Saturday, April 28, 2007

Who contributes and who lurks

Posting in stereo today -
I did this as I discovered that the links in my last post were not working. Especially the important one to Jorum.

I attending the Jorum steering group in York yesterday. It is great to hear that Colleges and Universities across the UK are signing up to the national repository. But we still have a way to go to get them all depositing and downloading the learning resources.

A sobering article was tabled from Thursday's Guardian highlighting that the 1% rule on contributing in online commmnities . Which is low is not holding up in research on web2

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

* 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:


In fact it looks like YouTube and other Web2 services have contributor rates as low as 0.065%
This is something that may challenge us on the road ahead - it may just be telling us more about people rather than technology.
Worth a look at - I could not find Guardian story but found source here.