Awakenetwork Participation

You two are full of it. Or rather, as conditioned phenomena you are empty. And my emptiness is emptier than your emptiness.

Just words.

Rod, nice to see you here once again. You have more to say than you think! Don't be a stranger.

Thanks.

Hi, Noah.

Thanks for chiming in. Can you please elaborate a little bit?

The typical poster to reader ratio on most message boards is roughly 10 readers for every active poster. Well, that's the folklore. We could calculate the ratio here but that's less important than knowing that without enough active posters all the readers and posters will slowly take their leave.

This conversation led me to look at the Google Analytics for this website. We average about 75 users per day but most of them look at one page and then drop off. The audience is mostly from the U.S., Great Britain and France. The average time in site is over 3 1/2 minutes but it's heavily weighted toward the very active users, whether they're readers or posters. Users here are about 55% male and 45% female, and their interests skew toward sports and related activities, technology and science.

Andy, I'll print the traffic flow and post it here. That will answer your questions, I think. If not, we can do more research.

Chris Marti wrote: Tom, what are your plans for Awakenetwork's future? Do you need financial support?

Sorry for not being around the last few days...been very busy with other things. To the question of financial support, no, nothing beyond what a number of generous folks are contributing every so often to keep the hosting going. I appreciate the contributions, large and small. Thank you!

As to what my plans are, I would certainly like to see it continue, but it is frustrating that there is so little momentum. DhO isn't that much better, but still there is something going on there. There seems to be an influx of new member requests here, many of whom are coming from DhO, but once approved they do not seem to post. Suggestions on how to change that are welcome.

On my want-to-do-yesterday list, I would very much like to redo the infrastructure so that it is more easily upgradeable, and hardened against hackers. That is mostly a time thing, but it also calls (back) into question the social network aspect of this site. As everyone knows, that is something that I have always wanted to keep and encourage its use of, especially for sharing quick bits of "stuff" that you come across that (a) don't merit a discussion topic, (b) aren't really the continuation of an existing discussion topic, and (c) would be something that you might share on Facebook if your FB friends were all dharma friends. That seems like an uphill battle here, but where it is relevant to my wish list is that upgrading that piece would be a small amount of money to pay for the license. Plus some more time.

To the shargrol's that want to write essays, there continues to be the "Read" section of this site, for just that thing. But I get that you might prefer to have that kind of stuff under your own "brand" of a personal website, so maybe the "Read" section is a failed experiment.

So, I am happy to continue to support AN as long as people find it of value. I just don't have a good sense of that value right now, so it does make it a bit hard to apply myself to upgrading, or repairing the latest hacker attack, etc.

Tom, thanks for your reply. It's helpful to know what's on your mind in regard to AN because you ARE AN at this point.