We’re less than 48 hours into the LiveSide stickers giveaway, and we’re already at over 100 requests for stickers.  What’s even more amazing is where the requests have come from:

(click on the picture to check out the Live Maps Collection)

I’ve spent a good part of the weekend stuffing envelopes, printing addresses, and adding each city/country to the “LiveSide Stickers Around the World!” Live Maps Collection.  I’m heading to the post office in the morning, where with any luck (and a handy credit card), the first batch of LiveSide stickers will leave downtown Des Moines, WA, USA, and head for all parts of the globe!

Live Maps and the Collections feature made it pretty easy to create an interesting and useful way to look at the data, although I was wishing for some better access to the data I input along with each push pin.  An easy way to save as a .csv file would have been nice, for example.  It has been almost effortless to input the pushpins into the Collection, though, and also easy to update and share the Collection. By the time we get everyone on the map, we should be able to extract some stats out of the Collection – fun LiveSide stickers facts!  Live Maps also handled finding everyone very well.  There was only one city that just wasn’t on the map, Rebouleh, Lebanon.  I purposely didn’t try to find your houses, I just stuck a pin as near the City name on the map as I could.  If I’m way off, let me know and I can edit.

So far preparing the stickers for mailing has been easy, too.  My method has been to open up a batch of emails in Windows Live Mail, copy/paste and revise the addresses to OneNote, take that list and type in each City/Country to Live Maps and add it to the collection, and then cut out the addresses and affix them to the envelopes (OneNote was great for arranging the addresses on a page sorted by Country, how many stickers requested, etc – I just typed things in randomly and moved them around to sort).

Now I’m typing this up in Live Writer, so it’s been a nice little Windows Live exercise.

Hopefully you should be getting your stickers soon.  Next up is to keep track of when you receive your stickers (or more importantly, if you didn’t), and for you to take some cool pictures of LiveSide stickers in action!  Not sure quite how to handle pictures yet, we’ll keep you posted.

The sticker giveaway is still going on, but I’m going to set a cutoff date of Wednesday, August 22 at 9pm GMT, just so I don’t have to keep schlepping to the post office.  Here’s the details one more time:  (offer has ended, sorry)