I keep meaning and forgetting to post about this lovely site that I heard about via Ben called The view from your window. It's based on a simple idea: send in a photograph of the view out your window. Your photo gets posted on the site. And now there are pictures from windows all over the world. It makes for very compelling viewing.
I think it works for the same reasons as PostSecret. We can enjoy them passively as viewers because they give us brief glimpses into others' lives, which can be surprising in their beauty, comforting in their banality, and intriguing in their details. The glimpses are necessarily incomplete, so they require us to imagine what lies outside the little that is shown, who the people are, what the rest of the story is. This makes them interesting.
But these sites also encourage active participation (not that I've sent in a picture yet). They give us all an easy and relatively risk-free way to express ourselves creatively, give our creations a public forum, let us compare our effort to what others did with the same task, and make us feel like we're part of something bigger than ourselves.
This is probably a good starting place for soliciting user-generated content (or whatever we're calling it these days): make sure you understand how you'll reward both passive and active participation.
Image is of Greet Roger's window on The View From Your Window.
Comments