Agreed with Seth here. The Forrester report still shows around a 10% participation class. These numbers could be broken down by *any* media site, but few sites actually do it, since there is no audit bureau of participation to compel them to publish accurate numbers.

and yes, when you say “just replacing one set of gatekeepers with another?” you are free to add, “as my former co-worker, Jon Garfunkel, hypothesized in his The New Gatekeepers series two years ago.”

Jeff Crigler
Voxant
Http://www.news2020project.com

How do you know the unintended consequences will be positive? Perhaps they will be negative. There’s a pretty good argument that the *feeling* displaces *real* participation, by shunting people off to echo chambers, where they can be fleeced by operators like Trippi. You do know this is his stock-in-trade, right? Giving people the *feeling* of participation, and extracting funding from them. Not that he invented that idea. But again, if you don’t know what the consequences will be, it seems to stand to reason they might be harmful, not helpful.

Seth, I go back and forth between your statement and the perhaps vain hope that a new generation and the increasing scope of change will really shake things up. I do agree a lot of the optimism is hype. On the other hand, that feeling of empowerment from being able to participate, as corny as it sounds, may have some unintended consequences down the line. It makes me wonder what Web 4.0 will look like.

And no, shifting to something like “You can write your diary, little Z-lister, you can CHAT WITH FRIENDS, doesn’t that thrill you to pieces?”, isn’t a rebuttal. It’s part of the shell game of trying to find some emotionally appealing justification for the hype.