My name is Maria and I'm a Text Analytics specialist. That basically means I create new technology in the advanced search space - I have a PhD in Artificial Intelligence (Computational Linguistics). The technology I create finds useful information in texts/documents, so DigiFree is a fun toy system I play with in this space - it finds useful things (i.e., freebies) in texts (i.e., blogs). But because it's a computer program it's not 100% accurate. I apologise in advance for when the system might get it wrong, particularly when it finds things that are not freebies or are inappropriate. I always try to identify inappropriate content and remove it quickly and fortunately it doesn't happen much! Sometimes the system will also think a blog is a freebie blog but it's actually for downloading other stuff like games. So I do need to keep an eye on it. I keep a tight reign on the blogs listed because they are the only place the system looks in for links to new blogs which are not known to the system yet. So the minute a non-scrapbooking blog (like a software download blog) gets picked up by the system, it can go wild finding more & more blogs like this! So I have to dig to find the root cause and strip it out. I have a bunch of things that the system logs so that I can do this. But it does take time. When I go on leave I let the system run alone but stop it from adding any potential new blogs. My job is pretty intense so sometimes I don't get to look at things in enough detail during the week. I do most of it on the weekend but I also like to spend time with my family!
I live in Sydney in Australia with my husband and our two great kids. According to the book "Men are from Mars, Women from Venus" I'm from Mars and my husband is from Venus. I've been doing digital scrapbooking since 2005 and I also have a design blog. I miss that paper/texture of "real" scrapbooking, but I love the fact I can print multiple copies of my layouts for friends and family and I can archive the originals and they will not be destroyed by fire or flood. To me these are the main reasons why I do it digi!
My family are also into digi - My mother's site is Cutie Pie Pics and my oldest sister's blog is Blue Elephant Studio. I have two other sisters but they don't have blogs (yet).
If you have gone through all the instructions in the FAQ and your site fails to show up, use the forum to find messages where others have had similar problems and if you are unique then post a message on there which I will try to answer as soon as I can. But please, please remember this is just a hobby. To give you some idea of how much time maintaining this blog can take, even if I spend only 5 minutes checking each blog and only 10 people ask me to check theirs per day, that's 50 minutes less time I have with my children that day… and there are almost 5000 blogs listed here now. I love my life so I put my family first, then my (full-time) work, my closest friends and then DigiFree ;-) I honestly don't have time to respond to every query so please do the above before contacting me. And remember that I really appreciate all my readers a LOT! If I don't seem to respond I'm probably working 80 hours that week :-(
