Activity on Woot‘s deal aggregation site Deals.woot.com has exploded over the past week, what lit the fuse?  A new reputation system that is clear, easy to understand, and gives users hints on actions that they can take to increase their reputation.

Deals.Woot Top Reputation Leaderboard

This was a much needed to boost to traffic and user activity, more than making up for the brutal attack on the site’s most active users a few months ago.   Segregation of the site’s more social area and excessive, at times stalking and shockingly personal, moderation of users caused many of the sites most active users to fade into the shadows or abandon the site altogether.

These changes to the reputation system have been in the works for quite a while, but the deals.woot programming team used the time well and the enhancements have been well received.

Deals.Woot Reputation Dashboard

The new dashboard is the center-piece of the changes, it details how the users rank in all the categories of activities that earn reputation.   It also provides useful hints that inform users what they can do if they want to increase their reputation.

Some activity is bound to drop off after some of the novelty wears off, but this change has made a real difference in getting the users more involved and has given the site a much needed shot of energy.

What do you do when things get busy and your creative energies are being focused elsewhere? You cut back on things that aren’t as important or as interesting. I cut back on my online reading and playing with new start-ups – and, well here we are 1 year to the day and no posts. Maybe you are in the same boat as me? You like having a site and like that you’ve written some things that people still find useful, and have a few things you’d still like to write about?

What can you do to breathe a little life back into your site?

• Set the bar LOW: Once a month is a crappy goal when you were cranking out 5 posts a week, but better than once a year!
• Set a specific day: Put it on your calender, think about your post during your commute, type some notes on your break at work, have lunch at somewhere with wi-fi and crank out that post.
• Get a buddy: Know someone else that is still posting away or even that isn’t and wants to get back to it? Have lunch with them and talk about posting or even write together
• Reward yourself: Pick something small as a reward for yourself when you finish a post

I’m sure that there are a number of other things that people have done to get the ball rolling again and if anyone is still out there that has succeeded I’d love to hear about it.

I have a few Google Wave invites available if anyone out there would like one, just leave me a comment and put make sure you put your correct e-mail address into the DISQUS commenting system.

Wave is pretty slick and if you need to do some online collaboration and don’t mind a fairly open environment then this is the perfect product for you.  Wave is NOT a replacement for e-mail,  instant messaging, or your online social networks,  although it pulls in components from all of those types of communication.

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Sorry about the Programmer Day Blog being down, I’ve botched something in my hosting settings that I need to track down. Russia has made Programmer Day an official holiday so we’re seeing a lot of interest this year. Check out @ProgrammerDay on Twitter and have a wonderful #ProgrammerDay!

As part of my Whimsday series of posts I will occasionally post an idea that I’ve had that I have no time or skill to successfully complete.  I hope maybe you will, it will be wildly successful, and you’ll decide to thank me with a car or something.

Where is the App for 25 Random Things?  What has no one thrown something together yet?  This thing has gone viral on several social networks and if you put together an app that let you list and change your items, send out invites, LINK when your friends install and fill out their 25 random things, and then send out feed notices when someone changes their items – it seems like you would have an easy winner!

I’ve never tried my hand at developing for Facebook but hopefully their are enough features that you could put something together that is snazzier that the ‘notes’ that are currently being used, so somebody get to work on this!  I’ll be awaiting the delivery of my Prowler or failing that a nice hybrid sometime in the next couple of months  :-p

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