Where Do You Contribute the Most Content, and Why?

There are literally thousands of websites in existence today that allow you to sign up and contribute information. But, how do you decide which sites are worthy of your time?

This comes to mind after noticing tonight that I've rated over 400 movies on Netflix, yet not one movie review on Amazon.com. Yet both sites - and many more, such as IMDB - offer rating services for movies. In my case, Netflix was the first site that offered an immediate return on the information I contributed. Plus it has a social network where I can let my friends can see what I've rated.

I contribute to Wikipedia articles from time to time when I think I can add some value, but without the immediate return I receive from changes to my Netflix recommendations.

And I post comments on at least 100 unique blogs a month in order to join conversations that interest me. My reward here is making contacts with people online who share similar interests.

How do you decide which sites are worth contributing to? Do you seek an immediate or obvious return on your investment of time and knowledge or is implied reciprocity good enough?

My only hope is that someone finds this post worthy of a response. :-)

I have a need to talk about stuff I feel I know more than anyone else about. Or stuff I have a strong opinion on. It is an itch and if your site allows me to scratch it, good for you.

I've also put loads of personal information on facebook because the more I put in my profile, the more I can find people who share my interests.

And I blog a lot to get my thoughts down on the Internet and also because apparently hiring companies look favorably on well written blogs.

I used to massively contribute to experts exchange (My profile), but the darn site was taking too much of my time..

Comments

1. Posted by: Mikel Ward on June 27, 2007 11:18 PM:

I add ratings wherever:
- there is a big database (either pre-existing, or one that I can easily add missing items to)
- I can access my own ratings via a web service

There's no point giving a rating if the product doesn't exist in their database, and there's no point me giving them my data if I can't use it myself.

At the moment, the only site that fulfills this requirement is Amazon. IMDb desperately needs a web services API.

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