Mathemagenic

There was something in my drafted posts from January… Something about lurkers vs. creators.

Stephen Downes: Blogging Without Writing

One tenth of one percent of the people write publicly. Well, OK, I can’t validate this figure, but it has been a rule of thumb for me for about a decade. If you have a thousand readers on your Website, one person will post regularly to the discussion board. If you have a thousand mailing list subscribers, one person will post the bulk of the messages. If you have a thousand Internet users, one person will create (and maintain) a blog (people may observe that two percent of Internet users currently blog, but I see this as an indication of the scale of the coming shrinkage of the blog community).

Jonathan Smith: With this medium I am reading much more than I am posting.

Just a few questions related to it:

Is it true that blogging is more about reading than writing? I guess so.

Is is true that % of active bloggers (blog writers) is so low? Is there any way to find how many blog readers are there (especially given the blurring line between weblogs and other types of online publishing/communication; also - when you write you know that this is a weblog, but your readers may not know)?

Do the numbers of active participants say something about general ratios between creation/consumption? I wonder what if we assume everyone is (wants to be) a creator, but this is not the case…

This post also appears on channel weblog research

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/04/07.html#a1157; comments are here.

• Mama’s day: Legitimate peripheral participation
• Blogs are smokescreens as much as windows
• Weblog citations

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