Hey, did you hear? Internet surfers love chat rooms, message boards, and commenting on blogs. Cyber wanderers dig typing IMs and sending email to each other.

What? You didn’t know that?

Oh hi, Senator Ted Stevens! Maybe this article isn’t for you. The Internet is not a big truck. Why don’t you go back and check your tubes while the real web users talk.

For all the hand wringing and trolling concern, espoused by clueless lawmakers. For all the wailing over our supposed isolationism or our imagined anti-social tendencies. One fact remains true. Communicating with other people on the web is fun and interesting. Frankly, I don’t understand people that don’t like the net.

"For all the wailing over our supposed isolationism or our imagined anti-social tendencies. One fact remains true. Communicating with other people on the web is fun and interesting."

How can anyone dislike conversing via the World Wide Web? How is it possible that there are people that can’t comprehend how cool it is shoot the shit with someone from across the planet - at the click of a button and in relative anonymity? The online communal experience is as human as any real life conversation or social setting. Just because we can’t see or hear each other, that doesn’t mean that we’re somehow participating in false interaction. Of course there are folks that prefer to use the phone, write snail mail or go to clubs over spending time in a chatroom. But hate? Why the hate? I just don’t get it.

A website that retains regular visitors is called a sticky site. A sticky site is a good site because they more they stick, stay or revisit, the more they view your ads. The more often they come to your page, the more they come to trust you. The more they trust you, the more likely they will click on your sponsor banners and signup text links. You need to make your site sticky. One outstanding way to do that is by providing some sort of community feature.

Online communities have existed since Arpanet and USENET news groups. Never forget that the Rand Corporation suggested the DOD come up with some sort of new-fangled communications technology for the battlefield. The first thing the DOD did was farm the creation of the technology to University professors and research labs. Those learned developers soon figured out that this network/packet thing was a perfect way to share data, virtually live.

Decades’ later, typing on a keyboard, looking at a monitor and conferring with another is still the killer app. Some of the most popular sites on the web today are blogs and blogs (with commenting enabled) are just glorified Bulletin Boards. A majority of the major paysites offer their members some kind of live chat or message board. YouTube recently surpassed Yahoo as the number one most visited domain on the net. YouTube lets users upload and view all types of amazing and/or crappy videos. They also allow members to build profile pages and video playlists, as well as featuring user ratings and talk back.

Print may die. The desire to see static images will decline but surfers will always be looking for a place to be with other people that share their interests. If you give surfers the opportunity to interact with your site and the others on it, you might open a whole new income stream.

The community you create is entirely up to you. Would you like to offer a live video chat with your in-house models? You can buy software to manage it or lease live video chat from an outside provider. Would you like to host a simple text-based chat where members can type in public pages as well as cyber in private rooms? There are pre-made scripts galore and some of them are free. All you have to provide is the bandwidth. Go for the message board format, with feature-rich options such as advance search, avatar personalization and a points system. For heaven’s sake, enable commenting on your blog if you want to grow any kind of fellowship with your readers.

Obviously, you wouldn’t try to link to your message board on your submitted TGP gallery. Nor would you want to invest such effort into a make-it-and-forget-it, four page, free site. When I advise you to create an online community, it’s understood that a real online community takes monitoring and nurturing. You have to set rules and be prepared to enforce them. Even paid members can get out of hand.

Let the quasi-sociologists lament the horrors of Internet addiction. Laugh, when the talking heads on TV scare the gullible with tales of nefarious plots, running wild on social networking sites and blogs. There are millions of cyber typists that have been participating in online communities for over a decade. A lot of them just need to find a site where they can be who and what they want to be. Why don’t you be the webmaster that gives it to them?