NetLingo: Word of the Day: The 1% rule

I love NetLingo - you’ll have heard my espouse it’s many and varied benefits before, but recently (Sunday October 19th) there was a great “Word of the Day” email about something called the 1% rule – and it goes a little something like this:

An emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online, then one will create content, ten will interact with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it (also known as lurking). Earlier metrics garnered from online community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing data due to social networking sites and blogs creates a different picture. The lesson? A Web site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of ten people just pass by.

So my question there would be how this differs now that Mobile device browsing, blogging, and general usage, might skew those figures – any mobile internet platform that allows simple, easy access to websites, and way to interact with them, is going to see a rapid rise in usage – but just how much would that convert to statistically?

If analysts are to be believed, we’ll all be accessing the InterWeb on our MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices) in a few years – but by then, will Web 3.0, or some other new and emerging technology have taken things on a different tangent? Thoughts, please……

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