infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

I found this post by Ross Mayfield proposing a “power law of participation” through Prentiss’s del.icio.us bookmarks. In the post Mayfield suggests a hierarchy of online activities that follow a power law distribution. At the top of the curve are activities with a high level of engagement done by only a few users, such as moderation and discussion-leading. At the bottom of the curve, are low-engagement activities done by many users, such as reading online and marking a text as a favorite.

I ain’t buying it. I have a few problems with the impulse to use power laws to explain everything on the Web, but my criticisms of this conceptualization are unrelated to my issues with power laws. First, many of the activities he describes seem to be orthogonal to each other. Reading and subscribing [to a feed] are largely consumptive activities, while commenting and tagging are production (in a cultural-studies sense.) Mayfield himself criticizes most long tail applications for emphasizing consumption, so why is he conflating consumptive and productive activities? I don’t see how adding an RSS feed implies a greater degree of engagement than creating keywords and tagging a page in del.icio.us. In addition, he attributes more engagement to activities that imply greater degrees of social power, like moderating a list. Of course, it depends on the volume of the list, but it seems like writing blog entries and creating content requires more engagement than filtering out messages as they arrive. Finally, what social science training I have leads me to wonder, “How do you operationalize engagement?” I don’t think engagement can be measured the same way that book sales can be measured. I’m not sure there’s such a direct connection between participation and the number of users.