Amy Jo Kim has put together a fantastic slideshare about metagame design.

If you work with social media, online commuities or anything where you’re bringing people together, do an exercise & think about your space in terms of points, feedback/rewards & viral (all described in the deck). You don’t need to be building a game to apply these principals.

guy kawasaki has an interview with the authors of ‘citizen marketers: when people are the message’. they mention the 1% number that gets bandied around a lot when discussing virtual communities or any customer contribution system. basically, 1% of your users will contribute the majority of the feedback/posts/comments/content. the majority will lurk & then some will contribute every once & a while.

jakob nielsen has the 90-9-1 rule. 90% lurk, 9% sometimes contributors & the 1% that contribute the most.

having been involved in communities from a ‘owner/host’ and ‘participant’ perspective, i’d say the numbers are about right. maybe one day i’ll run the numbers on those communities i host (but probably not – more exciting stuff i’d rather do – if someone wants to do it for me….). i think these numbers also pertain to the physical world. think about the last volunteer group you were associated with – what percentage of the people do the majority of the work? and then there’s a group that does some but the biggest chunk will be the people who do realitively nothing. at least that’s been my experience in several groups. i think this is just the way things are, neither bad nor good. it does raise the question of how you get more people to become that 1%, or get new 1%-ers as some leave the group, and how to keep the other 90% or 99% feeling involved. ie the age old question of how you keep your < whatever you want to call it > alive.

there’s a quote in the citizen marketer’s interview i found interesting:

The 1 Percenters flout cultural conventions. Americans love rebels, therefore the 1 Percenters often become the influencers of American culture.

the 1% definitely influence the group (behavior, conversation topics, norms, etc) but i think the rebel idea fits into the marketing side of things (which is what their books is about) and not the community side. at least i haven’t had that experience.

bolt media, a ‘networking site for people developing creative projects’, announced the winner of the first online collaborative song writing contest (at least they claim it’s the first time).

Bolt’s music experts and members of the band “Three Days Grace” chose five musicians, including a Christian rocker and youth pastor and a classical musician trained at the Berklee School of Music, to form Orangeblood.

The band created the song, called “Gunshy,” over the Internet using feedback, constructive criticism and remixed tracks from a new community of musicians.

that’s very cool! i wonder what sort of collaborative tools they offered the 5 musicians and what format the feedback/criticism was fed into the process. it doesn’t seem to be promoted heavily on the bolt website. i did find this blog post but there’s not many details. anyone try this website before?

btw, i knew bolt sounded familiar. their ‘about us’ page says they’ve been around 10 years in the youth sector & sure enough … they used to be a community website. looks like they’ve survived & morphed into social networking.

i found out recently a friend of mine is in the digital vision program @ stanford so i was having a look at the various projects and this one by nita goyal called Project Open Books: Multiplying Resources through Online Communities caught my eye.

it blends a few of my fav things like online communities, education and libraries. there’s only a brief summary on the page but it seems people will be able to list the books they own and lend them to people in their local community using schools & libraries as the drop off points. the project is running (or will run, i don’t think it’s operational yet) in india but i think it could work anywhere. there is most definitely a difference btwn the melbourne city (and burbs) and nyc libraries. i’m a big user of the libraries & there’s a lot of times when the book i want isnt available here.

this type of community would tie in extremely well with some of the book communities already on the web (like library thing and books well read) but calls out for some reputation management software. i hate to lend books to anyone b/c i’ve had such bad luck in getting them back. my really prize books don’t get lent at all. not everyone feels the same way i do but you’d need some sort of reward/punishment for those who don’t contribute to the system or return the books.

very cool idea to keep an eye on.

these articles are about a month old but business week has a few up concerning social networking sites getting VC money, visable path which is enterprise focused and analyses your connections within an org by watching your email and linkedin. there’s also some other BW articles linked from w/in the 3 articles.

all the articles seem to be from april 2006. did they just decide to do a big package on social networking or are the folks at BW really this far behind the curve?