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Tuesday, October 10, 2006
If you’re in charge of overseeing an online community and are frustrated because you cannot get more folks to participate, get over it! That’s just the way things are. It’s not your fault. In fact, it’s the very nature of communities, online or not.
“90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action,” writes international usability superstar Jakob Nielsen in Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute. “On any given user-participation site, you almost always hear from the same 1% of users, who almost certainly differ from the 90% you never hear from.”
How do you overcome “participation inequality”? You don’t, says Nielsen. Recognize that this phenomena “will always be with us. It’s existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied.”
Read the article for insight into meaningful ways you can encourage participation that require little or no effort on the part of participants. As usual, Nielsen provides references to back up his assertions.
Now all we need is a bit of research into why some “community leaders” believe they need to control the communities they oversee. Ideas?
Filed under: Community Development
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Need a place to promote your conference? Why not try posting your information to the world’s largest free online conference database, Confabb.com? Confabb combines an aggregate database of major conferences, conventions, and trade shows sorted by industry with social networking tools designed to empower conference attendees to improve their overall experience.
Built into the site is a reputation management system to be used by conference attendees, speakers, organizers and administrators allowing people to plan for and attend conferences, and critique and review those they have attended and want to share with colleagues. No other resource contains such a comprehensive listing of events or as robust a tool set for maximizing the conference experience via the live Web.
Here’s a few click links to get you started:
Coming soon to Confabb.com are new features.
If you have questions about Confabb.com, contact me.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
After a not-so-smooth roll-out of mailman listserv software on the Society for Technical Communication Information Design Special Interest Group, I decided to start an Information Architecture discussion group on The Content Wrangler Community. I hope it will be an alternative to the horrible listserv discussion groups that have outlived their usefulness and are quickly being replaced by social network discussion groups that allow more natural conversations and provide a better user experience.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
The Content Wrangler Community, the new social network for content professionals is attracting a global audience of content professionals from around the globe. More than 1,200 knowledge workers from all walks of life are congregating online and forming special interest groups focused on software tools, content standards, information modeling, job hunting, technical communication, web 2.0, marketing and more. In addition to allowing the formation of groups, the community provides members with online forums, a blog, keyword searchable member directory, video and photo sharing, discounts on upcoming conferences, event announcements, training sessions, webinars, and much more. Join today!
Thursday, October 04, 2007
While they might not be able to claim they’ve served billions of burgers and fries, MySpace.com can claim the title of the highest trafficked website in the US. The social networking site generated 45 million page views during the month of July, 2007, according to researchers at comScore.com.

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