A concern in recent years here at ETS has been how to encourage interaction with the online community. I’ve stumbled on to one way to increase interaction – typos and broken links.
A depressing yet heartening fact is that I will receive about 1-2 comments per month about a broken link or typo appearing somewhere in a site I am maintaining. It’s depressing because no one likes to have stupid typos on the Web (although I am very suspectibe prone to them). But heartening in that people care enough about the content to fire off an e-mail to point out the error.
I don’t recommend seeding content with typos as a way to increase interaction but I can tell which sites people really care about from the error notes that come my way. There are times when higher level discussions would be nice, but truthfully, there’s only so much discussion an ALT code for á can engender. It’s either the right number that works, or one that doesn’t.
I love it!