Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Too Much Blog Posting

This has gotten some press already, but I keep thinking about the Alertbox post on "participation inequality" on the web:

There are about 1.1 billion Internet users, yet only 55 million users (5%) have weblogs according to Technorati. Worse, there are only 1.6 million postings per day; because some people post multiple times per day, only 0.1% of users post daily.
This is my 31st post in the last seven days (here and there), so I'm way ahead of the curve.

I'm not sure, though, what the problem with "participation inequality" is, exactly. Notwithstanding Web 2.0 nonsense about "onecasting" between individuals, isn't the point of having a superlative blog like this one to attract an audience? And by definition, doesn't an audience "participate" by consuming the good, not necessarily producing it ever or at all?

(Via Bruce Sterling, Beyond the Beyond.)