1.1.7. Great Communities

From its very earliest beginnings, the Web has largely been about community. From a practical standpoint, involving a worthwhile community is a great way to create content. You don't need to create the content yourself: your users do, for example by contributing to discussion threads or by making syndication feeds available.

Site owners can use community to leverage their content and to create sites that are valuable to users because of the involvement of the community.

"If your site is extended by community members (for example, through a discussion thread), you may have little control over the quality of the content. As an advertising venue, this content may not be worth that much. But even if it is only worth pennies a day in advertising revenue, the content generation is on autopilot it is expanding, changing, and staying relevant on its own. So you may still be making a good return on your effort."

Community has made eBay great: essentially all the content comes from users of the eBay auction system. Amazon makes extensive use of community to fill out its content with reviews of books and other products.

Even if your site is essentially not a community site, you can use contributions from visitors to extend and round out your own content. Successful examples include comments on blogs and reader reviews on a site. Another idea for obtaining content that some webmasters have used successfully is to run contests ("Best story in pictures and words about a diving trip" for a scuba diving site is one example).

Mechanisms you can use to build community on a site include providing:

· Message boards

· Chat rooms

· Calendars with information about events in a specific field

· Instant messaging applications

· Reader reviews

· Blog comments and track backs

You probably wouldn't want to program an application that enabled much of this community functionality from the ground up, but the fact is that your web host may provide this software for free, versions may be available from the open source community that are also free, or you may be able to inexpensively outsource the application.

"If you are hosting your own blog with standard software like MovableType or WordPress, the software will give you the ability to enable comments and trackbacks out of the box."

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