B.G. Sloan wrote:
<snip>
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).
</snip>
Some may read Nielsen's post a bit differently e.g. I could see many would reconsider the following excerpt from Nielsen:
"Inequality on the Web
There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily.
Blogs have even worse participation inequality than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1.
Inequalities are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurkers. According to Wikipedia's "about" page, it has only 68,000 active contributors, which is 0.2% of the 32 million unique visitors it has in the U.S. alone."
changing it in this way, [with my edits]:
"Inequality on the Web
There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet [thankfully!] 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. [Unfortunately], there are [as many as] 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, [we can consider ourselves lucky that] only 0.1% of users post daily.
Blogs have even [better] participation inequality than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1.
Inequalities are also found on Wikipedia, where more than 99% of users are lurkers [hallelujah!]. According to Wikipedia's "about" page, it has [the unmanageably large number of] 68,000 active contributors, which is 0.2% of the 32 million unique visitors it has in the U.S. alone. [Let's hope matters improve!]"
Just joking!
James L. Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
Received on Fri Aug 20 2010 - 10:25:14 EDT