In yesterday’s post titled Are you a lurker?, I mentioned how contributing a story about how you have done something can pay back for the knowledge you have gained by lurking on the edges of discussion groups.
As a knowledge management exercise I want to report on the success of my contribution (a story1 about how I have used the photo management software called IMatch to catalogue over 2500 images2).
- In less than 24 hours the story has now been read 159 times. The most read story on my site lies today at 193 reads. Most of that was return traffic over a period of 6-10 months.
- The daily average for hits to my website has gone from 500 to 1500, with over 5500 hits recorded yesterday (it usually runs in the low hundreds). But these are just statistics. The true success lies in a request from Mario, the developer of the tool, to link directly to my story. It shows there was value in the contribution. Importantly it also provides a more permanent link. There have been 40 messages on the newsgroup since my original post. Enough to bury it so it never gets seen by some people. But that’s the point. You can add value by looking through histories.