Hopefully everyone had a good weekend! Here is some gamification news you may have missed last week.

IBM Proves Playing Virtual Games is Serious Business Wired 11/8/2011 IBM’s test of game elements on their Social Blue site proved that users interacted more when game mechanics were present. Social Blue, a Facebook-like business centric social networking site, launched game elements for 10 months giving users points for uploads, comments and other desired actions. IBM then pulled the game layer and watched activity drop. Jennifer Thom-Santelli an IBM researcher said of the experiment, “There were a number of people who were motivated by these incentive systems.”

Digital Journal ‘Power User’ List Features Top Contributors in Global Crowdsourcing Project SF Gate 11/8/2011 Digital Journal published its ‘top contributors’ for the month of October after launching a gamification project that tracks every action of contributors on the its site. The gamification project sought to give contributors something to strive for in adding content, as well as give the media site analytics on how contributors are interacting. Chris Hogg, CEO, says of the project, “Most newsrooms have no idea how productive or hard-working some of their employees are, but this initiative gives us a granular look at how every single one of our members and contributors interacts with us in real-time.”

Dell, Gamification Strategy: Are You Kidding? Forbes 11/9/2011 Despite the slightly misleading title, we were very pleased with this positive look at the BigDoor powered gamification app at Dell World. Rishi Dave, Executive Director of Online Marketing at Dell says of the implementation, “Historically we had to build this type of application internally,” says Rishi, “Now companies like BigDoor can bring it together very quickly and use the Cloud. We don’t have to touch that huge global infrastructure that Dell has. We can be very agile.”