As someone new to the blogging world, seeing the wealth of stat-related tools out here has been eye-opening. I find myself wishing my Google Analytics and Feedburner statistics updated more frequently so I could see in real-time what was happening on my blog. There are lessons here that should be applied to user generated content. Showing people how often their content gets looked at, bookmarked, clicked on etc can only help drive user engagement. In addition, most people act to optimize any metric they look at regularly. If you can line up the stats with the behavior you hope to encourage, you have a built-in incentive for your users to continue to do the things you want them to do.