My friends and family all know that I’ve been working extra-long hours for the last 6 months or so, and that I’ve stepped that up to super-extra-long hours for the last month or so. But, I’m pretty sure that only a handful of people know what we’ve been building and what it’s good for. As my mom said, “I got the email about your site, but I’m sure it’s too technical for me.” Not so, Mom! Even if you don’t have a use for ContentBoxer right now, it’s pretty easy to understand.

“ContentBoxer lets you share any type of digital content (such as documents, music, video, and images) in exchange for personal information (such as name, address, favorite ice cream flavor, and so on).”

There are plenty of sites out there that let you share digital content – for example, Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, and so forth. There are also plenty of sites that let you create custom forms and surveys. What ContentBoxer does is to tie the two types of sites together and combine it with the back-end reporting software we’ve developed over the last 6 years and used on hundreds of projects for our publishing clients.

While our initial focus is on satisfying a need for self-service user registration forms for our publishing clients, we’ve also created a free version of ContentBoxer that you can experiment with today for any purpose you can think of! Some of the ideas we’ve come up with for using this service include:

* For musicians – post songs and gather email addresses from people who download them

* For realtors – require people to give you their contact information before viewing your listings

* For authors – self-publish your ebook, or give away a sample chapter

I’m positive that there are thousands of uses for ContentBoxer that we haven’t imagined yet. I’m looking forward to seeing what our users come up with!