Image courtesy darlene is evil.
Hey kids!
You know what? Human Census has been kind of in a blah zone for several weeks– kind of been in a rut from my end as far as coming up with new questions and interesting things to add value to your experience here.
So, help me out. 
- What are some new things we can do to take Human Census in a new direction?
- What do you like, what don’t you like?
- What can we do to mix it up?
Here is a quick statistical look at the project:
Old Stats from www.humancensus.wordpress.com (June 24-July 16)
- Total Views: 1,483
- Best Day Ever: 134
- Posts: 57
- Comments: 185
- 10 Categories
Current Stats for www.humancensus.com (July 16-Oct. 17)
- Total Views: 4,198
- Best Day Ever:121
- Posts: 169 (-57 imported from the old site)
- Comments: 473 (-185 imported from the old site)
- 27 categories
Total Stats for The Human Census Project (June 24, 2007- October 17, 2007)
- Total Views: 5,681
- Best Day Ever: 134
- Posts: 169
- Comments: 473 (an average ~3 comments per post)
- Categories: 27
Things We’re Still Doing
- We still only ask questions on this site. There are very few (maybe less than 5 of ~169 posts) that aren’t based on asking a question and reporting the answers.
- Questions are listed under three categories: “Questions“, “Insignificant/Significant“, and then a relevant keyword (entertainment, education, life, work, etc.)
- Every day there is a photo posted from flickr creative commons.
- We’ll end the project on June 24, 2008, 1 year from the time the site was started. Until then, we’ve got a lot of time to continually upgrade the Human Census experience.
New Updates
- We moved from 7 days a week to 5 days a week.
- Introduction of the Friday Photos.
- We started asking “Solve A World Problem Wednesday” questions.
- Questions are posted at random times throughout the day instead of first thing in the morning.
Things We Used To Do, But Aren’t Anymore
- No longer voting on daily comments & showing the top-rated commentors of the day.
- No reporting on the previous day’s question.
- No more hand drawn cartoons.
- Not including links to other interesting sites relevant to that question/topic.
- We don’t have whoever commented first on a new question ask the following day’s question.
- Not sending out email updates to our mailing list every few weeks.
- I used to post the question daily on my facebook and twitter profiles, so the 100+ people who see daily updates to my profiles would also see the new questions regularly, but I’ve stopped doing this (wasn’t sure it helped much).
***
The Sum-Up
Anything we should change, bring back, or start fresh?
I feel kind of weak sauce about the way I’ve let the project stagnate a bit by not trying anything new for a while.
On one hand, it’s been good to let it gel and just carry on. That we are still getting comments and visits daily is great! On the other hand, the dip in traffic and progress reflect that lack of vitality.
We’re doing alright, but I think we could integrate some things to make the experience more valuable for you, and also to jumpstart the project again.
But that’s enough about me– what do YOU think? 
October 17, 2007 at 13:12
I like the hand drawn cartoons! Can you post them on days when you have time to make one?
For me, it helps to post new questions at the same time everyday, preferably early in the morning. Sometimes I visit the site and there isn’t a new question, and sometimes I find 2 or more posts since my last visit. Are you still posting questions from readers? I remember you did that a few times in the past. Did that encourage more participation?
Despite wanting to see a new question each day, sometimes I wonder if the site will be more popular if it became a repository of questions and answers. I feel like I should only comment on recently asked questions and forget about good ones that I missed weeks ago. If there wasn’t a chronological order to the questions, I could more freely answer any question of interest that I see without it feeling “stale”. It would also free you from having to come up with new questions everyday. A question each week may be enough. I wouldn’t want to turn it into another Yahoo Answers clone though. I see the site as really a survey of what people think of a topic rather than trying to answer a question “better” than everyone else.
If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.
Keep up the good work, and good luck!