What your contribution means to ITYT.

[dbaker]

ITYT is approaching the half-year mark -- it's incredible. It seemed like just yesterday when Nugget and I were watching the web logs in anticipation of our first hit. Since then, we've averaged one new user registration each day, had over 1700 posts, over 200 images submitted to the gallery, well over 100 library submissions, and average about 10 users in the chat channel .

One aspect of ITYT that I didn't expect was the percentage of our community members that actively contribute -- less than 30%. The vast majority of members simply observe the discussions, keep an eye on recent contributions to the gallery and library, and make use of the many available travel tools.

As a result, the forums (which are the most user-active part of ITYT) misrepresent the value of each contribution. Although many posts only get one or two (if any) responses, we've had literally tens of thousands of topic views. The most popular topics are read hundreds of times.

It's clear that the only motivation for contributing to ITYT is the expectation of other people to make use of your experience and thoughts. It's very pleasing to me to know that every post to the forum is actively read by people all over the world, even if response is limited. I hope that the same thing motivates everyone else to continue to spend some of their limited free time contributing to our growing travel community.

Also, be sure to email relevant forum, library, and gallery URLs to friends and family that might be similarly interested. It's the best way to build the community that we're looking for. Feel free to link to ITYT on your web page, too. Increasing traffic to the site only makes your contribution more valuable.

I'm looking forward to serving hundreds of thousands of web pages a day and hitting the 10,000 post mark. I expect to see both of those in 2002.

Enjoy ITYT and travel safely.

Cheers.

Daniel

• Snapshot of ITYT Main Page from 9/23/2001
• ITYT Main page today

[dbaker]

ITYT is approaching the half-year mark -- it's incredible. It seemed like just yesterday when Nugget and I were watching the web logs in anticipation of our first hit. Since then, we've averaged one new user registration each day, had over 1700 posts, over 200 images submitted to the gallery, well over 100 library submissions, and average about 10 users in the chat channel .

One aspect of ITYT that I didn't expect was the percentage of our community members that actively contribute -- less than 30%. The vast majority of members simply observe the discussions, keep an eye on recent contributions to the gallery and library, and make use of the many available travel tools.

As a result, the forums (which are the most user-active part of ITYT) misrepresent the value of each contribution. Although many posts only get one or two (if any) responses, we've had literally tens of thousands of topic views. The most popular topics are read hundreds of times.

It's clear that the only motivation for contributing to ITYT is the expectation of other people to make use of your experience and thoughts. It's very pleasing to me to know that every post to the forum is actively read by people all over the world, even if response is limited. I hope that the same thing motivates everyone else to continue to spend some of their limited free time contributing to our growing travel community.

Also, be sure to email relevant forum, library, and gallery URLs to friends and family that might be similarly interested. It's the best way to build the community that we're looking for. Feel free to link to ITYT on your web page, too. Increasing traffic to the site only makes your contribution more valuable.

I'm looking forward to serving hundreds of thousands of web pages a day and hitting the 10,000 post mark. I expect to see both of those in 2002.

Enjoy ITYT and travel safely.

Cheers.

Daniel

• Snapshot of ITYT Main Page from 9/23/2001
• ITYT Main page today