by Derek Morrison, 18 June 2009
In my 2008 online essay Take me to your thought leader! (Auricle, 28 January 2008) I highlighted work that suggests that despite the egalitarian vision and, arguably, the hype, the opportuntities for user creation offered by the Web 2.0 world appears to be grasped by relatively few accolytes.
In my earlier essay I said:
A particularly interesting study in the context of this posting is provided by the recent University of Minnesota work Creating, Destroying, and Restoring Value in Wikipedia (Priedhorsky R et al, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Group 2007 Conference proceedings, 4 November 2007, PDF). This work found that only one tenth of one percent of Wikipedia editors account for about half of the content value of this uber Web 2.0 exemplar. Content value is defined as the actual number of page views of a Wikipedia entry and not just the number of page edits measured by previous studies. So far from the “widsom of the crowd†a significant proportion of the value of Wikipedia appears to derive from the contributions of a relatively small proportion of authors/editors, i.e. the wisdom of an ‘elite’? 🙂 Incidentally, the same Minnesota study found that only ~5% of Wikipedia edits are damaging and that 42% of these malicious edits are fixed within one page view. Another of the contributors to the Wikipedia study was Loren Terveen who is also involved in a number of other projects related to online communities, e.g. see Community Lab.org.
So most people, it seems, are happy to consume rather than take part more interactively a, perhaps discomforting, reality for some further reinforced by New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets which summarises a recent piece of work by Harvard’s Bill Heil and Mikolaj Piskorski. e.g.
“Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one … the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets … the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”
The work also offers some other very interesting observations about the gender differences that appear to be unique to Twitter in comparison to other social networking platforms.
Twitter is currently the fastest growing social networking manifestation in the world with a quoted 1382% growth form 2008-2009 (Source: Neilsen Online). Those, however, are unique visitors what actually matters are the returners and here the picture is little less positive. Another Nielsen posting indicates that 60% of people fail to return and that:
There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point.
