• February 28, 2008

With the introduction of MY SHOT, National Geographic magazine will give thousands of users the option to create their own Web pages at www.ngm.com to display their photographs and interact with them through the site's cutting-edge jigsaw puzzle and memory-sorting game applications.

Page views for National Geographic magazine's YOUR SHOT have increased from 140,000 a month to nearly 14 million in January 2008 since the feature was revamped in summer 2007.

Susan Welchman, photo editor for National Geographic Magazine Online, selects the 12 best user-submitted images and posts them every weekday as the "Daily Dozen." Through an online feature called "The Voting Machine," visitors to the site can rate Daily Dozen photos on a scale of 1 to 10 each month. The photo that visitors rate highest each month is published in National Geographic magazine itself, which reaches 40 million readers a month worldwide. Online ratings for February selections close March 7, 2008.

More than 5,000 photographs a month are being submitted to National Geographic's YOUR SHOT. Any visitor who submits photographs will have the option to become a MY SHOT member and be able to upload and save 100 photographs on their page. Additional photo storage becomes available for members who make it into the "Daily Dozen."

MY SHOT comes on the heels of an extensive redesign of the NGM.com Web site launched Feb. 14. The site has a fresh look with enhanced user-participation opportunities. Among many new features are a video hub centralizing video content, a wiki-style feature called GeoPedia that's attached to feature stories from the magazine, a daily map linked to current events, and three new widgets, with more to come.

--Tanya Irwin