Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
SIX DEGREES OF PARTICIPATION
Tech guru Ross Mayfield has an important post “Social Technographics and a Power Law of Participation” that would be of interest to most serious bloggers. In it, Mayfield analyzes the results of a demographic study that examined the nature and degree of interactivity of participation on the Web, displayed in the visual hierarchy below:
A closer look at Mayfield’s visualization can be found here at Flickr
An excerpt:
“I still contend that a more ideal community is scale free in structure. What I wonder is if you could benchmark these levels of engagement against a power law — not just to test Forrester’s findings, but to help a given company realize — “we are under-weighted in critics!”
LOL! I agree. Try to love your critics. Even when they are dead wrong they are the ( sometimes irritating) guides toward truth.
On a personal level, I am a creator and a critic foremost, followed closely by spectator. I dip my toe in being a joiner and I am not a collector at all. I’m not sure why this is. I had a bloglines account and then a blogbridge aggregator and both fell into immediate disuse. I don’t subscribe to a single RSS feed and I’ve been told that mine malfunctions a lot. I don’t do digg or that delicious thing and I understand neither. Recently, eerie, the mistress of the group blog Aqoul indicated she kept track of about 240 blogs(!). My hat is off to her, I can’t muster that kind of interest.
How about you ?