by CriterionD » Sat Feb 09, 2008 4:55 pm
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CriterionD
- Blue Belt
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- Posts: 431
- Joined: Mon Feb 19, 2007 6:23 pm
- Location: Tempe, AZ
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I think its all about commercialization. I don't mean more advertisements. The site needs to offer services, extending beyond the website if it really wants to grow, IMO. Perhaps certification (of inventor/entrepreneurship related service providers, persay) is a good place to start. Perhaps the lite-bulb from the site's logo needs to be used in a manner to create a smaller "stamp-like" logo that could be used to brand more than simply the website.
I also recommend a new, attractive, perhaps even ad-free home page linking to all other parts of the site (i.e. blog, forum, directory, etc). The way it currently stands, the home page I think sort of gives the impression that the site is simply a blog with added features rather than a full-fledged community. To get so much traffic and generate returns it needs to be more of a community than a blog, obviously.
Allowing inventors to create personalized MySpace type profiles for themselves and their inventions might not hurt. I probably know someone who could help in that capacity.
And, I'll add, in this forum I don't like the concept of rewarding posters that post X amount of posts. They do this I believe on the forums @ evancarmichael.com and it might increase activity at times but it also, from what I have seen in the past, has lead to semi-usless posts that don't really accomplish much of anything positive. I don't think thats a problem at all in these forums right now, for the record, but I just don't like that concept in theory.
Same things with blogs, as long as the bare minimum exists I don't like the concept of rewarding bloggers for quantity of blogs (if thats currently being done). There is already arguably information overload on the blog unless you check it daily or maybe bi-daily. And this site already provides the most active inventors forum on the internet as far as I can tell...efforts have succeeded IMO in making this an active community, so emphasis should shift from promoting quantity to promoting quality (which has probably happened on some level, I'm not cirticizing at all, just adding another two cents).