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Articles |
Pulitzer
Winner Suspended Over Blog
Let's say that you are a journalist for one of America's most prestigious newspapers,
The Los Angeles Times. Not only that, but in 1999 you won a Pulitzer Prize for
exposing corruption in the world of show business (a dangerous feat in L.A.).
And you were a foreign correspondent in Russia and Africa and a technology writer.
Hiding
Behind the Facade
Anonymity makes a lot of things easier. Personal attacks and inaccurate representations,
for example, don't present much of an issue if nobody really knows who you are
when you invoke them.
Google
Scholar Sort By Date
Google Scholar recently added a "Recent articles" feature that lets you sort papers
by ranking them both by a combination of date and citations.
Study
Puts Blog Readers in Buckets
A new survey
of 36,000 blog readers conducted by BlogAds reveals there are different types
of blog readers. * Political types, according the the survey, read five blogs
each day, although it's not clear if this is by browsing or RSS. More than two-thirds
of these readers are male...
Mark
Cuban to Host Radio Show on Sirius
Billionaire tech entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, Mark Cuban, is
getting his own radio show, according to the WSJ
(sub).
The
New Unconference: EC’s (ExperienceCons)
I've been to a lot of conferences and events. Last week I was at the Webmaster
World Pubcon. What was remarkable about that? The pubcrawl. That's where the "pub"
part of "PubCon" came from.
The
Real Symbiosis Between PR and Journalism
[2006-04-23] It is a self-regarding conceit of journalism that we are the dogs
for whom public relations furnishes the lamp posts, says John
Lloyd writing in the Financial Times.
Alan
Meckler and Jason Calacanis Face Off
The WSJ
has Meckler and Calacanis discussing whether the typical blogger can make money
from their blog. Meckler says..."few people if any will ever make money from
writing a blog."
Blogger
Relations Update #1
About 48 hours has lapsed since I sent out the first batch of some 60 invitations
to participate in the Click.TV
blogger relations program. So far, I've heard from about 10 of them. All the responses
have been positive. I haven't had an email or even heard a rumbling...
Blogger
Relations the Right Way
Shel
Holtz is doing something very interesting, something that every PR practitioner
should pay attention to. It's also something that any business person should be
aware of, especially those who believe PR people and blogs don't fit well together.
Technorati
Stats, Just a Sign Post, Folks
For all the hype and hyperbole surrounding the latest Technorati
stats, I think, to Jeremy
Pepper's point, a lot of marketers are sitting on the sidelines looking at
things and asking, "how the hell does this really help us with our social media
plans?"
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05.03.06
Power Law Of Participation
 By
Ross Mayfield
Social software brings groups together to discover and create value. The problem
is, users only have so much time for social software.
The vast majority of users with not have a high level of engagement with a given
group, and most tend to be free riders upon community value. But patterns have
emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence and
high engagement provides a different form of collaborative intelligence. To illustrate
this, lets explore the Power Law of Participation:
Most of Chris Anderson's Long Tail examples have focused on models of consumption,
not production,
where intelligence is largely artificial. Amazonian algorythms guide users down
the long tail from Britney Spears to Nobodys, made available without the constraints
of shelf space. But the interesting question is will
the tail wag? Can users discover their own power together to either discover
something great, or even create it?
As we engage with the web, we leave behind breadcrumbs of attention. Even when
we Read, our patterns are picked up in referral logs (especially with expressly
designed tools, like Measure Map), creating a feedback loop. But reading alone
isn't enough to fulfill our innate desire to remix our media, consumption
is active for consumers turned users.
Digg is the archetype for low
threshold participation. Simply Favorite something you find of interest,
a one click action. You don't even have to log in to contribute value, you have
Permission
to Participate. Del.icio.us
taps both personal and social incentives for participation through the low threshold
activity of tagging. Remembering the URL is the hardest part, and you have
to establish an identity in the system. Commenting requires such identity
for sake of spam these days and is an under-developed area. Subscribing
requires a commitement of sustained attention which greatly surpasses reading
alone. Sharing is the principal activity in these communities, but much
of it occurs out of band (email still lives). We Network not only to connect,
but leverage the social network as a filter to fend off information overload.
Some of us Write, as in blog, and some of us even have conversations. But
these are all activities that can remain peripheral to community. To Refactor,
Collaborate, Moderate and Lead requires a different level of engagement --
which makes up the core of a community.
The byproduct of use is a Conucopia
of the Commons -- the act of using the database adds value to it. As users
engage in low threshold participation (read, favorite, tag and link) we gain a
form of collective intelligence. But it is important to distinguish the value
of collective
intelligence and collaborative
intelligence, as first pointed out by Mitch Kapor:
...Tons of interesting types of collaborative filtering, like Digg,
is TiVo like, indicating individual preferences, with some algorythm logic. Valid
and interesting, but people are not connecting. Different from a bunch of people
focusing on creating something. That is higher value than collaborative filtering,
my thesis, if you can get people to work together. Look at health information,
broadly speaking, why are doctors not collaborating to build such a resource --
the lack of information, locked up in a database that Harvard publishes, kills
people. I can feel the opportunity...
When users participate in high enagement activities, connecting with one another,
a different kind of value is being created. But my core point isn't just the difference
between these forms of group intelligence -- but actually how the co-exist in
the best communities.
In Wikipedia, 500 people, or 0.5% of users, account for 50% of the edits. This
core community is actively dedicated to maintaining an open periphery. Part of
what makes Flickr work isn't just excellence at low threshold engagement, but
the ability to form groups. Participation in communities plots along a power
law with a solid core/periphery
model -- provided social software supports both low threshold participation and
high engagement.
About the Author:
Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of
Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise
Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a
group memory. |
