User Participation Score at Download.com = 0.0005% (or 1 in

After downloading the PDF reader Foxit Reader from Download.com, I got a nice reminder email to stop back and provide my rating.  I image most people Download.com visitors aren't registered, so most don't rate the products.

In fact, out of 636,221 downloads of Foxit Reader, only 31 people have left a rating.  That means that just 1 person out of every 20,523 downloads left a rating, or 0.0005%.  You can see the user feedback here.

That's not a lot, but it's better than nothing.  And Download.com is still the best site to go for software downloads.   In any case, here is a case for a new experimental metric, the User Participation Score (UPS).  For Download.com, we could give it a score of 0.0005% based on this once case.

Now, in the practical world, Download.com could work on increasing their User Participation Score (UPS).  Some thoughts:

• The only people who would register at Download.com are those who really, really, really want to share feedback (like me).
• Download.com needs to give visitors a reason to register.  One somewhat diabolical way would be to require all downloaders to register.  Makes sense.  Download.com is providing a service after all.  But then again, they could just insert an offer to register in the download process.
• The holy grail is social features.  It would be great to find people similar to you.  At the very least, let me see user profiles and what they downloaded and voted on.