Websites relying on user generated content must first reach a critical mass before they because useful.  That’s pretty simple. The problem is that before there is critical mass there are just passionate users who are using the site without really getting the reward from the masses.  So where does one find these users?  Its not as simple as placing a few advertisements and hoping that one of the 100 people you’ve paid to visit your site will be passionate about it.  That’s just not going to work.  Paying for ads might get your website noticed but what will it do to make your website grow.  Another you could do is plant posts yourself, maybe posing as different people.  This takes too much time and is too creatively challenging for my tastes, additionally I feel its a little inappropriate to propagate a “community” site by yourself to give the illusion of community.

So how does one see their community driven website from completion to popularity without compromising the integrity of the website?  I’m still up in the air about it.  I’m sure I’ll come back to this at some point, but I’ll leave you with this to think about: Who starts using community websites and why?  Twitter with 5 users is pretty worthless; a forum with three people isn’t really a forum at all.  How do these websites create their initial momentum?

Between the years of 1925 and 1961 37% of the valedictorians had the suffix junior.

A friend of mine was having trouble understanding the graph above, so I made a quick little chart that has the percent of valedictorians that had suffixes in the 9 years surrounding that year.  This illustrates the density of suffixed valedictorians over time.  Complete waste of my time?  Maybe. Interesting?  Depends. Poorly put together?  Obviously.

Since 4 years after women were allowed to attend (1989), there have been 13 female valedictorians. Representing 59% of valedictorians since their admission.

And so ends the first post.