Couldn't agree more about the amount of expertise on forums. And yes, getting enough users and data to compile stats is quite an undertaking (why site-wide stats don't currently exist). From a techy point of view, however, forums are only harnessing part of that available expertise. With slightly more structure I do believe the ease of finding and sharing that expertise will be shifted dramatically. This 'structure' that I'm talking about is very general. After reviewing the heavy clients available out there now, our main goal was provide a tool that allows people to keep their own methods of tracking (from notebooks for example) but to put it in a system that applies to many. So far example, the structured elements include what state your plants are in (I think we can all agree that cannabis goes through a couple diffrent growing phases), what strain (eventually we'll track phenos), what were their origins (seed, clone, unknown), mother plants, how often they've been watered (and with what), lighting timing, supply categories (nutes, environment, containers etc). I think with a little experimentation, you'll find the confines of our webspace are much more flexible than pen and paper.

In terms of the suspicion of computers, yes that is a reality. However, no more a reality than it is here. Email addresses are optional at registration, IPs are not logged with user accounts, and SSL encrypts the traffic. I encourage you to check out the help section on user accounts and privacy Cannalogy - Grow Good Cannabis. Again, it is a users choice to make any of their resource public or private (ie, share your nutrient supplies but maybe not your active plants, or keep active plants private but completed plants public)

The WIIFM question will vary depending on the grower. We're very proud of our app design, in that, to get the benefits of any of the functionality, you only need to use what you want.

-A personal grower might be forgetful about manual watering (or any scheduled event for that matter)
-A personal grower who uses a notebook might want to be able to sort data (such as your hottest day on record in the garden, or plants by yield, or basically any number data you can think of)
-Breeders might want their experiments available to customers
-Customers might want their experiments available to Breeders
-Product developers (I'm looking at you LED people) might want to give fact based tests of products without adding or having to sift through commentary. (and have them easily sorted and organized)

Forums are a fantastic place to exchange ideas and find people (I learned how to grow on forums) but the benefits of an object oriented application for research should not be underestimated.

Just my 2 cents. I really appreciate all the feedback we've received from folks.