Slashdot Mirror
Nearly Half of U.S. 'Net Users Post Content
An anonymous reader copies and pastes: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly half of U.S. Internet users have built Web pages, posted photos, written comments or otherwise added to the enormous variety of material available online, according to a report released on Sunday. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that about 44 percent of the country's Internet users have created content for others to enjoy online." Don't read the blurb - cut straight to the study.
The real question is, how much of the content is even worth existing?
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
If you ask me, the more people creating content the better. The web is a collaborate medium after all.
Granted, there's a lot of worthess content out there, but I'd take a truly democratic system over an overly controlled one any day.
.: Max Romantschuk
Since most of Slashdot's readers are qualified nerds, we find ~10%-20% of the posts to be good, interesting reading. Everyone else out there would rather watch paint dry.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Thus far I have found one (1) use for these pages: finding the email address for someone. Unfortunately, lately because of the spam pandemic, even that function is dissapearing since people don't want to out their email addresses to public internet.
Personally I think that when I have become interesting enough to have a personal homepage, someone else will do it for me :)
"There is a terrorist behind every bush"
The study notes that the response rate was 32.8%, meaning that the vast majority of people who were called refused to participate in the survey. This is a potential source of bias in the sample. I can certainly see those who are more eager about their internet use being more likely to participate in the study to brag about their contributions to the internet. The numbers do seem kind of high to me.
All those attributes are largely in the eye of the beholder.
I think it's too often stated that the net "democratizes". The true beauty of the net is that it pluralizes. even if there are only a few hundred agitors scattered across an oppressed country - or for that matter, only a couple dozen globally-dispersed teenagers who obsess over geri ryan's ass - they can communicate, discuss, and get community critique of their otherwise lonely and isolated ideas.
So to answer your question - a LOT of it is "useful, easy to read, and informative" - to its target audience.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
At least for me, it's been almost a way of life since about 1997, and how I've been eeking out something of a living for the last half year or so (and less of a living before losing my job and car and having to work on the net fulltime).
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
OK
Buying a copy of word and sitting down and typing isnt going to make you a writer
Buying a copy of dreamweaver (or shudder front page) isnt going to make you a web designer. People do things on the web that they would never do in their front yard. How many of you have seen those garish sites that make you want to cry, or your eyes bleed? People have forgotten that the web is a PUBLIC space, it is one giant central park.
Just because you can do something dosen't mean you should, and people posting on the web need to remember this!
unfortunately the promise of commercial-free, user-created content is ruthlessly stymied by broadband providers' policies forbidding Joe Schmoe User from setting up his own servers, and by gutting upload speeds to pathetically low rates of transfer.
welcome to the "you-are-a-docile-receptive-sheep" consumer media ghetto.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
i could say the same about any type of content, eg books...
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Try taking Livejournal as the cross section though. That's when the useful content plummets to almost nil.
1) It means that 56% of American internet users are plain parasites who take and give nothing back - and don't participate in any online communities.
2) Maybe that's better... Anyway... Great most of the content is junk that makes finding "true gems" even harder. (webforum blurbs, webpages which repeat the same stolen articles and photos 1000's times, flames, unanswered questions and clueless answers to mailing lists, misleading links, fake keywords... finding something new, creative and useful is getting gradually harder, not easier because of this "richness")
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I'm not sure that the 800k user ids given out has much to do with the number of active users.
Although the editors have done a lot to try and remove the game aspects of Slashdot it is still a game to plenty of people. At least some trolls have extra accounts to mod themselves up and modbomb their enemies. People friend whore, foe whore, and reply whore - and shill accounts are useful for all those activities.
If that's meant to be a journal, it should end with your life's end. But if it's a "content webpage" like "Database of all cars created in 19th century", once it's completed and published, and after some period of bugfixes, it may be perfectly well left on the web for years, unchanged - and it will still remain a valuable resource - once completed it never needs changes.
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don't forget to use proper descriptive text(see the w3's homepage- "here" is a perfect example of what NOT to use between the A tags!)
Not necessarily. For material which you don't intend for people to find via search engines, it's entirely appropriate.
For example, if you've got a web page about some software you've written, and you've got a tarball linked from that page, you probably want Google to point people towards the page, not the tarball. Saying that the tarball is <a href="foo.tar.gz">here</a> reduces the chance that the tarball will appear inappropriately as a search result.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Again, gasp, shock- the old system was better.
