people doing things cause they feel like it. it’s a good enough reason for them to act. Here’s what I mean: you can write a request to your friend’s on Myspace to visit a web site in order to Save Dafur. Maybe 2% of them will take 5 seconds and click on the link. If you’re lucky.

Then, someone posts a 20 page quiz as a bulletin “Are you good in bed?,” and your entire friend community will spend an hour filling it out! I must have read 1,000s of Myspace bulletins and posts, and the one thing that remains true is that people want to know about themselves.

That’s why quizzes ranging from testing your sexual skill to predicting your death date are so popular…that and they always end in this little threat, “forward to friends or you’ll have bad luck for five years.”

I think it’d be interesting to take the same message, in two different communities, and end the message differently: One promising bad things if the message isn’t forwarded, and one promising good things if it is. Which do you think would be forwarded most often?

A friend of mine, who is active in the Live Journal Online Community, made an awesome observation. Some people are proud of the way they tag content and are even protective over it.

For example, In my personal profile I might tag one of my interests as reading. If I were creative, I’d invent a more elaborate tag, something like, “readinginbarnes&nobleonSunday.” Live Journal uses different colors to indicate whether or not others have used the same tag. Black means you’re the only one with the tag, and blue means that others share it.

If suddenly you found that someone else used your obscure tag, you’re likely to: 1) feel someone stole your creative idea 2) want to befriend a like minded person.

Some people tag restaurants locally in live journal and have met up with each other because they share the same tag!

Here’s the point: tagging is much more than just bookmarking content, it’s about how you perceive what’s important and the way you describe it to others.