. The guide will contain information about local businesses and organizations. You can add your own business, or organization to the guide - just fill out the form, and you'll appear within a few days. We intend to make sure that a basic listing on the guide is always free, so that nobody wll be left out because of cost.

The guide will also include much fancier listings which will include pictures, audio, video, and more. These won't be free, but we're working on keeping them very low-cost because you'll add them in yourselves. Trust us, this is going to work.

Finally, we have event listings. These are also self-service. You can add events to the site by filling in a form, and we will almost always approve them unless they are somehow not family-friendly, illegal, or for some such reason.

We're going to be launching the site in May. For now this is just a short demonstration of what it will be like after it launches.

Thanks for listening.