Parentography to Stimulate Contributors with Cash

You have probably already read about a new website launched today - Parentography. It has launched as promised (and has properly informed subscribers via email of their launch).

Parentography is a new parenting social network for users to share information on children-friendly excursions. The website provides information on various activities and places: restaurants, lodgings, kid services, parks & playgrounds, attractions.

All the information you'll find here is based on personal experience of other parentographers - there is a substantial number of reviews already - they were written during the private beta testing period. The reviews you write can bring you to the list of Top 100 parentographers currently headed by the website founders - Noelle and Tim Ludwig (did you actually expect it could be a non-family project?).

But building a new social network - whatever it is intended for - is quite risky today. The major question is how you will get people from other similar networks participate in your brand-new network. Pete Cashmore from Mashable made a conclusion about Parentography:

Success depends on having a critical number of reviews, of course, so they'll need to work on that.

And they have worked on that: today the Parentography blog has 2 major announcements - public launch of the network and cash giveaway. The giveaway is quite simple:

Each time that our database indicates that we've had a review or excursion posted that makes the total number of entries in our system a multiple of 100 (i.e., 100, 200, 300…), that Parentographer will win US$100.00 from us.  We'll keep giving away money until we hit our 1,000th contribution and that Parentographer will win US$1,000.00.

This promotional tool will definitely bring them "a critical number of reviews" - and that only means that every review written will cost them $1.9. Not bad to build a content base?

And they have really worked well to make parentographers stay after they try the network and write a couple of reviews during the contest. User interface is rather simple and intuitive, content is easily browsable, searchable and accessible.

My conclusion? It is exactly what a web 2.0 community should be - a place for people to enjoy and use. Parentography is definitely not a place for geeks - it is a network for people who simply need a better place to share their knowledge about raising children. And don't you feel like we already have too many websites made by geeks and for geeks? And too many projects that are only launched to be reviewed once by a prominent blogger, get overwhelmed with traffic (only geeks who read the for-geeks blogs, register but never stay) and then disappear for lack of interest after the review is published.

At the same time I do know that it's not geeks who actually build a strong and successful online community - it's ordinary people who share similar interests. Something like Parentography. And to tell you the truth, it is really refreshing to see "keywords" and "keywords cloud" here instead of the tags we now have everywhere. But why should a parent who only wants to take a child for a walk - and share the information later - be taught the word "tag" at all?