Power Users - Lego Community

Welcome to another wonderful session of What’s Up Wednesdays on Beyond the Rhetoric!

Each week, I cull the Internet for some of the best blog posts that the online community has to offer, highlighting some of these for all of you to enjoy. A great way to grab my attention (and get a free link back to your blog) is to follow me on Twitter. I usually put out a request on Tuesday evenings for What’s Up Wednesdays submissions, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

For this week’s roundup, we take a little look at being social, getting into networking, and how to get the search engines to find your terrific content.

The Power Struggle with Communities

Martin Reed is an expert when it comes to online communities, particularly those found in niche forums. Although you want to encourage your forum members to contribute as much as possible, power users may actually harm your community. We all know the type. They seem to live on these forums, posting far more than anyone else and, as a result, they can be pretty intimidating.

Getting Comments the Evil Way

Monty of Sensonize knows that encouraging comments on your blog is a very good thing, because it makes your site much more active and dynamic. Sometimes, it can be hard to get those discussions going, so he has derived some evil ways to get comments. Have you partaken in any of these techniques? Personally, I think an awesome contest might be a little more legitimate (and work a little better).

Why Do You Follow Me?

Zac Johnson enjoys being social online. I’ve already talked about why I’d follow you on Twitter, but Zac asked his readers for their number one reason to follow someone on Twitter. Not surprisingly, the majority said that they follow people who are interesting. Let’s face it: if you’re not interesting, you’re not going to be followed.

You Can Go With the Flow

Leo Babauta has been self-employed for over a year now and he has managed to find the natural rhythms and flows of working. Being forced to work, by yourself or others, is never a pleasant experience. Leo has found that working is much more of a pleasant experience now that he is collaborating with other self-employed individuals, but he also has a few words to share with people still stuck in cubicles too.

Canonical URLs and Duplicate Content Penalties

Colin Dean has some search engine news that is hot off the press. You don’t want to run into duplicate content penalties with Google, but it seems search engines will honor new canonical URLs to reduce this problem. You know how you can reach the same blog post using different URLs? That may no longer be an issue with this new development.