If you haven’t already, sign up for free at giveamonkey.com, create a wish list, name it Christmas 2009 or something equally imaginative, and start adding the things you want for Christmas. You can send an invitation to view your Christmas list so that all your friends and family can reserve, buy or just get inspiration from items on your wish list.

Of course giveamonkey.com doesn’t just mean making your own wish list, you can create gift lists for your loved ones too - a short-list Christmas list if you will. You could even share your ideas by sending your gift lists to the rest of your friends so you can collaborate on present-buying.

Stuck for Christmas gift ideas? Browse our featured gift ideas for wish list inspiration. And don’t forget that by quickly installing the Giftermonkey tool you can add gifts to your Christmas list from anywhere on the web. Spot something by chance? Add it in a matter of seconds.

And if you’ve not already arranged a New Year’s Eve party, it’s not too late - use the giveamonkey.com party planner to organise a party to kiss goodbye to 2009, and have all your friends upload photos and videos to commemorate the event! You can even use our venue finder to search for the best venue. Too lazy to organise a party? View the public events to find a New Year’s Eve party and leave the clearing up to someone else…

Remember, remember, the 5th November? Yup – that was yesterday. But we Brits don’t like to let the trivial matter of a date get in the way of a good celebration.

Take a look through our public events for some of the belated Guy Fawkes Night events happening. One example is the Westway Fireworks Display in London W10 on Saturday 7th November. Not JUST a bonfire and fireworks display, the event organisers have even booked in fire jugglers! We’re almost failing to resist the urge to write stacks of puns around the fire theme, so we’ll keep this post short.

If you’ve got a burning desire (too late) to see the skies light up this weekend, take a look at the giveamonkey public events page and then take your pick!

Have a great weekend

Love, the giveamonkey team

But make sure, whether you’re attending a public firework display or organising your own fireworks night, that you keep you, your family, your animals and your property safe. Or the oohs and aaahs will be followed by owwws and aaaarghs.

• Keep a safe distance when you’re watching
• Never hold a lit firework (make sure you’re even careful with those sparklers!)
• Keep a bucket of sand and a bucket of water handy
• Keep animals safe indoors - they’re not so keen on the pretty lights and entertaining whoosh, scream, bang noises
• Unless you really are a rocket scientist, don’t make your own fireworks
• Once you’ve lit the fuse, retire to a safe distance quickly (be VERY careful about approaching a firework you think hasn’t lit properly)

Basically, don’t do what THIS guy does…

It’d be easy to get a little despondent, but fireworks night is coming! Have YOU got something planned? If not, WHY not? Create an event to remember now.

What with it all being a bit wet outside, we’ve stayed indoors and cheered ourselves up by looking at a few www.giveamonkey.com reviews:

http://www.girlgeekchic.com/posts/1820 - thanks Nikki!

We’ve had a stack of votes for being a best-in-class web 2.0 service at Killer Startups: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web20/giveamonkey-com-having-an-organized-life

There’s also a four-and-a-half star review at App Appeal: http://www.appappeal.com/app/giveamonkey/ - thanks chaps!

Aaaah, now we feel toasty inside…

Become a member of www.giveamonkey.com before the 10^th of November, create at least one wish list and one event, and we’ll enter you into a fantastic prize draw to win either

· £50 for you to spend towards items on your wish list – so you can get started on fulfilling your Christmas wishes

OR

· the free hire of a secret London bar* (clue – it’s in the NW1 postal code…) for at least 50 people! Bet that’s got you in the mood for celebrating!

So sign up to www.giveamonkey.com as soon as you can - and tell your friends!

Good luck, and happy shopping!

Love, the giveamonkey team

* free bar hire only includes the hire, and is only for over 18s. If you sign up to giveamonkey.com and you’re under 18 you are still able to choose the £50 towards your wishes

But before we kiss goodbye to autumn even before it’s arrived, there are a couple of events we’re already receiving invitations for: Guy Fawkes Night and Halloween. So if you’ve not already organised a bewitching night of fun, now’s the time to use giveamonkey’s party planning feature to spook your friends on 31 October. You could even search our public events for ghostly goings-on if you’d rather get your frights somewhere new.
Fireworks night follows swiftly on the heels of Halloween – remember, remember, the 5th of November… Set the sky ablaze with rockets and Catherine wheels – but make sure you do it safely. You can use the party planner to provide all the details for either event, and even tie in a wish list to make sure people bring those all-important accessories: toffee apples, pumpkin pie, sparklers and whatever else you need to make your party go with a bang.

Make the most of autumn, because the clocks go back on 25th October, and the countdown to Christmas begins. Before you suddenly find yourself in December with mum and dad nagging you to put together a Christmas list, use the Giftermonkey tool to keep your Christmas wish list stocked up with gift ideas for friends and family – there’s no sense of trepidation when unwrapping a present from a distant uncle when your Christmas wish list is full of everything you could ever want.

