Steve Rubel points to Forrester Research's Ladder of Participation. It's yet another consumer behavior map. It's buckets are roughly aligned by effort. From least to most: inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, creators. It's similar to Ross Mayfield's Power Law of Participation and my own experiences in electoral activism. If you're designing a product or business, you'd better understand your customers.  

It's great but incomplete.

First, I'd like to add an orthogonal Ladder of Disclosure, from those who pay cash and live off the grid to those wearing live streaming webcams who twitter every bowel movement and blog their bank accounts. The Participation Ladder is tightly coupled with doing things in public. Look at digital ID (OpenID), presence streams (twitter, jaiku), relationship brokers (iotum), pseudonymity and faceted authorization (Vox-like access to content) for clues to consumer behavior and tools for engaging about privacy. Strategies that acknowledge and compensate for privacy concerns always do better.

Second and Third, the participation ladder views the web as the whole Internet. It's missing (a) The Mobile Net, with SMS, mobile web apps services that people whip out of their purses/pockets and (b) Live Communication like Windows Live Messenger, Skype, IRC. People are spending billions of hours in these two sectors and models that ignore these sides of their lives may miss where their passions live and who they trust.

Fourth, the ladder seems to miss the offline. Effective mapping could lead to strategies that use the online to affect the offline. We've seen that in US electoral campaigning where blogs and mailing lists were used to recruit online citizens and drive them into activities that both brought them up a ladder of political participation (from minutes per year to weeks) and applying volunteers to reach out over the phone and in street action to those who live mostly or completely offline. Ten volunteers in the San Francisco East Bay recruited 5000 volunteers for offline action including a million phone calls to 2004 swing states.

Fifth, the ladder doesn't seem to model participatory mobility. 200 million people tried Skype in the last three years, 100 million people became bloggers in the last ten years, a billion started using email, more using mobile phones. People adopt new behaviors all the time, often en masse. The participation ladder is static, so 2007.

See also: Geoffrey Burling who votes down the report itself.