There are a few sites on the net that have "rewarded participation" by a dynamic access control system such that those that post *useful content* can read, or down load or access more.
Typical of such sites is
istockphoto.comwhich is a site for sharing images. When a user uploads images, nothing much happens. But when another users accesses those image then the contributor is credited with points so that he or she can download the content uploaded by other users. This means that participation is rewarded and it works very well. It is, as it says, the fastest growing royalty free collection in the world, and taking on the giants, like ghetty images.
The makers of the
istockphoto site said that they would only licence the database / CMS for about $10,000!
That is a lot of money way out of my league, but perhaps it gives an indication of the usefulness of these sort of rewarded participation sites.
Lots of us have blogs. We post. Some people read. We get some comments. But quite a lot of the time the blog site, or community does not really get off the ground and slows down when the owner gets past the initial buzz.
A lot of the time the articles posted to blogs are fun for the writer, and that is why so many blog diaries keep going. But it is rarer to find a site hat keeps posting useful content. Researching, writing, producing useful content, that people really want to see, takes time. If you do it on your own then you have to be really motivated. Some site use donations and advertising to provide an incentive. But this is not appropriate to all sites, and the link between contribution and reward is not direct.
There are however quite a lot of instances where content on sites is really useful. Sometimes people sell it by subscription (e.g. the term paper sites that I do not condone!). All the same subscriptions do not directly reward participation of the contributors in a direct way.
In my own field, English education, there are contents that I would really like to share. For instance tests and graded readers, both essential for language learning. Some lucky people are energetic enough to get these sort of sharing sites of the ground but a lot of us put some good content up on our site and then that is it. Other people do not join in. That is the way things often -- but not always -- work.
So...well if there were a system of dynamic access control in blog software so that when someone writes something (a research paper, a report, a test, a graded reader, a design) and and another member (after having read the intro) decides to read the rest, then the contributor gets points, so that he or she can, reciprocally, read the contributions of other contributors, then a site would be more likely to snowball into something bigger because the "points" awarded would create a virtual economy.
Another site that uses this system effectively is
proz.comwhere those that make contributions to the site get extra posting priveldges via the browniz (c) and kudoz (c) point systems. I hope that by suggesting the concept of dynamic access control I am not infriginging their copyright or istock's copyright. I don't mean to copy istockphoto's points, or "kudoz" or "browniz" exactly, but the general idea of a sort of virtual money,...would be great, and produce blogs that really expand.
Well it is just an idea and I respect that this site for one, as many other open source sites, works very well without an enforced economy -- donations are voluntary. And I would make a real donation for this sort of function.
I was just about to use b2evolution when I saw geeklog. Urk. This is indeed the ultimate weblog system.
Tim