The first quarter of 2009 has gone already, so it's time to announce our first winners of 2009!

Also, now that we've had time to see which competitions are the most popular, I'm keeping those as quarterlies and moving some of the others to yearly format so there are a good number of entries come judging time. This will also give everyone longer to vote on entries and help make the competitions more useful as people can see what aspects of their entries need work and what they're doing particularly well.

Congrats to all the entrants, the level of entries has been consistently high across the board! And a big thank you to our member Hippie for organising another of his one-off kit contests, the Pick Up Playoff, which has been a massive success!

New contests in the categories that are staying quarterly will be going up shortly.

- LaToya

Thanks to everyone who entered all the competitions, we had some great entries and here are the winners!

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I just wanted to welcome all the new members who signed up at the K&C event and say congratulations to all the raffle winners and to Christian and Marie for doing such a great job signing 52 new members up for the site and getting lots more ToyPedia volunteers!

Thanks also to I.C. Toys for providing the raffle prizes. First Prize of a Limited Edition Britains Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Regimental Band Set was won by Morton. The ten runners-up who each get a set of Britains Welsh Guards Receiving the Colour are Davidmac, Gary, Pastocker, Paul4, Pope1, Stonewall, Summerfeet, TheMan, Tyler44 and Ukreb.

Here are a couple of pictures from the event;

Christian and Marie manning our stand, with members Lionel Gaurier and Mike Blake

Marie and our raffle prizes!

Thanks to James Begg for the photos!

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- LaToya

After the recent thefts from the Toy Museum of Stockholm, we have created a special area of the site for Theft Reports. We hope it will be very seldom used, but feel that it might be a useful resource. You can find it here in the marketplace.

Anybody who would like to use Toy Collector to alert the collecting community about a theft of this sort should make a blog post about it and then alert LaToya so she can copy the post across to this section.

And of course, everybody should always stay vigilant and if you suspect you might be being offered stolen items, please report this to the relevant authorities. Our thoughts are with the Stockholm Toy Museum and we hope their items are found and returned very swiftly.

LaToya

We've added a great new tool to the site to allow you to give us feedback on what you think should be changed.

Across the site, you'll see a little tab called "Feedback" on the extreme left hand side of your screen. Clicking on it will give you a floating popup with a choice of things about the site you can vote on - just click on whichever you think is the most pressing issue.

There's also a link called "Go To Our Feedback Forum" which will take you to an offiste forum where you can give us your own ideas on what needs doing to the site. It's all anonymous and it won't interfere with your browsing of the site, as everything either opens in a popup or another browser tab.

LaToya

Toy Collector is now on Twitter! You can get updates on what's going on with me and the site here - there are full instructions on how it works and how to sign up on the site if you're unfamiliar with it!

LaToya

Mellow60s is our Member of the Month for March. He holds the record for making the most use of the most Toy Collector features in the fastest time, filling out all the details on his profile, blogging prolifically, creating a gallery and filling it with great pics of his collection of rubber toys, posting in the Want Ads, adding a Yellow Pages listing AND contributing to ToyPedia all within his first week on the site!

Well done, Mellow60s and we look forward to seeing much more of your fantastic collection!

Toy Collector's Events section is now the largest calendar of toy and model-related events on the web!

As of right now, there are over 270 events worldwide (and counting!), including everything from auctions and museum exhibitions to swapmeets and club events. As you're probably aware, we've divided it up by geographical region to make it easy for users worldwide to access details of events near them. The current region categories are:

• Australia
• Asia
• France
• Germany
• Netherlands
• UK
• Rest of Europe
• Canada
• USA
• South Africa, South America & Mexico

If you've got an event to add, the section is still totally interactive, so you can easily just upload it yourself with as much info about it as you like. Past events expire automatically, too, so you don't need to worry about the calendar being out of date!

