This has been on ongoing debate the last couple of times I've worked on websites. I like the idea of trying to make non-registered users experience the registered experience as much as possible.

This ladder model of online participation is more useful and nuanced than the pyramid models I was looking at only months ago. 52% of online users have no desire to "participate" in any social media online.

A new company trying their hand at reducing the overhead in running a blog and making posts. They call it a tumblelog. Dumb name,

Quoted: "We make a lot of this stuff up as we go along," the lead designer said. Everyone in the group laughed until he continued, "I'm serious. We don't assume anything works and we don't like to make predictions without real-world tests. Predictions color our thinking. So, we continually make this up as we go along, keeping what works and throwing away what doesn't. We've found that about 90% of it doesn't work."

redotted from: McToonish

This is a very useful layout of some concepts we've been discussing internally for some time. Online participation broken down into 4 categories (consumer, commentor, contributor, commentator). The movement up towards the commentator is a worthy goal but it IS a very small percentage of the online community.

This is Max Levnchin's new endeavor. I had never heard of this until today. Looks interesting...

Quoted: Slide lets everyone in your group create and watch streaming Slide Shows together. Discover, share and talk about photos together. Drag and drop pictures into Slide to make Slide Shows. Show off your favorite photos to the world, or securely and privately show photos to your friends and family. Subscribe to RSS feeds of pictures. Turn any photo into free wallpaper for your desktop

This is apparently Mac OS X only but it seems pretty cool for anyone with a video iPod. $15 gets you this software which will convert and allow you to get on your iPod.

Quoted: TubeSock convert YouTube videos for iPod

It's nice to have a single place to go to to find tons of contet you can use under Creative Commons licensing. Now they've made the search better...

Quoted: Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the software downloads and web sites that actually save time. Don't live to geek; geek to live.