29301
General Software Discussion / Re: Windows XP Myths
« Last post by mouser on October 10, 2006, 04:56 PM »f0dder please try to be more respectful, there is no reason to resort to name calling, especially to a new visitor.
Recent Posts
Magnificent! A work of genius. The best how-to manual ever published. I could keep piling on the superlatives because this book is simply a masterpiece. At one level, it is a comic book about how to make comics, and for that it is supreme; the best. It will walk you through every step of making a comic, including how to make them on the web, digitally, or in pen and ink. I've been working on a near-completed graphic novel, and every page has told me something important and spot on. With brilliant graphics, Scott McCloud combines the most profound insights from his two previous books, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics. But in this book he raises your understanding of graphic communication further by making every lesson utterly practical and useful for both novice and expert. I can't imagine anyone ever doing a comic manual better.
Startups certainly require an inordinate amount of hard, thankless work, flexibility, and spendthriftness. It is rare to find suitable startup conspirators in your day-to-day life when you are working an “adult” job, and “ignorance” is helpful in that you don’t know enough not to try.
Still, there are several things that work against young entrepreneurs. Here is a list of five:..
- They Don’t Know the RIGHT People
- They All Have the Same Ideas
- It’s the Marketing, Stupid
- Kids are Flaky
- Kids are Good Pirahna Bait
During the last week I created Cover Browser, a website to explore & search comic book covers. You’ll find everything from Superman to Spider-Man to independent comics, and I plan to add more titles if feedback is good.
..
The Hipseat baby carrier has been developed to allow adults to carry their children naturally on their hip without the usual strains on the back. Specifically designed to address one of the root causes of adult back pain, the seat provides a firm shelf for the child to sit on and supports their increasingly heavy weight from underneath. Instead of twisting the spine, the back is able to stay straight and the child is tucked into the chest on whichever side is more comfortable for the wearer. Simple, practical and easy to use this baby carrier is both endorsed and recommended by osteopaths, chiropractors and back professionals.
How to Overcome Participation Inequality
You can't.
The first step to dealing with participation inequality is to recognize that it will always be with us. It's existed in every online community and multi-user service that has ever been studied.
Your only real choice here is in how you shape the inequality curve's angle. Are you going to have the "usual" 90-9-1 distribution, or the more radical 99-1-0.1 distribution common in some social websites? Can you achieve a more equitable distribution of, say, 80-16-4? (That is, only 80% lurkers, with 16% contributing some and 4% contributing the most.)
Although participation will always be somewhat unequal, there are ways to better equalize it, including:
- Make it easier to contribute. The lower the overhead, the more people will jump through the hoop. For example, Netflix lets users rate movies by clicking a star rating, which is much easier than writing a natural-language review.
- Make participation a side effect. Even better, let users participate with zero effort by making their contributions a side effect of something else they're doing. For example, Amazon's "people who bought this book, bought these other books" recommendations are a side effect of people buying books. You don't have to do anything special to have your book preferences entered into the system. Will Hill coined the term read wear for this type of effect: the simple activity of reading (or using) something will "wear" it down and thus leave its marks -- just like a cookbook will automatically fall open to the recipe you prepare the most.
- Edit, don't create. Let users build their contributions by modifying existing templates rather than creating complete entities from scratch. Editing a template is more enticing and has a gentler learning curve than facing the horror of a blank page. In avatar-based systems like Second Life, for example, most users modify standard-issue avatars rather than create their own.
- Reward -- but don't over-reward -- participants. Rewarding people for contributing will help motivate users who have lives outside the Internet, and thus will broaden your participant base. Although money is always good, you can also give contributors preferential treatment (such as discounts or advance notice of new stuff), or even just put gold stars on their profiles. But don't give too much to the most active participants, or you'll simply encourage them to dominate the system even more.
- Promote quality contributors. If you display all contributions equally, then people who post only when they have something important to say will be drowned out by the torrent of material from the hyperactive 1%. Instead, give extra prominence to good contributions and to contributions from people who've proven their value, as indicated by their reputation ranking.
Summary:
In most online systems, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
All large-scale, multi-user communities and online social networks that rely on users to contribute content or build services share one property: most users don't participate very much. Often, they simply lurk in the background.
In contrast, a tiny minority of users usually accounts for a disproportionately large amount of the content and other system activity. This phenomenon of participation inequality was first studied in depth by Will Hill in the early '90s, when he worked down the hall from me at Bell Communications Research (see references below).
When you plot the amount of activity for each user, the result is a Zipf curve, which shows as a straight line in a log-log diagram.
User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:
90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
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.
...
Why Time Management Doesn't Work
For many years, I would try every new time management or personal organization system that came out. And while some were better than others, I have to say that, overall, none of them really "worked", in the sense that they didn't make me become the "organized person" that I desperately wanted to be.
JackAss JoeJoe's Freeware Utilities
The Cost
My programs are freeware. There are no strings attached, no nags, no ads, and no timebombs. Those that enjoy my programs and wish to make a small donation can do so on this website via PayPal. Donations ensure that my programs continue to improve and don't fade away into the void. I've been working on my programs and this site since late 2001 and will continue to do so. Big thanks for all of your support.
Feedback
My programs are made, fixed, and changed because of user feedback. Don't be afraid to send me a note about a problem, and idea, or just to say hello. The Comment form is at the bottom of every page on this site. I do read my email and I try to answer every one.
Since its founding in 2005, the site has grown steadily and as of October 2006 has over 39,000 registered members from around the world. Of course it's free to sign up at our site, and only a small fraction of these people (about 1,800) have gone the extra mile and made a donation. Becoming a donating member has lots of additional benefits so we hope you'll consider becoming one of our supporters.