I was thinking about user-participation and community as it pertains to Web 2.0 and wondering how exactly we are to go about getting our users to adopt the tools that we provide. With the myriad of choices available, how do we convince users that it is our community that they should hang out in? Our tools they should use? I think that with the extremely distributed nature of community on the Web today, this is not only a frustrating question for community builders, but for users as well.

As a user myself, I have accounts with photo storage communities, bookmarking sites, online calendars, an Ajax start page, and I subscribe to 41 feeds in my Bloglines account. I have diligently cataloged all of my personally owned books on LibraryThing, created a profile on LinkedIn, made my titillating list of life goals on 43 Things, added 83 movies to my Netflix queue, and made wish lists on Kaboodle. But when I try and share much of my resulting data, I find that many of my friends and family don’t belong to the same communities that I do, and honestly could just care less.

I have a “family only” set of images on Flickr, the link to which I sent my mother with explicit instructions as to how to join. A week later I received an email telling me she had signed up with a link to her vacation photos that she had put up on Yahoo!Photos. This was all reminiscent of the Kodak Gallery debacle last year.

I would love to set up a “for:” tag in delicious for everyone I know and send them fyi bookmarks to their accounts, but only one person I know uses it, and he doesn’t check his inbox. I’d enjoy teaming up with friends and people I know on 43 Things to cheer each other on to reach goals, but again, don’t know anyone that uses it. Sharing my Netflix queue with friends would be cool, if I knew anyone with an account. I joined Friendster a year ago, didn’t know anyone there, felt like a loser, and left, too embarrassed to return. My Wayfaring map of the garment district in NYC goes unseen by any of my acquaintances, as does my personal Movie Database, and my birthday Kaboodle went unheeded this year.

If I can’t, as a fellow user, get the people that I know to use the tools that I think are effective, what are communities to do? Do we need to be technology cheerleaders in order to get people to try out the tools that we provide and then continue to cheer them on so that they actually use them?

I have just created an Intranet for my entire family on Jotspot and am really putting my foot down about making everyone join. It’s too bad we can’t strong arm our users in this way. I’m finding that everyone is very excited, and relieved to have everything all in one place; a blog, shared calendar, polls, profiles, recipe wiki, etc. And further they are excited that they didn’t have to create it, nor will they have to maintain or groom the space. So is part of the answer that we also need to make life as easy as possible on users as an incentive to participate? I’d love to hear other ideas people have for focusing users’ attention.

I was fortunate enough to attend the NY Tech Meetup group this evening for what amounted to a mini-conference of exciting new Silicon Alley technologies.

A thriving community of several hundred tech-savvy New Yorkers crowded into the Farkas Auditorium at the NYU Medical Center for an exclusive display of the latest in emerging technologies. In a procession of rapid-fire presentations, upcoming tech startups, entrepreneurs, and idea-people provided five-minute overviews of their products, followed by a brief Q&A. Following the presentations the audience was invited to make announcements, one of which made by author David Siegal of “Creating Killer Websites”, who is currently looking for an Ajax guru. Audience members were also asked to make a minimal contribution to pay for the space rental and ever true to the grassroots spirit, our organizer Scott Heiferman politely asked everyone to “pass five bucks to the left”.

The NY Tech Meetup group provides a forum for new technology companies to gain exposure for their products and services, networking opportunities for jobseekers and those looking to hire, and the chance for everyone else to keep up with the latest in technology developments and events. Here’s a breakdown of the technologies that were presented tonight:

ShopWiki: The former CEO and CTO of DoubleClick have teamed up to produce a shopping search engine on steroids. The ShopWiki search engine crawls over 120,000 online stores to find products and offers the ability to limit searches by maximum price, or by range. Unlike other shopping search sites, this one is also a wiki and provides users with helpful buying guides such as this one on Bicycles which details different types of bikes and their cost ranges as well as links to specific searches. They currently have over 1,100 such guides. Like other wikis, ShopWiki is open for editing by the public.

Reuters Newsbeats: These outrageously creative sound bytes are the fusion of original music tracks with Reuter’s news. The Reuters folks have teamed up with Cellular Records in San Francisco to deliver the news in a brand new format. These .mp3 files can be downloaded or listened to online and users are able to comment on their corresponding pages such as this one.

Harvest: This is a time-tracking application created with Ruby on Rails by the Iridesco Company which seems to be following the example of 37 Signals by creating simple, non-bloated software. Harvest offers the user both daily and weekly views of time sheets which can be broken down to the client, project, and task level. There is a real-time tracker function which will keep track of the actual time you are working on a particular project, and even allows switching tasks in real-time. The reporting features offer visual graphs of hours differentiated by billable, non-billable, employee, and contractor, and also by project which are broken down by people and tasks. The online software is free for freelancers.

Fon (Pronounced like phone): Andrew Rasiej who recently ran for NYC public advocate with a platform to bring wifi to New York, presented about this unique company. Fon is a global community of WiFi sharers known as “Foneros”. The idea is that if you have broadband access in your home with a wireless network, you can subscribe and share your access, this then allows you to roam anywhere in the world and use any of Fon’s shared spots for free. Non-subscribers can also take advantage of the shared spots by paying $2/day.

Edit.com: This is a website maintenance service which offers small businesses the ability to edit their own websites with ease and technical support. With plans starting at only $25, Edit.com allows website changes to be made from inside a browser and will assist customers with custom development.

Fotolog: A photo blogging site which has been around since 2002, Fotolog has over 3 million members and 100 million photos. Very popular in South America according to Alexa statistics, Fotolog offers users a place to upload and share their images with the community. Users can create profiles, friends, favorites, and can leave comments about theirs and others’ photos. Fotolog has recently published a beautiful coffee table book containing members’ photos.

Explore XY: A tool for searching the deep Web, this downloadable desktop application aims to improve online information retrieval. Explore XY utilizes the principles of correlation to discover a connection between two terms. Its powerful search aggregates and analyzes hundreds of documents to produce relevant data. Aimed at serious researchers, this “knowledge discovery vehicle” combs the Web for both structured and unstructured data for analysis.

SkyScout: An amazing invention, the SkyScout offers the experience of a visit to the planetarium in a handheld device. Using GPS technology, 3 axis sensors for both magnetic and gravitational fields, and a database of celestial objects, the SkyScout is a point and click planetarium. Look through the viewer at the sky and press a button and you will receive both text and audio about what objects you are actually viewing - both natural and man-made. Locate any object in the sky instantly by using the menu system. The SkyScout comes with headphones and offers a “Top 20” feature which details the top 20 coolest things to see in the sky on a particular night. Comes with a USB port to download updates from your computer, as well as an SD card slot. The SkyScout will be retailing for $399 with a 2 year warranty and Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for its release later this month.