The National Association of Mortgage Brokers (NAMB) will be holding their western regional conference (NAMB/WEST) in Vegas in early November.  These conferences are great networking opportunities whether you are a broker, loan officer, branch manager, or industry service provider (you guys should have booths!) so if you’re in the West try to take advantage of this great opportunity.

I contacted the people in charge of NAMB/WEST about promoting the event (for free) here on MBL and met a luke-warm reception, at best.  I suppose I’d be skeptical as well if someone from “the internets” randomly emailed me with an offer for free advertising (okay, so maybe I was hoping to get hooked up with a free “attendee” pass for the event as a token of good will for my efforts in promoting NAMB/WEST, but I wasn’t going to ask for it nor do I care that I won’t be getting it) to my target audience around 2,000 strong.

Turns out I’m legit and I’m not going to hold it against them because I’m a strong believer in the value of these conferences, regardless of what industry you’re in.  Anyone who is going send me a private message through the forums or email me and we’ll get together for dinner or drinks.

There is a new feature here at MortgageBrokerLand - a mortgage wiki.  Wikis are community-driven collections of pages that anyone can add, edit, or nominate for deletion.

The purpose of the wiki here at MBL is to provide a place where any of our growing 1,800+ members can provide easy to find industry related information for anyone’s benefit.

Why add a wiki to a site that already has forums?  Good question.  Wikis are different in that you can edit a page over and over and over again while forums simply allow you to create new posts.  So forums are good for conversation while wikis are good for refining and perfecting valuable information.  You can liken the value of a wiki to that of the wisdom of crowds.

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally gotten ’round to completing the user directory here at MBL. There are a number of new links toward the top of the site for the various categories in the directory, which are meant to help users find others by what they do.

As the site grows, so will the directory. New categories are possible and if you belong to one that doesn’t appear please feel free to contact me with a suggestion.

Here are some answers to (what will probably be) common questions about the directory:

• How do you get a picture/logo by your listing in the directory?

  First, you must be a V.I.P. Member, then you must upload a profile picture in your user control panel.

• How do you get a bolded box around your listing?

  You must be a sponsor, which will also put you at the top of the list.

• Who shows up first in the list?

  First, sponsors. Next, members are listed by their MBL score. The MBL score is a combination of total posts in the forums and reputation points received from other members. Therefore, the more you post and the better quality posts you make, the higher you will be in the directory.

• Do you have to participate in the directory?

  No. You can opt-out through the control panel.

• Why participate in the directory?

  For service/product providers the answer to this question should be obvious. For originators: borrowers reach MBL through search engines all the time, and may find you through the directory.