While I was out of town last week in Baltimore, my wife was planning and shopping. She wasn’t shopping for clothes!

It appears she got with Sensei Won to pry some info out of me while chatting through IM while I was in a conference in Baltimore. So he gets some information from me telling me he is looking at Mustangs himself. I thought it was weird, but fun at the same time. I have owned several Mustangs over the years and it made sense he was asking me questions about what I liked. So, after gettting some details from me, my wife goes shopping. I get home late Thursday night and my wife, Sensei Won, and his wife are awaiting me at the airport. We go home and go to sleep.

Then came Friday when Sensei Won and his wife come over to visit and work. Sensei Won and I are working away and our wives say they are going shopping. We continue working like any other normal day, then they say it is time to go to dinner. We go to one of our favorite Mexican food restaurants a few miles away. When I park, to my left I see a beautiful 2007 Mustang. I get out of our car and I am checking this Mustang out when the alarm chirps at me. I back up thinking they either have a sensitive alarm or someone in the restaurant wants me to back off their new car. When I turn around, my wife is holding the keys in her hand!

My jaw dropped! I didn’t know what to say. The whole thing was set up and I had no clue, absolutely zero. I was amazed and SUPER grateful. It was nice to have our best friends there for the occassion as well. Needless to say, we were the hit of the day at the restaurant as well. They even slapped a sombrero on me and sang “Happy Birthday”!

I wanted to give everyone a heads up that I am in Baltimore this week for a meeting with a mastermind group I am involved with. The weather is great and cool, the hotel is amazing, and the group is awesome as usual. I will be back online for my normal routine on Friday. If you ever travel to Baltimore, you will definitely want to stay at Henderson’s Wharf Hotel. This place is very nice and the service is fantastic!

In an article at useit.com, Jakob Nielsen looks at lurkers vs. active contributing members in a forum or community.

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

Nielsen gives some examples of participation inequality in social networks, review sites, blogs, etc. But he gives some good ideas for how to overcome, or at least reduce, participation inequality:

• Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
• Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they’re doing. For example, Amazon’s “people who bought this book, bought these other books” recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don’t have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system. Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will “wear” it down and thus leave its marks — just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.
• Edit, don’t create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example, most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
• Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don’t give too much to the most active participants, or you’ll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.
• Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who’ve proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.

Out of this list, my favorite is “Reward — but don’t over-reward — participants.” There are so many things we can do for our users as forum owners. From reputation systems, to “kudos” like I use at dreamincode.net, to free giveaways. Even things as simple as member badges or titles can encourage users to contribute and participate.

You can read the entire article here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

Just a quick note here - my good friend Bostondan at BizMP has just announced he is doing a forum kickoff contest with nearly $15,000 in prizes being given away. BizMP is a very targeted community which soley focuses on the buying and selling of websites and ways to make money in flipping sites. You wont find any info about PPC arbitage over there, but you will find all you need to know about how to make a good purchase and then flipping it for twice what you paid. Check it out @ http://forums.bizmp.com/index.php?showtopic=88&view=getnewpost

About a year ago, I set all new members to automatically “Subscribe to This Thread”. A lot of members will post and never return. Maybe their question was answered somewhere else, or maybe they just forgot. Recently, I noticed myself subscribing to threads at other forums and realized I wasn’t visiting those forums nearly as often because the replies to my threads were being included in the email. For example, here’s a topic subscription from EarnersForum, notice the reply is actually in the email itself:

Dear skyhawk133,

Bryan Le has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to entitled - What are you getting your mods for the holidays? - in the Online Communities forum of Earners Forum.

This thread is located at:
http://www.earnersforum.com/showthread.php?t=9282&goto=newpost

Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
Wow! I think it’s great that you care so much for your mods.
Got any openings? hehe, jk.
***************
There may be other replies also, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again.

All the best,
Earners Forum

If I didn’t know better, I would assume that was the only reply and I wouldn’t bother returning to the site. So, to solve this, I took out the “reply” portion of the email and just left the link to the thread and some link to other parts of my site. This forces the user to return to my site to get the reply. Here is what my “Topic Subscription” email looks like now:

skyhawk133,

absta has just posted a reply to a topic that you have subscribed to titled “Introduce Yourself”.

The topic can be found here:
http://forums.dreamincode.net/index.php?showtopic=18938&view=getnewpost

If you have configured in your control panel to recieve immediate topic reply notifications, you may receive an
email for each reply made to this topic. Otherwise, only 1 email is sent per board visit for each subscribed topic.
This is to limit the amount of mail that is sent to your inbox.

Check out the rest of Dream.In.Code:
Programming Help: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum76.htm
Introduce Yourself: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum65.htm
Caffeine Lounge: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum1.htm
Code Snippets: http://code.dreamincode.net/
Job Listings: http://home.dreamincode.net/?p=careercenter
Tutorials: http://tutorials.dreamincode.net/
Developer Blogs: http://forums.dreamincode.net/?automodule=blog

In the short time since I made this change, I’ve noticed an increase in new members returning to the site and becoming more active. Fewer “drive bys”, more active members.

Hope this helps!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com