...in the big picture???
I was reading Stewart Mader's excellent blog on wikis and his post on where wikis fit in the overall scheme of things. This article linked to a blog by Erica Driver on some work the Forrester people have done on looking at Web 2.0, its core technologies, its applications and most importantly, what they let you do and what that means for people, business, life.
I was particularly taken with the third concentric circle, Behavior Changes, and Erica's statement that "Not everyone is out there blogging and tagging; we've found that people fall into several buckets: creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators, and inactives." This came to me just as I was contemplating similar thoughts myself in respect of me. While I blog a little (very little and very badly!) and I tag a bit (a bit of delicious and some flikr) I'm not really sure I'm a fully fledged creator. I comment rarely on blogs, so probably not much of a critic either. I suspect I'm probably either a collector or a joiner though I haven't investigated sufficiently to find out what in detail these are!
I think, however, that it's important that there is room for all these different types of people in the Web 2.0 world. It can be an intimidating place if you feel under pressure to come up with interesting and original posts when you appear to be surrounded by so many people doing so many amazing things and with such insightful comments that you can be left feeling rather overwhelmed and discouraged. Maybe the life of a joiner isn't so bad after all, and better a joiner than an inactive!
Still, in the words of my wee fella's teacher when he was in P1, "stick at it...".
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