nice list!!

A typology of crowds

March 04, 2010

Over the last few days, I’ve been involved in an email discussion on “The Crowd,” which will be excerpted on PBS’s Digital Nation site. One thing that has long bothered me about discussions of online crowds is that they tend to yoke lots of different sorts of groups together under a single rubric. Important differences end up being glossed over.
With that in mind, I’ve been trying to think through the various forms that online crowds take. As a rough starting point, I came up with four:
“Social production crowd”: consists of a large group of individuals who lend their distinct talents to the creation of some product like Wikipedia or Linux.
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: A typology of crowds.