Well I wasn't going to talk about this here yet, but it appears to be a better idea than even I thought! Today I launched a new site called www.HelpDeskTalk.com, a forum for the help desk community.

This came about because of my own personal need to keep track of trends in the help desk world. In most semi-technical industries this can pretty easily be done by tracking blogs and forums. Over the past year I've found that this isn't really the case for the help desk community. There are some good blogs out there, but not as many as you might think. As for forums, well there's basically none.

A few of the of the help desk organizations have them but they're unused. I believe because most are behind 2 layers of authorization. First a general membership login, then a forum system login. Beyond those it's mostly limited to sub-forums of larger IT boards where the help desk topics are so buried as to be impossible to find.

So HelpDeskTalk was born. While I know there's a need I've been surprised by the response I've gotten in just the few emails I sent around. In fact it's already gotten several inbound links. One from Rob in the Salt Lake City HDI chapter and another from on of my favorite help desk bloggers, Mike McBride.

I'm also noting with everyone that this is a community effort and not a money making one. There's no ads and I hope to keep it that way. I don't see why I wouldn't unless it gets popular enough to where it's actually costing significant money to run, though even then I'd be inclined to just eat the cost or perhaps share with another organization.

The site is also a nice example of how darn flexible the HelpSpot portal templates are. It literally took about 5 CSS changes and a few images to set it up.

I know a lot of you may not be in the target audience for this type of site, but as always I'd love to hear your feedback if you have ideas for improvement. Things are light over there right now since I just flipped the switch so I'd also encourage you to add a post if you have a relevant topic.

Link love for the new site is also greatly appreciated ;-)