This Thanksgiving, we are featuring five gadgets that you can add to your Windows Live Spaces or Live.com page. They include:

• Directions
• Weather
• Today Show’s Recipe Search
• Calorie Calculator
• and to round out the fun, Cocktail Mix Flash Gadget

You can check them out on the main gadgets page. We plan to have relevant items showcase for similar occasions so get your creative juices flowing and create items that may be useful for the coming holidays!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Windows Live Gallery team!

Katarina Ling – Program Manager

Tags are keywords that you can add to an item on Gallery to help others find similar stuff when they search or browse. Here’s an example of how tagging works. Let’s say you are browsing the site and come across the Blockade Sidebar Gadget. After reading a little bit about this item, you think it reminds you of a game you like to play called "Tetris", so you add a tag "Tetris". Tagging Blockade as "Tetris" makes Blockade easier to find when someone else is looking for a game like Tetris, because now Blockade will be grouped with any other gadget that shares the "Tetris" tag.

So here are a few tips and best practices on tagging:

• Whenever you add a tag, please use a meaningful word that will help others find the item. Please do not add tags that are email addresses, url's or other irrelevant pieces of information, since these are not helpful to the rest of the Gallery community.

• You can add as many tags as you want. 

• If you find a tag that seems inappropriate, use the Report Abuse link to report it for review. Tags can be removed by our team if they violate the Terms of Use and Code of Conduct.

You might have noticed that the tags on each item's page are also links. If you click on it, you'll find other items with the same tag. If you want to see all the tags in a particular section of Gallery, you can do so when you browse (As an example, try browsing the Toolbar buttons section) Click the "Popular tags" link on the left side of the page to see the list. Then click a tag to find all the items in this section with this tag. We hope that you'll find this to be an easy way to discover new or related items on Gallery. :)

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

In the past few months, we have made improvements to Windows Live Gallery based on feedback we have received from you. Your feedback has helped us improve our abuse reporting to include reviews and tags, better the navigation so you can find the information you are looking for and add several other features. But – we need more feedback – we want to know how we’re doing and what you think we should be doing to improve. It’s easy to send feedback. Go directly to the Gallery Feedback page or follow the steps below:

1. Go to the Gallery site
2. Click the "Send feedback" link in the left hand navigation column to get to our feedback page.
3. “Type of feedback” drop down option lets you specify the gallery area you want to give feedback for. This field is optional.
4. Write your feedback in the text area.
5. We have added a new drop down which lets you specify your likelihood to recommend gallery to others. This field is optional.
6. Click Submit and you are done – it’s that easy :)

That’s it! We go through feedback and feature requests regularly as we plan our future direction.

Junaid Basir - Program Manager

We are really excited by the response of the community towards Windows Live Gallery. Not only are people actively engaged in posting reviews and tagging items, but a lot of you have also been busy submitting items for inclusion on the site. Since our launch, Gallery has posted over 1300 items contributed by the community. Most of our top downloads in each of the sections on Gallery are those created by the community. We are thrilled to see this kind of engagement and are developing a process to highlight community contributions.

To get the ball rolling, we have handpicked a few Web and Windows Vista Sidebar gadgets that caught our attention and put them in our Featured items module. They are:

1. Live Clock
2. GMT Clock
3. Hot or Not
4. Outlook Info
5. Media Player Shuffle Gadget

Take a look and see what you think of these items. If you find an item on the site you think should be featured, send us feedback. We would like to highlight popular, unusual, and interesting items from the community in other categories as well.  In addition, we are thinking about doing a contest for item creators on the site with winners getting featured status; do you like the idea?

As a member of the Gallery community, you and others like you have been indispensable in improving the site and making its content richer. Thanks and keep those submissions coming!

Junaid Basir - Program Manager