You join the online community by entering your e-mail address in the Subscribe Today field located on the top right of any page on this site. After doing so you'll be taken to a page to set up payment and sent a confirmation e-mail making sure you really want to join. If you do, you can just reply to the e-mail or click on the confirmation link.

You'll then be sent a welcome message and be ready to take part in the discussion. What does that mean exactly? Once you sign up, you'll be able to login to the online community and read all the past posts, respond to them if you wish, and create new posts of your own.

You don't ever have to post anything if you don't want to. You can be a fly on the wall or a very active participant, it's entirely up to you!

When you first sign up, you'll be subscribed to receive the posts in the main discussion by e-mail. If you don't want to receive them by e-mail you just click a button in the community and they'll stop. And if you ever want to receive them again, you just click the button again.

Example for how it all works: I have a question about recycled paper. We're committed to using 100% recycled paper for our long distance bills at Red Jellyfish but we're paying a huge premium for them. So I post a message on the community asking if anybody knows of a good source for 100% recycled paper at a reasonable rate.

Two other list members know of a good source for inexpensive, high-quality, 100% recycled paper. They each go to the community and respond to my post.

The result? Thanks to the help of community members I've found a source for our recycled paper that costs 50% less than what we're spending now, saving Red Jellyfish thousands of dollars a year.

But there were also several other community members who didn't originate the post, didn't respond to it, but saw the whole thing. They now also know of a good source for inexpensive recycled paper and take action as well, saving their companies thousands of dollars a year.

Everybody benefits by being involved. Once again, you can initiate discussions, reply to discussions, or just sit back and soak it all in.

I hope this answers any questions you might have. If not, please feel free to drop me a line and ask me what's on your mind.

- Jason Trout