D G Models and White Tower Miniatures have kindly agreed to help us by supplying information from their archives.‚   Also, Kevin from Kevin's Hobbies is contributing 19,328 model cars in 1/18 (We didn't even know there were that many!).

Plus, we have now uploaded the images from four more Bonhams' sales (as well as those from the first two Christie's sales) to our Gallery

You can see the whole list of companies that have offered to help build ToyPedia here.

Exciting news, everybody - ToyPedia has landed!

After much great work on behalf of the development team, we are finally up and running as of tonight. As you're no doubt aware, ToyPedia is our wiki-based project that aims to catalogue every toy and model ever made, Wikipedia-style!

You can check it out by clicking the "ToyPedia" link on the red menu above. Not all the functionality is in place just yet - as of right now, you can edit pages that already exist in the Wiki, but you can't create new ones. If you do want to add items or manufacturers, you'll need to contact me.

Of course, now more than ever, we're looking for volunteers with lots of juicy information about toy brands and their product ranges to help us get started filling in the Wiki. If you'd like to help, then click here or click on "Volunteering" on the yellow menu once you're on the ToyPedia homepage.

So now it's finally here, make sure you go and check it out and let me know your thoughts and ideas! We hope you enjoy using it as much as we enjoyed setting it up!

- LaToya

jclevering is our Member of the Month for February, thanks to his hugely prolific blogging - he has a total of 26 blog posts, putting him just three posts behind our leading blogger, previous Member of the Month modelcarfreak!

So far, he's blogged about everything from DAF cars to Abrex Skodas to the Paris-Dakar Rally and the European Car of the Year in miniature, complete with some great unusual pictures. We look forward to hopefully seeing much more from him in the coming year.

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Toy Collector is pleased to welcome Marie Lupo, who is helping us out for the next six months.

Marie is from Grenoble and is in her second year at business school at CERAM in Nice. She wants to pursue a career in Communications and Marketing in an international environment, and has a degree in Communication and Sales Techniques. Marie will be helping us out across the site to increase membership and make it better than ever for all our users.

We're glad to have her and we're sure you will be too!

Thanks to all your feedback, we're aware that a lot of you have found the galleries a bit tricky to use in terms of creating a gallery and uploading content. As such, we've just given them a bit of an overhaul with new icons that include text (rather than just tooltips) to make it clearer what they do.

This should make it a lot easier and quicker for you to create galleries and upload your pictures. As always, let me know what you think of the changes and if you have any more suggestions!

LaToya

Due to the positive response we've had from members to our news updates section, I'm trying to get them out a little more often.

So, with apologies to Aston Auctions, Special Auction Services and Wm. Hocker, all of whom were equally helpful last year, but who didn't get their own dedicated news releases, I'd like to announce that we've now received the first 1,000 images from Bonhams Toy Department, who will be sharing all their toy photos with us. These first ones date from their auctions way back in 2000, and you can now see them in the Bonhams Gallery here.

Bonhams will also be giving us all their auction results, which we'll be feeding into ToyPedia.

There are some great items there, so enjoy!

Rare First World War Harwin and Co Allied Teddy bear, English 1916-1918
The blonde mohair bear with glass eye, swivel head and stitched nose, mouth and claws, jointed at shoulders and hips and having cloth paw pads, dressed in the uniform of a First World War officer, (right eye missing), 25cm (10in) tall.

Sold for ‚ £4,080 inclusive of Buyer's Premium

With the success of our book reviews section, we've just launched a new reviews section. Now you can review products and models too!

At the moment, we have categories for reviewing diecast vehicles, model plane kits, model car and other vehicle kits, and tools and supplies. If there's something you'd like to review, but it doesn't fall into any of those categories, please let me know, and I'll set up a suitable category for you.

Just one thing - when reviewing, please do remember that this section is for reviews of new products that are currently on sale at the time the review is being posted. If you want to talk about vintage or obsolete toys, you can do so in the blogs to your heart's content!

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LaToya