[Web4lib] Interesting Web/Library 2.0 data (was particpationSkills for Library 2.0 Leaders)

[Walt Crawford]

Really commenting on an earlier post: From what I've read and observed, the
Pareto Principle is the wrong one to use for contribution ratios in
social/web services. The applicable ratio is the 90:9:1 ratio--that is, of
every 100 users, roughly 9 will be occasional contributors or commenters and
roughly one will be a "real" contributor.

I think that's true for Wikipedia, although there it may be more like the
alternate 990:9:1 ratio since there are so many "driveby users." It seems to
be true for a range of other "social" sites, including blogs and blog
reading. (Are 10% of blogs actively maintained, i.e., with posts at least
once a month?) I'd guess the 90:9:1 ratio is even true of a fair number of
lists...

One consequence of this is that the audience is still, *mostly*, the
audience--but "mostly" isn't as overwhelming now as it used to be.

Walt Crawford

On 5/3/07, Mark Costa <markrcosta at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ok, so now we know why Google bought Youtube, because there are many ways
> to
> drive traffic to the site.
>
> I think of it this way, just because I drive through a rich neighborhood,
> it
> doesn't make me a member of the community. I'm just another guy passing
> through admiring the houses. It's the same thing with Youtube, there are
> just a bunch of people passing through; very few of them are community
> members. Youtube gives people a good reason to drive through, and Google
> knows how to sell to the gawkers.
>
> Wikipedia throws me off a bit. You can't imbed the site's content, so its
> not as easy to drive traffic to the site. But, they have to get a large
> number of drive throughs because you can pick up one of its entries for
> almost any Google search on a topic or famous person. Do more people
> contribute because it is easier to add a line or two of text, rather than
> contribute a video? Or is it because a larger percentage of the population
> has an idea that they want to share, while only a small percentage of the
> population has a video they want to share. Everyone's an amateur
> philosopher
> and historian, very few of us are amateur directors.
>
>
> On 5/3/07, K.G. Schneider <kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I would have to say that for Youtube and Flickr, they generate a
> > > tremendous
> > > number of visits because people can imbed the image/video on another
> > site.
> > > That's a good way to drive non-contributory traffic to a site and skew
> > the
> > > ratio.
> >
> > This isn't "non-contributory traffic" that "skew[s] the ratio," since a
> > major component of Web 2.0 theory/practice is the idea that content is
> > portable/remixable. If I post a YouTube video to my site and people
> watch
> > it, they are participating in YouTube (and likely to visit the site
> > themselves).
> >
> > The idea that the site is the destination is very 1.0.
> >
> > K.G. Schneider
> > kgs at bluehighways.com
> > http://freerangelibrarian.com
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Web4lib mailing list
> > Web4lib at webjunction.org
> > http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Mark R. Costa, MLS
>
> "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man
> persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
> depends on the unreasonable man."
> --- George Bernard Shaw
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