Another few links from Jakob Nielsen at Alertbox:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html
Summary: "In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."
Which, given the supposedly participatory, inclusive power of these sorts of tools, is pretty damning - seems to be a new hierarchy, just a little more distributed. Includes some good stuff about improving usability and incentivizing the process to get more people involved.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html
Summary: How people read websites: "Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/writing-reuse.html
Summary: "Users often see online content out of context and read it with different goals than you envisioned." Talks about user studies involving the reading of blogs.
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Yeah ... lurking sucks, really. That's partially why I think that there are really only 2 sizes of blog: wee, and monstrous. The wee ones get somewhere up to maybe 20 comments per post, on a really good day. The monster ones get hundreds, regularly. It's funny. I wonder where the in-between ones are, or if they even exist?
ReplyDeleteThat last one makes me wonder, really, what goals people thought their readers would have.