Bradley's pyramid has started a fire-storm of conversation that has fanned out and started side-conversations all over the net.
I've seen several people derive a similar conclusion to that pyramid that I think is a bit misleading. The gist of the confusion is that the 90% of the population who are Consumers are inherently consumers in all domains. We can test this assumption very quickly. If you are a creator in one domain (or community), does that mean that you are in the Creator category in all communities that you belong to? Do you belong to a community in which you are a Synthesizer (or Contributer)? And what about the Consumer role? Do you lurk in any of your communities that you derive benefit from?
The percentages indicate that if you are a member of 10 communities, the chances are good that you find yourself in the Synthesizer role in one of those communities. And if you find yourself deriving value from 100 communities, you are probably a Synthesizer in 10 of those, and a Creator in one of them.
There are two more categories of people that Bradley's pyramid doesn't cover. The first is the Decliners. This are the people who have been given the opportunity to participate in the community, but have declined to because of one reason or another. I'm going to assert that this group is also an order of magnitude larger than the immediately preceeding group (Consumers).
The next category are the Uninformed. These are the people who have not even heard of the community, so have neither rejected it, nor accepted it. Again, this group is likely an order of magnitude bigger than the Decliners (at least -- possibly, this group is much larger).
The exciting part of all of this is that everyone is potentially a Consumer, a Synthesizer and a Creator. Even more interesting is the fact that if you belong to two communities, and you are a Consumer in both of those, but you use del.icio.us, or some other tool to bookmark your sites so that other people can see your bookmarks, the simple act of tagging two communities (or a piece of content in both communities) with a single tag is that a link between those communities has been created. In essence, you have become a Synthesizer!
Look at the way the dynamic spreads. Your second community has someone who is also a Consumer, but who doesn't know about your first community. They follow your link, and voila, they move from Uninformed in relation to Group 1, to one of the other categories of user: Decliner, Consumer, Synthesizer or possibly even Creator!
And the more that people get involved meaningfully in more communities, the greater the crossover effect.
At this point, you should just about freak out if you are like most readers. "I already have too much content to keep track of! How many communities do you think I can belong to?!?"
This very issue is a topic that Scott Karp and I have bantered back and forth briefly. (Okay, so I'm name dropping. He has referenced my blog, but we've only had a couple of volleys). This issue of navigating through the barrage of new content every day is precisely the reason that I started thinking about CxMS's as opposed to CMS's (CxMS is my abbreviation for Context Management System). I wrote about this back in December before I moved my blog over to TypePad.
How nice that this whole conversation is heating up just as we approach SXSW. My panel, Beyond Folksonomies, is precisely geared to address some of these issues. Should be a juicy session, and a wonderful conference. If you haven't registered for SXSW yet, and you can swing it. I'd rush on over there. Be forwarned, I don't think there are any more hotels in downtown Austin.
If you can't make the conference, my co-panelist J Wynia has created a blog specifically dedicated to the discussion of the panel before, during and after the conference
Comments