Participation counts – says Ryan Sholin, who follows it up with…

• Start blogging here: wordpress.com
• Start sharing your photos here: flickr.com
• Start sharing your bookmarks here: del.icio.us
• Start developing a social network here: facebook.com

Ryan is spot on, and of course, there are other ways to start participating.

Another reoccurring theme here at beat blogging will be tools. And while I will always stress that people are more important than technology – it never hurts to know what other tools are out there.

In the comments Zac Echola writers

"There’s great conversations out there and it’s most rewarding when we see those conversations turn into actions at papers.

Simply put, if you’re not engaging people, what are you doing,
exactly? You need to be a participant to fully understand the value of
the Web and to understand your audience."

A lot can be said about "understanding your audience." You can spend years getting a sense of them. But why not just ask them directly?

Online polls, if directed at a highly concentrated group that a reporter trusts, can be highly effective. Again: It doesn’t feel like "reporting," but I would argue it is: You are gathering information. While shoe-leather reporting requires having your senses alert and knowing where to be, sending out an online poll is all about asking the right questions to the right people.

Recently I came across SurveyMonkey. It’s not the first online poll creator I’ve seen – but I found it a pleasure to work with. It’s incredibly fast. Building a survey takes minutes if you already know what you want to ask. It’s free and flexible: You can ask open ended questions, multiple choice questions, pull down questions, etc. It does the statistical analysis for you and you can either direct people to the survey via email or on your blog.

I think creating simple polls is an incredibly effective way to engage your sources. It’s an easy way to get concrete data as well as anecdotal — as long as you ask the right questions.

It isn’t exactly creating a "social network," but it is one way to engage lots of sources at once. Perhaps there is a way to think creatively about doing an online survey so that the sources, as well as the reporter, are able to learn about the group. I could see SurveyMonkey combined with a GoogleGroup to be a highly effective combination.