I wish he posted more. Much as I wish I posted more.

When you allow users or consumers to add, change, create, delete, rate, and interact with your site, product, service, content, etc, you open the door to a host of new questions.

How much participation is enough?
Is there a spectrum/scale of the value of participation? Is it linear?
What are participant roles? Who is best suited for those roles? How do we support them?
How does participation correlate with profit? Is there proof of causal links?

This is just a start. The point is that the participatory nature of digitial communication will increasingly demand new valuation metrics. This is an undeveloped thought — but worthy to mull over. A very old post (Khoi Vinh’s interesting link archive system directed me there) from Bradley Horowitz sparked this line of questions.

It’s difficult to perceive the world in new and different ways. CES, Macworld, hundreds of blogs, my clients, my co-workers, my friends create my homophilous network of stimuli. I see the value of the subtle improvements in the UI of a website, the features and functions of a new mobile device, the social impact of Second Life. But it’s all about context.

I spent the weekend in a small town (18,000 pop) in southern Illinois. My wife and I visited my Grandma. I don’t think she’s ever used a computer and has no desire to. I, on the other hand, jonesed for a web-fix and couldn’t find the wifi network my brother claimed he found last time his family visited Grandma. So early Saturday morning I headed out to a coffee shop we always pass on the way to Grandma’s from the highway. I remember it for its name “The Common Ground” and that it advertises “Free Wifi.”

I bought a cup of coffee, fired up the laptop, got good signal strength from the the access point, but no dice on connecting to the Internet. I moved around to different tables and got odd stares from a group of three older men sizing up the new guy. Without success and two large cups of coffee later, I went to plan b. On that same stretch of road the coffee shop is on so too sit tens of gas stations and fast food joints. I had also filed away the advertisement that scrolls on a big LED on the Dairy Queen roadsign: “Free Wifi.”

I drove into a parking spot, laptop still on, and was successfully browsing. I went inside, got a $.79 cup of coffee (in a little diner-style plastic mug they kept refilling), and settled myself into an old wood both. The place was buzzing with customers, all aged 65+. One man, who I later learned was the town’s Wal Mart Greeter, chatted me up about Apple. He had purchased a working iMac (who knows what variant) for 5 bucks and was running OS 9 on it (he purchased for 50 cents at a garage sale). He had an odd mix of seemingly deep knowledge of technology and a naivete regarding its use.

After getting muscled out of my first seat by a 70 year-old woman defending her Saturday morning breakfast club’s area, I continued to check email, read my feeds, and surf a little while taking in the community that was Dairy Queen on Saturday morning in a small town in southern Illinois.

What made the Dairy Queen an actual hive of activity, of relationship, of comfort? More puzzling, when I followed up on Sunday, following the same routine, I was the only customer there for the first 20 minutes or so. The weather was bad, but more likely, I think the community locus that morning centered around the town churches.

As we, who make our lives thinking and building digital communities and experiences of the future, pontificate about the value and the patterns of community building it’s worth changing perspective now and again and looking deeper at the aspects of aliveness that exist in the enduring forms of human connection and communication. I think there is a lot of value at looking at the Late Adopters and Rejectors to see how they live without our innovations…

I’m still working through sources to define community (see earlier discussion). Tara Hunt posts recently:

Community is not a buzzword to describe a monolithic mass of marketing data. Communities are made up of people with endless motivations, hopes, dreams and goals and all have unique personalities.

Click through to her post… more of a mantra than a definition… and I’m interested.

But in starting to build my own theory on community, especially defining how emerging technology (and communication tech specifically) influences how a community looks and operates, I’m headed towards very specific and more well-defined communities to start. It’s easier to grasp all the working parts if I do that. My initial launch point is “Cultivating Communities of Practice.” The book’s authors are knowledge management and organizational design experts, which makes the book much more practical in defining the means, ends, and value of a community. The “practice” part of a community really changes the context. I think online community designers (and moreso marketers) think about the social and connective part of communities — but rarely focus on the output, the value, the practice of a community.

I’m rereading the book now and marking up notes and thoughts. More to come.

Lots of interesting noise around the “size” of Second Life. And it’s bizzare that there is so much noise when the actual signals can be published at any time. The debate steams from the Shirky camp that believes Second Life doesn’t rate all the press it’s getting (due to the overinflated population/usage numbers) and the reaction of anyone who has a vested interest in Second Life defending its value (where value can diverge beyond the topic of size/usage).

I came across this from GigaGamez:

Linden CEO Philip Rosedale suggested retention was 10%— a percentage so low, it shocked me. (“[A]bout 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later.”) When I checked with Linden Lab last week, Philip and Marketing Director Catherine Smith reported back a slightly higher percentage, this one gauged by returning users from over the last 30 days (but not those who created an account within that period)— “12-15% and has remained steady over the last year… we know churn will be high, but the difference is a network effect and constantly changing content that people do come back to see. ”

The stats above are going to be the crux of some back of the napkin calculations I’ll throw out later (need to verify some data sources first). But there’s probably an easier quick litmus test on the hype factor — the concurrency data. How many people are online at a single time. Let’s assume the following are generally accurate (sourced from Linden’s feed once a minute) — (see graphs). Eyeballing it, it looks like 10-12k concurrent users is the average — with spikes up to 20,000 or so during peaks. If we go back to Shirky’s statements about marketers and press not asking the hard questions to parse out “cool story” versus “does it matter”, it seems to me that in terms of scale, this is a non-story. Especially when you look at this:

So this, as it turns out, is where to set the Second Life bar: of the 2,000,000+ registered accounts now, roughly 240,000-300,000 are regular users, residents in both the colloquial and literal sense. Clay is right to call for the media to stop reporting that very top number without caveat. Shirky is further correct to wonder if all the big companies recently promoting their brands in Second Life (NBC! American Apparel! Adidas and Toyota!, etc.) count as news, since it’s not clear if this is just a gimmick, or if they’re actually getting any measurable return from their promotion dollars.

But even in the Gigagamez post, Wagner James Au admits that measured on scale alone, this isn’t so newsworthy.

So here’s my take:
Second Life, in itself, is never going to reach the mass adoption or generate the impact MySpace and YouTube have. The wild assumptions on Second Life adoption and growth will never materialize without dramatic changes — incremental improvement won’t do it.

However, Second Life is worth looking at, watching, and playing in. Even if you are a marketer. I think it’s definitely a Faint Signal on the Fringe — what is happening in terms of:

Design for user-generated content
Design for user-generated commerce
Community Design
Rights of digital content and creation
Rapid prototyping and immersive design
Government regulation of global virtual property and content
3D social application design
Etc

There are lots of newsworthy elements of Second Life… but in typical hype fashion, money, size, and sex sell.

My early morning and late night “blog time” is being consumed by thoughts for a radio show I’m being interviewd for (representing the company I work for). I’ll translate those thoughts into a post tonight or tomorrow. I also want to continue playing with the ideas Greenberg and Shirky are discussing.

But for now, direct your attention to a very link-worthy post by Kathy Sierra:

Collective intelligence” is a pile of people writing Amazon book reviews.

“Dumbness of Crowds” is a pile of people collaborating on a wiki to collectively author a book.