[Air-L] Participation inequality - querying the crowd

[Bernie Hogan]

Dear AoIRers,

Over the past few years I've seen numerous studies demonstrating how
participation online follows an extreme skew in any given context.
Many people post few comments, few people post many comments. Jakob
Nielsen characterized this in a classic short article:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

This was dovetailing on some "new networks" work showing online
networks having a similar skew (although, it is somewhat different for
the statistically inclined - perhaps power-law rather than pareto,
log-normal etc...). But for simplicity's sake, its similar- many sites
have few links, few sites have many links.

But while scale-free networks and extreme skews have been extensively
studied from a statistical point of view (i.e. what is the parameter
for this curve or how does the clustering shift over time), I can't
recall any studies discussing the motivations (either social, economic
or psychological) for participation inequality and why it differs from
person to person or site to site. I've heard of some studies showing
gender, efficacy or time online to be factors, but even these are
minor  - I'm more interested in why any of those people are massive
contributors while others less so, not subtle variations among the
massive contributors.

Any thoughts? Papers? Presentations?

Take care,
BERNiE

Bernie Hogan
Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute
University of Oxford
1 St. Giles,
Oxford, OX1 3JS
United Kingdom

http://individual.utoronto.ca/berniehogan/