That phrase (it comes from the movie 'Field of Dreams') was behind so many failures of 'web 1.0' in the late nineties... Building a site, even a good site with good content, is not enough to get visitors and then convert them into users.

YouTube was not the first Flash video site on the web, and it is not the best but, somehow, it managed to get a strong user base (I resist the term community) behind it and has become a poster child for user generated content. What happened? What made it such a success?

I believe that quite a few of the web efforts around using IT for education, even the ones for mathematics, are well beyond the 'good enough' point and we have to begin wondering whether IT for education presents special challenges that haven't been met yet, or if it really is a matter of waiting, or there's some fine tuning to do, or some other aspect I can't quite grasp.

Some general pointers can be found at If you build it, will they come? 21 tips for getting people to your web site - publicity, promotion and marketing, and Google has led me to If You Build It, They Will Come: Building Learning Communities Through Threaded Discussions, which looks promising after some quick skipping. Then again, I'm sure we'll learn a lot from Christine's work, as pointed by Olga.

Anyway, a big challenge ahead, offering some interesting times...