Great Communities
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
Chatrooms
Calendars with information about events in a specific field
Instant messaging applications
Reader reviews
Blog comments and trackbacks
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.
Great Communities
