There is NSF funded study of this sort of stuff -- looks even deeper into some of the behaviors in groups to find distinctive patterns in list traffic that serve to distinguish "answer people" from those who "discuss."
See for example " Visualizing the Signatures of Social Roles in Online Discussion Groups" /Howard T. Welser, Eric Gleave, Danyel Fisher,and Marc Smith Journal of Social Structure 2007 (Vol. 8, No. 2) http://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume8/Welser/
Some of you who look at the article may recognize the co-author name of Marc Smith, a sociologist formerly at Microsoft, who has done some related presentations at CNI (and elsewhere) that use some of these slides.
His stuff is at: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2008-icwsm-marc-smith-some-dimensions-of-social-media-presentation
Jonathan LeBreton
Sr. Associate University Librarian
Temple University Libraries
Paley M138, 1210 Polett Walk, Philadelphia PA 19122
voice: 215-204-8231
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email: lebreton_at_temple.edu
email: jonathan_at_temple.edu
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
> Sent: Friday, August 20, 2010 9:31 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] Participation Inequality (Was: Participation in the NGC4LIB list)
>
> 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 - 10:18:45 EDT