The single hardest thing for a content site to do, I’m convinced, is to build a community. Throwing money at the project doesn’t help; there are no particular features that will ensure success; build it, and chances are high that they won’t come. You need patience, commitment, and a willingness to switch plans on the fly as you learn what does and doesn’t engage people.

But there is one relatively simple way to boost a community, and that’s to lower the fences. The less work it is to participate, the more people will do so; the more barriers you put in their way, the higher the chances are that they won’t bother.

At Technologizer, we have two principle forms of community: user comments on blogs, and the social network we call The Technologizer Community. The former requires no registration, and folks dive right in: It’s not unusual for a post to generate dozens or even hundreds of responses. (Not bad for a site that’s only a few weeks old and whose page views haven’t yet hit 200,000 a month.) The latter does require registration–the fairly simple one used by Ning–and will clearly need more work before it’s an unqualified success.

Then there’s PollDaddy, a poll tool I’ve had a lot of fun with at both Technologizer and PC World. Participating in a PollDaddy poll requires just a couple of clicks, and so I’m not surprised that you can get thousands of people to partake in one. Yes, the results aren’t the kind of meaty engagement that thriving forums or user reviews provide, but PollDaddy is simple, free, and popular; I can’t imagine running a Web site and not using it.