Consume Create Ratio

From the ‘Things that are neat to think about but hard to measure dept’

I’ve been trying this thing lately. Every single time I sit down at my computer, instead of running straight for a website or my email, I try and write something first. What got me thinking about this was a thought I had about how most people spend more time online than watching TV, but the majority of those people are still consuming information.

Take a look at sites like Digg, Reddit, Boingboing, Facebook, etc. You can throw up a few pictures and vote on a few stories but for the most part it’s like watching TV. You didn’t have to create anything to realize the value of those systems – you just had to ‘participate’ by going there.

So what if you could measure the amount of stuff you consumed, and the amount of stuff you created?

Then you could come up with a personal ratio. So lets say for every blog post I write I read 100 websites. That actually seems like a reasonable ratio to me. So my ratio is

1:100

But if you’re not in much of a writing mood for awhile, maybe you’ll read 1000 websites for every blog post

1:1000

Something like this would be cool to track, and I’d be really interested in seeing what the averages are.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 28th, 2010 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Brainstorming, General. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://doriantaylor.com/ Dorian Taylor

    Some UBC people did a CA simulation recently that suggested max out at a 1:1 ratio of imitating (consuming information) to creating (synthesizing new forms).

    While it is just a simulation, it’s interesting to note that as the creators create more than they consume, the entire system supports fewer and fewer creators, and the overall fitness degrades, just as it would if not enough agents were creating at all.

  • http://trevoro.ca Trevor Orsztynowicz

    That’s really interesting, thanks!