[Sussex] Jakob Nielsen on Participation Inequality on the Web

[Nicholas Butler]

Phil.,

Wow you sit there for ages saying hardly anything online and then BHWAM 
that posting, as a response to lurkers, users and members ( see Dobbos 
previous postings ) its a damn fine read . its a bit long but since its 
here and in plain text I'll read it than head off to my browser ( but 
hey horses for courses man, hourses for corses ! ) .

In particular I enjoyed this comment in the summary

"  * Make participation a side effect. Even better,
let users participate with zero effort by making their
contributions a side effect of something else they're
doing. For example, Amazon's "people who bought this
book, bought these other books" recommendations are a
side effect of people buying books."

and this one in the main posting

" * Signal-to-noise ratio. Discussion groups drown
in flames and low-quality postings, making it hard to
identify the gems. Many users stop reading comments
because they don't have time to wade through the swamp
of postings from people with little to say."

Thanks for posting

Nik