Outside the Box

Iowa Farm Report And User Generated Comments

I'm still a tad down about the demise of IFR this off-season, but I would lay even odds that it will return next off-season.

That said, something I've thrown out here a few times is the idea of user snips of info on the players. For instance, users could add some biographical data, for instance, during the 1999 off-season Frank Thomas went through a difficult divorce. Or Mickey Mantle wore the number 7, or any of a number of other things.

Why I'm talking about this is that I want to get as much info as possible, and I want to make it as easy and useable as possible. I think that requiring a simple registration and password protection would be the best approach. This way users could make a series of contributions and you could alter or view all of your comments at once and folks could easily see the sum of the users contributions.

One of the frustrations of the IFR was I had this slick means to user contribution, but received very little user input. I'm sure I was way under 100 legitimate comments. I received a lot of illegitimate stuff like "Hey Brian haven't seen you since HS give me a call sometime." or "Derek, I'm Christy from the party. I thought you were cute, call me so we can hook up sometime." I am not kidding.

I tried offering books and other inducements, but I still had very middling input. I realize minor league players are much lower profile, but I'm just wondering what would be a way to induce more user involvement. $.20/comment? If that works too well, my wife might run me out of the house. I could probably swing a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com every three months. One entry for every comment accepted.

Some of the more popular services that make use of user content are napster which you know about and the CDDB, which houses track times and names for nearly every CD in existence. That's how your computer CD player knows what tracks are on your CD while the CD player in your house doesn't.

All that data is user generated, but the reason the CDDB aggregates data so well is that the user entering the data receives a distinct benefit for entering it, their CD player now displays the tracks from They Might Be Giants' "Severe Tire Damage". It is almost coincidental that the data is uploaded to the CDDB database for everyone else's benefit.

What sort of benefit would a person receive for entering data onto my site other than piece of mind?

Is there a tie-in service that I could provide that people would enjoy? Researchers might like a "locker" to store data, but that is a relatively tiny group of users.

Here is what I'm looking for. For what reason would my brother Chris (a huge Darin Erstad fan) add a comment to Erstad's page mentioning he was a punter for the National Championship Nebraska Cornhuskers in 1994? I'm not sure that a benefit to him exists. I just thought I would throw that out to the list and see if we have any "outside the box" thinkers out there. BTW, any ideas that get mentioned here are for anyone who wants to use and implement them.