I would define user participation as an act on the part of a user to actively add or share their thoughts, opinion, or experience via online features or tools in an open manner. Interaction to me is an active engagement or customization an online feature or tool, but not leaving any of your own self with it. Participation doesn't have to be public or individual (one's efforts can be rolled into a collective result), but to me it's not something that is done entirely for yourself, so adding a news feed or uploading photos to a site but not sharing them with anyone would not be participation.
Based on my definition (and feel free to disagree with it), here are some forms of online user participation:
- Blogging
- Microblogging
- Status updates and "Wall" posts
- Commenting (on a blog, video, review, photograph, etc.)
- Discussing via message boards (a.k.a forums)
- Reviewing or recommending (eg. a book, movie, travel destination, etc.)
- Making lists to share (eg. playlists, favourites, books on Amazon)
- Voting (e.g. Digg, site polls, or via "Was this helpful" feature)
- Adding name to online petition
- Rating (eg. assigning a score to a film, book or review, etc.)
- Social bookmarking
- Tagging/folksonomies
- Creating & uploading videos
- Creating & uploading podcasts or online audio
- Creating & uploading photographs, stories, artwork, etc.
- Sharing (via email, posting to profile, or site forwarding feature, etc.)
- Creating or contributing to a website
- Contributing to a wiki
- Contributing to an online open source project (thanks Mouly)
- Friending
- Reporting abuse (i.e. self-policing features on sites)
1 comment:
How about participating in an open source community
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