Bradley Horowith of Yahoo reflects on the distribution of users in their social spaces (ex. below based on YahooGroups).
It seems this could apply to blogs and other social software spaces. (The visual is ‘borrowed’ from BH) via apophenia
From Nivi blog you can read:
You can break down Web 2.0 customers into a fuzzy hierarchy:
- Creators who create an “original” work.
- Linkers who annotate the work of Creators.
- Commenters who comment on the Creator’s and Linker’s work.
- Surfers who consume the output of Creators, Linkers, and Commenters.
To which cboon a commenter added: “Enablers who build the means for Creators to create and disseminate.”
Like I said earlier, the math still adds up to more readers, connectors and commenters than creators. That’s a lot of people basking in other people’s (narcissistic) mirrors, and echoing the reflection in a number of ways!
We could be arguing over the definition of creator; debating what percentage of newer content added to what is ‘borrowed’ is sufficient to make a posting a creative act. But not tonight.
This reminds me very much of the debate on ‘appropriation’ in contemporary art (scroll down to the appropriation section). To be continued…I’m quite sure.