Who Participates Online

This is my first post on this new blog - See ‘About’ for more information about me and the intent of the blog.

I’ll use this first post to highlight a wonderful chart from Business Week, June, 2007, that just came to my attention via the blog, userslib.com. The chart visually describes who participates online and what they are doing there. Since I am in Generation X, I focused on that category first. It’s quite interesting that almost half of us (41%) are online spectators! Why aren’t we joining social networking sites? The other interesting set of data in the chart is the ‘collectors,’ or those who use RSS and tag information. The highest percentage is only 18% from Generation Y. From a library perspective we spend an incredible amount of time blogging and providing RSS feeds for our users. This makes me question whether folks are really reading our blog. Maybe they are reading but not subscribing?