{"id":1042,"date":"2007-05-02T08:49:59","date_gmt":"2007-05-02T15:49:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp\/2007\/05\/how_many_users_are_actually_ge\/"},"modified":"2007-05-02T08:49:59","modified_gmt":"2007-05-02T15:49:59","slug":"how_many_users_are_actually_ge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/main\/how_many_users_are_actually_ge.php","title":{"rendered":"How many users are actually generating content?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Web-watcher Donna Bogatin challenges a basic assumption<\/a> of social networks on the web, and sites that celebrate the rise of the active user. She suggests that while media mavens are heralding the new world of user-generated content and a new democracy in public expression, statistics show that most of the world is still just watching.<\/p>\n

For example, she points to the dramatic ratio between videos uploaded and videos viewed on YouTube (one-tenth of one percent), and wonders if the user-empowered on-line world is just a new version of the media world that already existed:<\/p>\n


\nAll of the Web 2.0 Social Web properties which rely on users to contribute content are faced with what I call the “Social Freeloaders” phenomenon. As in the “real-world,” interactions within social communities on the Web are dominated by an extremely small, self-selected minority of active, vocal participants.
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Using similar statistics, however, Charles Leadbeater is ecstatic about the prospect of a one-percent participation rate. In his speech to the TED conference (linked in an earlier weblog<\/a>), he suggests that one percent of a very large community is actually quite a powerful thing.<\/p>\n


\nIf you are a games company and you’ve got a million players in your game, you only need one percent of them to be co-developers, contributing ideas, and you’ve got a development workforce of ten thousand people. Imagine you could take all the children in education in Britain, and one percent of them were co-developers of education. What would that do to the resources available to the education system?
\n<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So, is the Internet creating a new generation of ”content makers” or yet another generation of watchers with a few makers in the mix? And how many ”makers” does it take to transform the world? No way to know but to watch it unfold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Web-watcher Donna Bogatin challenges a basic assumption of social networks on the web, and sites that celebrate the rise of the active user. She suggests that while media mavens are heralding the new world of user-generated content and a new democracy in public expression, statistics show that most of the world is still just watching. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1042","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artfulmanager\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}