When you are on the web you are most likely doing one or both of these things. Many people have tried to measure the ratio of how much active participation happens vs. how much consumption happens.
My friend Adam recently wrote about finding the right ratio of persistence, passion, and quality to try to come up with the formula for success.
In it he references the 90-90-1 principle from Jakob Nielsen known as the participation inequality.
Luckily for Adam and others Jake McKee has created a site specifically designed to explain and explore the 90-90-1 Principle:
It explains the principle and narrows down the explanation in a way that is easily digestible and of course shareable with others.
The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It’s existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied.
This is not a bad thing!
Having a continued concentration on quality over quantity we allow for an evolution of contributors to occur. Those that try to crank out mass quantities suffer from a quality problem, which in turn will lead to an audience problem, thus most likely lower the amount they contribute back. Those that contribute high quality postings and gain the trust and attention of an audience are more likely to continue the trend, and push them to come up with better materials.
With the advent of spam blogs and republished content coming up everywhere one could argue that the signal to noise ratio is getting worse. On the other hand, with the barriers to entry so low for new participants to enter this space we may be getting much more signal than we realize. I have seen that shift on my blog with simplifying my comment system with Disqus, going through a redesign, and keeping up with where and how my readers interact with my site.
Keeping up with comments is only part of participating with your community. Monitoring where your content gets consumed, whether by RSS, email, or on your page, is also very important.
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November 25, 2008
Marketing, Social Networking, Technology