the Onda

As we struggle to get Tabblo into beta, Ned sent me a very relevant piece from Brad Horowitz-- "Creators, Synthesizers, and Consumers"-- on social sites, participation, and the industry's move to embracing the unwitting blogger.

Horowitz starts the post with this chart to show that in fact very people people have to be "active" in order for a community site to be of significant value. His argument is that this 1-10x-100x ratio holds across different sites and he uses both Yahoo Groups (a great aggregation of many communities of all types and sizes) and Wikipedia as examples of the ratio holding. He argues that this winnowing we see as someone moves from lurker to creator actually helps to reduce noise in the community which I don't agree with (who hasn't been part of a group where the most vocal can end up being the most disruptive?) but then also argues that he is all for removing barriers that preclude more active participation.

The first example he gives is one where the production experience is so lightweight (posting individual pictures to flickr) that it's a very easy and seamless shift from consuming to producing. This is interesting but I'd argue that for many worthwhile activities that live naturally in a social software site, the production experience shouldn't (or couldn't) be sufficiently simplified to make the transition so easy (researching a wikipedia topic, remixing podcasts, contributing code to an open source project, etc.) and what becomes really interesting to me are attempts to break the 1-10-100 ratio in those cases, especially around the 1-10 lurker-> synthesizer transition where I think there is so much locked up communal value.

Brad then makes the case for properly instrumenting a social site such that it encourages "implict creation" and creates "public artifacts" as a byproducts of what the users are doing in the system. This is similar to Dan Bricklin's old Cornucopia of the Commons argument or Tim O'Reilly's Architecture of Participation and is dead on as a starting point for trying to harness the potential creative investment of all of those community lurkers.

I prefer using "unwitting blogger" because there is a bumbling and serendipitous tone to unwitting that I think fits better with how most people who engage with a site suddenly discover that they have undergone a state change up the pyramid. It's almost never a conscious decision on the part of the user but after it's done, you'll find it very hard to put that particular genie back in the bottle.

Unfortunately, this dynamic seems like a really hard thing to get right. It takes a really rare mix of tool-building, community management, and perhaps most importantly (and most obviously missing from most of today's social sites), a really deep understanding of how people learn and what kind of rewards are necessary to get them to invest one more incremental unit of effort in working their way up the pyramid. As we move from easy production experiences to richer ones where more creativity is encouraged, finding the right mix is the challenge that faces us all.

[ As an aside, it is so nice to see a bigwig from the largest social software experimenter out there blogging about this stuff openly. It speaks volumes to how good it is to be working in the consumer web today, especially when you compare it to say, another "consumer" industry: consumer electronics where I had an opportunity to play five years ago. No matter how hard I try, I just can't imagine one of the big cheeses at Philips posting on whether "this iPod thing is really gonna go anywhere." ]

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