Are you writing static or active text?
Lee LeFever of Common Craft has an interesting blog post about social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and has borrowed some ideas from the systems dynamics field to evaluate them.
I can’t help but think about the whole idea of stocks and flows, borrowed from the field of systems dynamics. I wrote a series a while back about it - but the basic idea that online communication has two states - active and static. For instance, when a blog post is posted, it’s active - it flows through the blogosphere, through rss readers, etc. After a while, it becomes archived and static - stocked for future reference. Online content flows and then becomes stocked.
What kind of content are you writing? Mostly active—flows—or static—stocks?
Posted on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 at 07:17AM
by
Roy Jacobsen
in Writing in its natural habitat
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2 Comments
Roy Jacobsen
in Writing in its natural habitat
|
2 Comments
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Reader Comments (2)
What a shock, that people all think their content is active. I think perhaps different wording would have changed your results. Certainly blogging looks active (and is, in the short term). But the question is whether all of those archived posts are static.
One of the tricks I've used is editing an older post from time to time. I was cleaning up my tags and discovered that every time I changed one it popped up at Technorati and BlogCatalog as a new post with the original date on it. I can keep a larger portion of the site in play just by making minor changes.
Actually, you have to look down in the right corner of the poll widget to see how many people have voted. In this case, one person has voted in this poll, which tells me that either people didn't understand the question, or very few people are creating any content at all.