I'd like to focus on the Useit article's advice to essential turn site use into
a form of participation.
The user task - help less frequent web visitor quickly find out what is hot
this week/month.
Simple Ideas
1. Right Now - Topic list ordered by most recent post. Innovation complete. :-)
2. Posts - Make "Posts" clickable and sort last 30 days of posts by number of
replies, add option to expand time frame to one year/all time.
Next Level
3. Most Viewed Topics - Convert web stats into "democratized navigation"
4. Most Viewed Posts - Topic views for seven? days from posting plus individual
post views
5. Most E-mailed Posts/Topics - We don't have this option, but I find the
results at the StarTribune quite interesting: http://startribune.com - they are
often not the same, e-mailed posts connect more passionately with readers
Ultimate
6. Most Recommended - I vote for a simple "recommend" button next to individual
posts and a click-trough in the footer (something else may need to be
condensed) and simply let crap/things people disagree with not rise up. May be
it is a "Good" or "Like it!" button to make it snappy. If folks end up not
using the feature, they I would recommend turning it off.
7. Popular Topics - Here is my rough formula - assign points based on:
- Webviews (weighted by %/#registered web members so we can have cross-site
popular topics too)
- Total posts to topic (volume = interest)
- Total number of authors (diversity = good, usual suspects bad)
- Posts within topic recommended
- Hours of sustained posting
Bonus points:
- First time participant post
- Less frequent participant post
Deductions:
- One sentence posts
- Two authors make up more than 50 percent of posts
I would default popular to the last two days and give an option for the most
popular this week, month, this year, specific years, and all-time.
Cheers,
Steve
P.S. Say, check this out:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/live_stats/html/map.stm
