Research threads

I'm starting to get some work going on the research for my first non-fiction book. I'm looking to get feedback from people about if they could change anything in their past, knowing what they know now, would they change it and what would it be? Alternately, if they would not change anything, why not? I chose to start a thread on Topix (http://www.topix.com/forum/news/weird/TT8JMI7DJNGPLJECN) to seek feedback because it's a passive way to solicit information while I work at my day job. It's actually up to 21 comments now (nothing in thread size, really) and getting a couple of hits every hour or so. I think it's kind of like SimCity, where to be self sustaining you have to get it to a certain size. Since the forums sort by the most recently updated, you have to go in and enter a comment now and then to bring it back to the top. Once it has a serious number of hits, people keep coming back to see the replies to their comments, or drop in to see what all the fuss is about.

What's funny to me so far is the things that people would change are not at all what I had expected. No one is interested in going back and doing things differently financially (so far) like investing in Google or anything like that. No one is sorry they had an abortion, or that they didn't have an abortion. Of course there are a couple of trolls who have to make some weird comments, but that's to be expected in forums like this.

Now that I'm getting a little more savvy at these things, the next move is to try this in different forums and see which ones thrive better and which ones have different opinions. For instance, I would expect people to have different opinions in the African-American forum, the Guns&Ammo forum, the Abortion forum and the Cancer forum. In this way I can target audiences a little better. Eventually I'll be able to point peeps back to my blog (or a different themed blog) and have people seek me out. This could get fun.