In June we were discussing how the vast majority of NGC4LIB posts come from a small number of list members. I mentioned that this was a fairly common phenomenon in my experience.
Now I find out that it has a name: "participation inequality". Jakob Nielsen discusses it in this posting from 2006:
Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute (see: http://bit.ly/cI9T11).
Among other things, Nielsen cites a 90-9-1 rule for participation in large online groups:
* 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
* 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
* 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.
I'm not trying to re-open the discussion. Just thought this might be of interest to some...
Bernie Sloan
Received on Fri Aug 20 2010 - 09:31:25 EDT