[Theforum] evoltspotting
Madhu Menon
webguru at vsnl.net
Wed Dec 5 11:30:40 CST 2001
At 10:45 PM 12/5/2001, Michele Foster typed these words:
>IOW, I don't see any valid reason to abandon one project in favour of
>another .. especially since that project is working well; at least in my
I'm not advocating abandoning it - yet. I see one as more productive than
the other.
(Aside: Does IOW mean "in one word"?)
>opinion .. technically speaking it works good, and a lot of effort has gone
>into building it. It's a nice addition for evolt.org. I guess the survey
>will give us some numbers whether more effort should be put into that
>project or not.
My point is that there are other sites that are doing exactly the same
thing: adding links in various categories. And they have a head start too.
There's bound to be a heavy overlap between d.e.o and those sites anyway,
and if anything, we may be behind the rest.
We would simply be duplicating work that other sites already do, with
nothing to differentiate our effort from theirs. I refuse to believe that
50% of our links will be stuff that's not mentioned on any other site. The
blogging community is usually pretty efficient at spreading the links around.
Marketing is all about differentiation, and IMO, the FQA (or FAQ) would be
"unique" for evolt.
> I guess the survey
>will give us some numbers whether more effort should be put into that
>project or not.
Don't have to wait for that. Our site stats should tell us how many people
visit. Dan?
>Remember, d.e.o. is as good as we make it .. Simon's built a nice
>infrastructure .. add valid/good links and we've got a nice list.
(warning: software design lecture ahead)
Well, assuming that we take it seriously, we need to make it EASY for
people to contribute. People like us read several articles in a day (I
think) and I usually can't be bothered to visit the site, sign in, and add
links to categories.
As an example, sign up for an account at SaveThis.com
If you had to visit the site to add links to your account, it would be
tedious. Instead, they have a bookmarklet directly for my account that I
can just click. It immediately opens up a pop-up window with the site URL
and page title filled in, a list of my categories (with the option to
create new ones), and a textarea for comments. The whole operation takes
less than 5 seconds. It's a joy to use, and indeed I use it frequently.
We need something like *that* for evolt to make it work for a community.
Regards,
Madhu
<<< * >>>
Madhu Menon
madhu at members.evolt.org
Blog: http://madman.weblogs.com
More information about the theforum
mailing list