Comments on: 90-9-1 Rule Skews the New Web

By: Here comes Clay Shirky’s ‘Cognitive Surplus’

Here comes Clay Shirky’s ‘Cognitive Surplus’ — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:05:50 +0000

[...] rule,” as the authors describe it on page 123; it’s the 90–9-1 rule (explained here and here) that applies to a typical group of 100 [...]

By: Jake

Jake — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:56:41 +0000

Sure. The Forrest study that Charlene and Josh did break the types of users down into much more granular categories, which is good. I'm not sure of the sample sizes, but my guess is, when applied to the 'tubes, the numbers are probably still closer to 90-10 for blogs and Twitter.

As you say, blogs are hard, and frankly, so is Twitter. The value of community is tough to quantify.

Agreed that participation takes time, and you allude to the main reason why when you mention Facebook. It's trust.

I don't actually find blogs lonely. It just takes time to build a community.

By: LaurelPapworth

LaurelPapworth — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 21:28:05 +0000

Hmmm. Dr Jakob Nielsen's work is from Oct 2006 and based on studies even earlier than that. Wouldn't it be more useful to compare the two Forrester studies 13% are Creators in 2007 up to 26% Creators in 2009? We are learning to contribute. We will learn Twitter. We find blogs lonely (media created in isolation) and hard to build an audience and time consuming but we learnt Facebook very well. Twitter offers nothing to a first time user (not much of a profile to fill in, no apps to play with). But they eventually come back…

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:58:22 +0000

Feeling honored that you continue to read here and enjoy your contrarian viewpoint.

Interesting point from Bill Stone. I have used Twitter frequently to find news reported as it happens, and for me, the 'tubes provides the best screen, mainly b/c it's, you know, online and all. The best screen probably applies to your thoughts on mobile as well, incidentally.

I can't do Twitter w/o groups for filtering, which is the only reason I cling to TweetDeck, despite its memory consumption. You don't hear much complaining about native Twitter groups anymore, but that's definitely a gap I'd like to see filled.

There's that trust thing again.

By: joel garry

joel garry — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:40:39 +0000

I signed up for it when Oracle people started doing it, never got into it. I just thought those particular articles were interesting, marketing people have a, er, "different" view of the social technologies. Combine marketing with government and politics and, voila, it's 1984 (the book) all over again. Paying attention? Shoot, don't get me started on that. These people don't pay attention, they only are in it for the money or manipulation. The marketing people are just in it for the money, write a blog, make a tweet, they've done "work." I don't begrudge people getting gummint contracts, but they often are putting out drivel rather than content. And that is not a good thing for social media, as you noted, trust is the differentiator for usefulness. How long would you follow a blog that is just Oracle press releases? Would you hang on its every word in case they bought some other company? Isn't that even less interesting than some stranger saying they don't want to clean their toilet? Good blogs are interesting because they analyse, tell you things you don't already know. Can tweets say the same?

An interesting point came out of an article about Flo TV: “I think that says there is clearly a demand from people who have the service, and we see a really big spike when things are happening that people care about, whether that's a Lakers-Magic game, a plane landing in the Hudson River, swine flu outbreaks, the inauguration... When things are happening in my life, I want to view them on the best screen available. If the Lakers' game was on now, but I'm on an airplane, I'm between classes, I'm on a road trip in a vehicle and I have my netbook with me, that's the best screen available. So people are living their lives, and their expectation is whatever is happening can be integrated into their lives where they're at.” - Bill Stone

You can only watch so many videos of people getting hit in the nuts by eight-balls. You can only read so many useless tweets. At some point, the Grand Canyon gets a little too quiet. Then the bots come.

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:38:40 +0000

BTW thanks for your other comment

By: Jake

Jake — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:46:36 +0000

You're on Twitter? IMO getting local news and government on Twitter, assuming they're paying attention, is a good thing.

Big assumption though.

By: joel garry

joel garry — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:39:17 +0000

Time to move on to the next technology when mainstream politics get involved.

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:37:08 +0000

Good point. The NYT piece focuses on pie-in-the-sky bloggers who had dreams of getting rich, which, as we all know, doesn't happen. If that's the motivation, quitting is pretty easy.

Besides, blogging is harder than it sounds, and it takes time and dedication, even if you're building an audience vs. trying to make money.

Unless you strike gold with UCG + pithy captions, providing a never-ending supply of content w/very little of your own effort I should focus on the ICHC network; that's a crazy business model.

By: John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises)

John E. Bredehoft (Empoprises) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:15:23 +0000

One minor comment on the Technorati stat. In some cases (including my own), blogs were abandoned because new blogs were started. I've changed my blogging strategy a few times since 2003, going from multiple blogs to a single blog and back to multiple blogs again. And with these new blogs, my last visit to Technorati revealed that Technorati hadn't pinged them in some time, so my near-daily updates to the blogs were unknown to Technorati.

This doesn't invalidate your premise – there clearly is a steep curve when you graph members' interactions – but it's worth a mention.