Dear AoIRers, Over the past few years I've seen numerous studies demonstrating how participation online follows an extreme skew in any given context. Many people post few comments, few people post many comments. Jakob Nielsen characterized this in a classic short article: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html This was dovetailing on some "new networks" work showing online networks having a similar skew (although, it is somewhat different for the statistically inclined - perhaps power-law rather than pareto, log-normal etc...). But for simplicity's sake, its similar- many sites have few links, few sites have many links. But while scale-free networks and extreme skews have been extensively studied from a statistical point of view (i.e. what is the parameter for this curve or how does the clustering shift over time), I can't recall any studies discussing the motivations (either social, economic or psychological) for participation inequality and why it differs from person to person or site to site. I've heard of some studies showing gender, efficacy or time online to be factors, but even these are minor - I'm more interested in why any of those people are massive contributors while others less so, not subtle variations among the massive contributors. Any thoughts? Papers? Presentations? Take care, BERNiE Bernie Hogan Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute University of Oxford 1 St. Giles, Oxford, OX1 3JS United Kingdom http://individual.utoronto.ca/berniehogan/