What makes a New Media Champion?

New media is highly dependent on the active user. Active users are your champions, they are the content providers and evangelists.

The notion of an active user:

• Who is able to make decisions
• Who can control the media he uses
• Who can understand the media
• Who knows what they want

But what makes someone an active user? Its important to know what active users seek so that your site can design around these fundemental concepts to promote the development of the online community.

One site that incorporates the decision making of the users is digg.com. Digg is a social news site that featured popular stories that its community “diggs”. This give users a sense of gratification whe they see an article they dugg on the front page. This also incorporates the notion that users are given control of the media they use.

Keeping with the example of digg, active users of digg who are able to understand it well, know what people are interested in. Secrets, rumours, interesting facts etc… All these make people curious and what to uncover what the story is about, and if they did learn something they didnt know, they will digg it.

Users have to also know what they want, this is where the splitting of headings come handy to segregate active users who know what they what they want.