As promised, we now have a live poll on ZRecommends.com to promote a single Bottom or Middle Tier sippy cup to Top Pick status based on reader acclaim. Take a look in the righthand column of the site (underneath the recent comments box) and cast your vote! The poll will close at the end of the day on June 1.

Gardenaut has scored five new blogging gardener contributors - Janelle from Healthy Child, Healthy World; Jen from Rolling Through Looneyville; Tara from The Organic Sister; Amy from The Gift of Green; and Virginia from Seattle! (That's Jen in the photo above; I can't decide which is funnier, that photo or the portrait we used on Gardenaut. In the end, I think the other one is actually funnier, because she and her baby are doing a great job of pretending Jen is not getting licked by a cow.) We started publishing their first posts last week, and they'll be in the mix along with our existing crop of contributors.

We are currently looking for guest contributions for Gardenaut - one-time posts from folks with their own blogs. All you need to do is write a post you'd publish on your blog anyway, send it to us instead at editors (at) zrecs (dot) com with a photo or two (480 pixels wide is best) along with the name of your blog and a link to it, and we'll get back to you quickly to either tell you when it's scheduled to publish it or to encourage you to publish it on your own blog if for some reason we don't think it's a good fit. If we do choose to publish it we'll feature a prominent link and shout-out to your own blog in the post and promote the post in other ways too, and you and your blog will get some great exposure to our readership.

We've added a cool new flip-through-it list of PRIZEY giveaways on our network home page in the righthand column. It's the same list you can see on PRIZEY, but brings that blog's data to the network home page, further pushing us along the path to making ZRecs.com a true "dashboard" and hub of information for ZRecs readers, joining our stream of comment conversations (a great way to find a discussion to dive into) and of most posts on ZRecs sites. If you watch the page you'll see more features trickle in as we develop them.

PRIZEY is sort of going crazy. We launched our 3.0 edition a month ago today and have published over 1,700 giveaway listings since then. That's up from the 20-40 we were publishing each weekday under our 2.0 edition. We have around 500 bloggers signed up, who represent around 700 blogs. At the moment we're working on tools for marketers who want to get review products into these bloggers' hands and host giveaways on their sites. More on that soon.

The ZRecs Network Newsletter will go out sometime tomorrow. No, you didn't miss May, we did. This May/June cusp edition of our newsletter will include a link to a really fabulous giveaway, as well as announcing a winner plus a couple of alternates for a great prize package - some of our favorite kids' books, CDs, and a couple of rockin' DVDs, all from the Punnybop In/Outbox. If you're a subscriber, look for it in your inbox tomorrow afternoon. If you aren't, you can subscribe using the link in the righthand column.

We're experimenting with our RSS feed. We'll discuss the changes - and the philosophy behind them - later, and what we'll need in order to succeed with our plans. For now, we'll just say that we're making a leap of faith.

We have some other very interesting announcements but they deserve their own posts and a little more explanation. Stay tuned!