Ghost of Midnight

How People Use the Social Web

Ross Mayfield recently offered the Power Law of Participation…

Social software brings groups together to discover and create value. The problem is, users only have so much time for social software. The vast majority of users with not have a high level of engagement with a given group, and most tend to be free riders upon community value. But patterns have emerged where low threshold participation amounts to collective intelligence and high engagement provides a different form of collaborative intelligence.

At first blush, I’d say that Front Porch Forum‘s neighborhood forums travel along this curve, from left to right, as the neighborhood forum gains participants.  People join and lurk and then past some tipping point things get interesting and collaboration kicks in as neighbors start working to get the potholes filled, graffiti cleaned up, block party organized, etc.  He goes on to say…

Charlene Li at Forrester just came out with a report on Social Technographics that surveyed user engagement.

As I previously commented, 50% of one neighborhood forum contributed in the past six months.  Not sure how our model fits into this web-centric world view.