As you may already know, you can add items to your wish lists from any website on the internet, but we also have featured gifts from our partner stores. And those stores are growing in number – our newest giveamonkey shopping partners include Nike, Marks and Spencer, Not On The High Street and Red Letter Days – so there’s something for everyone, no matter what their wish may be.

And if getting out and about, now that the nights are drawing in, seems more important than ever, we’re constantly adding new venues to our featured venues list – the last month has seen a particular boom in Kent and the South East of England.

Don’t forget to sign up to the RSS feed for the latest developments here at giveamonkey.com

Tired of trying to organise parties by email (after all does everyone have ALL their real friends and family on social networking sites?) and fed up with trawling the web for gift ideas after receiving unimaginative Christmas lists from her family, she knew a party and wish list website had to make things easier.

Nothing she could find on the web offered her a truly intuitive event/party planning and wish list solution, so she set about having a site developed. But it had to do more than just list gifts…it had to be completely interactive, social, flexible, simple to use, and above all, totally free for the user.

One thought led to the next, and soon giveamonkey didn’t just suggest gift ideas to populate birthday lists, wedding lists and so forth, but let the user organise any kind of celebration, anywhere they want. A full invitation and RSVP service with Google maps, space to share photographs, videos and friends’ comments was, in the ever-more social world of the internet, vital. Soon Tammi began to establish relationships with venues where users might host their parties or events. Not only can venue owners and promoters have every venue listed publicly with a complete description, reviews and photographs, but they can also manage contacts, bookings and attendance numbers through the site. As an added bonus for both users and promoters, giveamonkey highlights featured events and hotspots on a weekly basis.

Where giveamonkey differs enormously though is the ability to organise your social life all in one place. Nowhere else can you research possible venues, create a dedicated party page which can be public or private, send invitations, thank-you notes as well as providing related gift lists for attendees. At a glance you can see a full list of parties you’re hosting and invited to, wish lists you’ve created and the gift lists of friends and family. And because interaction through social media was always the ultimate wish, giveamonkey allows users to post their wish lists and events to Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites with a couple of clicks of the mouse. On top of this your friends don’t have to join to view or accept your invites or even buy from your wish lists – so even social network-phobes can use giveamonkey.com.

And talking of wish lists, not only can members use the giftermonkey bookmarking tool to add items to their wish list from any site on the internet, but giveamonkey also features suggested gift ideas from a variety of online retailers. So if you’re stuck for inspiration you can search featured gifts or even browse wish lists which users have chosen to make public. giveamonkey’s ever-expanding network of retailers and product suppliers can choose which products to promote, and suggest to the giveamonkey team which items will have popular appeal.

To the giveamonkey team (as it soon evolved to be, with Daniel, Aimee, Courtney and Anthony joining the ranks), what was also important was that the spirit of giveamonkey wasn’t solely about having fun, but encouraging people to give a little back. To that end wish lists were expanded to include charity pledges. So a birthday list might include either request to donate to a chosen charity, such as “pledge £5 to the RNLI”, or a personal pledge such as “take me on a walk by the sea”. giveamonkey’s own profits will be no exception to the mantra of giving: the site has pledged to donate 10% of its profits to charity annually.

Timing is crucial of course. September is back to school time, the nights are drawing in, and, reluctantly or otherwise, thoughts begin to turn to the festive season. With Halloween, Guy Fawkes Night and various other holidays cropping up between now and Christmas giveamonkey has appeared at the right time to make party planning and present-buying that bit easier.

So not only can users organise their perfect Christmas, share family gift lists and organise all their party invitations in one place, but they can hunt down public parties to attend. New Year’s Eve too stressful to host? Friends all bogged down with prior responsibilities? The public party search lets users search for open venues and events to attend and your diary lets you see if you have double booked and enter reminders for mundane appointments – dentist anyone?

Next on the giveamonkey wish list is a party in October to celebrate the hard launch. Will it be organised through giveamonkey.com? What better way could there be?

Our trial period was extremely successful, and we’d like to thank all our trial participants for their help, patience and feedback. Special congratulations to Steph, who won our £100 voucher.

We’ve made it easier for you to share your wish lists with all your friends as well as get more people involved thanks to our giveamonkey.com Facebook page, MySpace page, and you can also follow us on Twitter.

We are already expanding our list of charity pledges so you can make charity donations of your choice, and we’re working with our partners to add even more featured hotspots (recommended venues) to host your special event, whether a London nightclub or a safari park. With 38 pages of top quality venues already available to host your special occasion, you’ll see more added on a regular basis.

Our retail partners are increasing too. We’ve thousands of gift ideas to help you put together your wishlists, so whether you’re already dreaming up your Christmas wish list or want a wedding list which doesn’t restrict your guests to just one shop – it’s time to sign up for a free account with giveamonkey.com and make use of the Giftermonkey tool wherever you are shopping online.