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In Internet culture, the 1% rule is a rule of thumb pertaining to participation in an internet community, stating that only 1% of the users of a website actively create new content, while the other 99% of the participants only lurk.

A variant is the “90–9–1 principle” (sometimes also presented as the 89:10:1 ratio),[1] which states that in a collaborative website such as a wiki, 90% of the participants of a community only view content, 9% of the participants edit content, and 1% of the participants actively create new content.

Both can be compared with the similar rules known to information science, such as the 80/20 rule known as the Pareto principle, that 20 percent of a group will produce 80 percent of the activity, however the activity may be defined.

So where do you stand? Are you a lurker or a creator.

One quick way to jump from lurker to creator is to start curating content. That’s say using content that others create. It’s simplest enough to, in fact it’s the quickest way to create an email for marketing purposes.

Some tools for content curation:

Flashissue – for curating content for emails.

Scoop.it – for curating content for web pages.