I recently read Clay Shirky’s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It gives us a few more examples about how the internet is changing the world:

We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.

as well as explains why visitor interaction only sometimes succeeds:

Every webpage is a latent community. Each page collects the attention of people interested in its contents, and those people might well be interested in conversing with one another, too. In almost all cases the community will remain latent, either because the potential ties are too weak (any two users of Google are not likely to have much else in common) or because the people looking at the page are separated by too wide a gulf of time, and so on. But things like the comments section on Flickr allow those people who do want to activate otherwise-latent groups to at least try it. The basic question “How did you do that?” seems like a simple request for a transfer of information, but when it takes place out in public, it is also a spur to such communities of practice, bridging the former gap between publishing and conversation.

Whether you plan to have a small community or a large one, the focus is on making it easy and on trying to understand where your visitors will want interaction. If you’re interested in a web community or just want a little bit of occasional interaction with visitors, Here Comes Everybody will probably help you figure out how to do just that.

Just one last tidbit that I found interesting:

In 1991 Richard Gabriel, a software engineer at Sun Microsystems, wrote an essay that included a section called “Worse Is Better,” describing this effect. He contrasted two programming languages, one elegant but complex versus another that was awkward but simple. The belief at the time was that the elegant solution would eventually triumph; Gabriel instead predicted, correctly, that the language that was simpler would spread faster, and as a result, more people would come to care about improving the simple language than improving the complex one. The early successes of a simple model created exactly the incentives (attention, the desire to see your work spread) needed to create serious improvements.