NSW Public Sphere: 4 Sept 2009

NSW Public Sphere is nearly upon us.

What: NSW Public Sphere: Government 2.0

Where: The Theatrette, Parliament of NSW

When: 4 September 2009, 7.30am to 5.00pm

And just for the occasion, they’ve asked me if they can use my gov2.0 YouTube video that I created for the ACT Chief Minister’s Department. However, I figured I’d just create a new one just for them . . .

M

OzIA09 Cometh!

This year’s Oz-IA is just around the corner …

Where: StarCity Hotel & Casino

80 Pyrmont Street, Pyrmont NSW 2009 Australia

When:

Friday 2nd to
Saturday 3rd October
at the StarCity Hotel & Casino, Pyrmont NSW 2009

The website is close to up and the program is already being finalised. Here’s their Wordle picture for this year’s prezos!

I wonder if you can see your proposal in there!

M

1:9:90 of Social Media — Truism or Fallacy?

There is a widely held belief that only a small proportion of people ‘contribute’ when it comes to Web 2.0 — from social media to collaboration. It’s something that Jakob Nielsen wrote nearly three years ago about in his post titled Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute when social media was in its infancy. It’s the notion that:

• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).

Source: Nielsen, 2006

This comes originally from Hill, Hollan, Wroblewski & McCandless’s research [1] that suggests user participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule. Nielsen goes further to examine a number of online behaviours:

Usenet [2]

• 2 million messages
• 27% of the postings were from people who posted only a single message
• Most active 3% posters contributed 25% of the messages

Causes app on Facebook [3]

• 25 million users in April 2009
• 185,000 users gave a donation, even though the application offers the ability to give to 179,000 different non-profit organisations
• Suggests 99.3% lurkers and 0.7% donation contributors

An analysis of statistics of types of online behaviour from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), however, paints a different picture [4] of Australian adults [5] who are online:

• 26% publish a blog/web page, upload music and video at least monthly
• 35% post ratings on a product, comment on blogs, contribute to a forums, edit wikis

Traditionally, these sorts of behaviours would adhere to Hill et. al.’s concept of involvement and engagement but don’t adhere to his 1:9:90 rules. Futhermore, it fails to recognise the wider range of activities and behaviours that people can now undertake in modern online Web 2.0 environments. For example:

• 16% of Australian adults who are online use RSS, vote for websites, and add tags to content, from video to photos
• 45% of Australian online adults maintain a profile on a social media websites like Facebook and LinkedIn — an important aspect of allowing newcommers to online communities to understand who makes up that community, enables them to identify with those people, and determine whether or not they want to interact with them. Without this type of activity occuring it is likely that other types of online interaction with communities would not be possible (or would at least be significantly reduced)
• 63% are just spectators — those who typically read blogs, listen to podcasts, watch video, read forums and ratings — again important behaviours that encourage continued creation of content by the 1.8 million of Australians who create content. I know that without these ’spectators’ and the views I get on my own photos on Flickr as a result I may not be as motivated to contribute my content.

Proclaiming the 1:9:90 rule, therefore, without an understanding of the variety of roles, behaviours, the relationships between them, and the actual statistics, dooms us to a view of the world that social media will only be attractive to a very small proportion of citizens online. But given there are 11.2 million Australians currently online (out of 16.4m), and a whopping 8.5 million who do use social media at least monthly, I think the future is rosier than this 20 year old rule would otherwise suggest [4].

M

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1. William C. Hill, James D. Hollan, Dave Wroblewski, and Tim McCandless, 1992 “Edit wear and read wear,” Proceedings of CHI’92, the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Monterey, CA, May 3-7, 1992), pp. 3-9. 

2. Steve Whittaker, Loren Terveen, Will Hill, and Lynn Cherny, 1998: “The dynamics of mass interaction,” Proceedings of CSCW 98, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (Seattle, WA, November 14-18, 1998), pp. 257-264.

3. Hart, K and Greenwell, M, 2009. To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green: Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising. 22 Apr Online at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103786.html

4. Analysis of ABS cat no.  8146.0 and ABS cat no.3201.0

5. According to ABS definitions, adults are those 18 years and over