For all of its glory, Twitter is apparently not as sticky as many social media buffs would like it to be. A recent Harvard Business School study reported that 10 percent of the service's users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. (I wrote about Twitter's lack of loyalty back in April.)
However, I don't think it really matters. As with any service or piece of software, a rising tide lifts all boats, so a core user base can propel a service for quite a while. Somewhere down the line however, Twitter as a company will need to put programs and efforts into place to encourage people to actually use the service if it ever plans to monetize it.
The fact that 10 percent of users are driving 90 percent of the content is not dramatically different than what you see with sites like Wikipedia, or with personal blogs, which have an even lower rate of consistent publishing. According to a 2008 study by Technorati, 95 percent of the blogs they track hadn't been updated in at least four months.
Orphaned tweets, like orphaned blogs, are just as much part of the social fabric as anything else. The fact is that people abandon stuff all the time--TV shows, books, whatever. We shouldn't be remotely shocked that someone bails out of blogging or something else that could be considered work.
... Read moreInteresting new data from Nielsen Online says "member communities" (e.g., social networks and blogs have become more popular than e-mail.
While the data does not show a dramatic difference between member communities and e-mail use, in terms of percentage points, it does reflect an impact that social communication is having on the way we work and communicate.
Of course, the other side of the equation is finding out how the sample data was taken and if it's based only on consumer data. Nonetheless, it shows that information is moving online, not getting stuck in e-mail boxes.
Another interesting statistic is the fact that 85 percent of those surveyed use search tools, showing once again that the data structure of the Web still has a long way to go. That stat should also bring comfort to Google shareholders.
Wired has a great interactive info-graphic on the path blog posts take once you hit the "go" button.
You have a blog. You compose a new post. You click Publish and lean back to admire your work. Imperceptibly and all but instantaneously, your post slips into a vast and recursive network of software agents, where it is crawled, indexed, mined, scraped, republished, and propagated throughout the Web. Within minutes, if you've written about a timely and noteworthy topic, a small army of bots will get the word out to anyone remotely interested, from fellow bloggers to corporate marketers.
Since I joined the CNet blog network I've found that more and more of the content I post is scraped and put on link harvesting blogs. There appear to be a few keywords (Microsoft, Apple, MacBook) that drive the most leeches.
Earlier this week I went to lunch with Ashlee and Cade from The Register and they were telling me about this giant story that had been in process for weeks. The story "Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain" is a wild-ride of Wikipedia editing, stock-shorting and false identities that is more like a bad Sandra Bullock movie than it is Web 2.0, but that's not my point.
My point is that for all the naysayers who say that journalism is dying thanks to blogs and social media there is still clearly room for real journalism--the kind of writing that requires research, editing and legal checks.
The blogosphere spends the majority of its time commenting on things that other people write-- which is why despite the plethora of content the majority of it is crap. Even here on CNet both Matt Asay and I have found that the pieces we write that are more in-depth and take longer tend to not get as many hits as the ones that ride the trends. I can only hope Steve Ballmer calls Apple users communists over the weekend to improve my traffic.
In case you were under the impression that blogging hadn't already jumped-the-shark, today's announcement that a bunch of big companies are banding together to create "blogging best practices" proves that "the establishment" still doesn't quite get it. At a minimum if they were really serious the corporate blog would have some content prior to launch.
The council plans to discuss various issues, including: the role of the corporate blog in a media landscape increasingly geared toward consumer-generated content; the correct way to engage and respond to bloggers who write about a company; and how to manage blogs in more than one language.
I still can't believe these companies haven't just figured out that the blog universe is the same as the news cycle...just faster and with less editing. The fact that this topic needs this consortium as we head into 2008 is depressing.
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