You lost me there... how, exactly, was the old system better? I know precisely where to go for "the usual things", like stock quotes, weather, news, etc. A portal is of no value beyond a cursory introduction to the 'net, and that's why the guys like excite, yahoo, etc are dead/dying. What google helps me find is the gold that could never be traced out by manuallly maintained indexes that I might frequent.
I agree with you that widespread dependence on google is a bit frightening, but the worst we'd end up with if google disappeared (or lost credibility) is what we had before, which was basically jack shit.
If you read a thread with a +4 threshold, then you will all the recent posts that have not had a chance to receive an eventual +4 or +5 rating. I wish there was a way to request only the subset of posts that have been rated interesting or informative by at least one moderator. That wouldn't solve the case of omitting worthwhile posts that haven't been moderated yet, but it would reduce the effect of excluding underrated posts.
Too bad he'll never see your reply.
http://use.perl.org
You'got a very good point.
I think that Andy Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" may be wrong. Actually, anyone of us can be famous to 15 other persons instead. All it takes is to set up a decent website and fill it with content that in some way feels important to oneself.
I run a Norwegian website called Solumslekt with a fairly big genealogy database (yes, I'm in the "senior" group), and in a couple of years I've gathered quite a group of attenders who are hanging around on the discussion forum.
For more than 99% of the Web audience my site is probably worthless, but among the few who share my interests, I've earned myself some good reputation.
I pay the equivalent of twenty bucks a month for professional web hosting, and I think it's worth it. Writing a book isn't my idea of fun, and most genealogy books don't return the investment anyway. It's so much easier to publish on the web.
I used to be a sceptic. These days, I'm not so certain.
So millions and millions of people post content, but how much is useful, easy to read, and informative? Probably less than one percent.
You might as well ask what percentage of information transported over the telephone is useful, easy to read and informative? Who cares? People are communicating with other people and the quality of the communication is (as another poster said) in the eye of the beholder. A dump of pictures from my wedding is probably dreck to you but interesting to my mother in law.
This shows that the old professional content providers view of the Internet, namely that the internet is a bunch of pipes which transfer content from a few central providers to the masses, is insufficient. Almost half the Internet users are themselves content providers, in a small scale.
The other view of the Internet, as a nautral place where people meet and exhcange ideas and thoughts, has survived from the days it was an academic network.
Some of us have always thought this is what the Internet should be, and what the part of the net that is interesting still is, and it is nice to have numbers that back up this view.
The Internet is not and should not be just another broadcast medium for predigested entertainment like TV.
Something else to consider, how much of the content is redundant??
*604x
Diaries of unknown people are unlikely to be usefull to anyone except historians. Why would knowing about my day to day life be usefull to you ?
To make actually usefull content, like games, stories, pictures or music, requires some actual effort. Blogs and diarys can be entertaining, but they are unlikely to be usefull.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
I feel stuff should never be removed from the internet.
So you must've been pretty annoyed about goatse.
Seriously, what about child porn and other illegal content? Shouldn't it be deleted?
I've been on the 'net since the early 80's, been involved with some big ISP startup moments in the 90's, and I've noticed that peoples 'net-sphere' grows rapidly when they first get on the 'net, and then consequently stabilizes.
...
... but how do I find them?
... but that leaves maybe 85% of the problem unsolved. "Search Engines" need to evolved more into "Recommendation Engines".
:) Short of asking my friends and associates what their favourite daily-sites are, I don't know any other way to find the cool stuff ...
What do I mean by net-sphere? The list of sites one visits daily, or regularly, for news/updates, etc. Apart from google queries, one rarely goes outside this net-sphere
For example, I visit a list of 5 sites daily. And when I'm done with those sites, I rarely visit any others, willingly, unless I happen to randomly come across something new that interests me.
It frustrates me to know end, knowing as I do at the end of my '5 site browse session' that there are probably at least 7 or 8 other sites out there which would interest me, and which would hold my interest, and which I would add to my list of 'net-sphere' sites... only how do I find them?
It'd be nice to have a site where I could go, plug in my 5 favourite (most-visited) sites, and get a list of recommendations for other sites to peruse/visit. I know sites like that exist
Search engines only solve the search for things you know you want to look for
I'd happily subscribe to a list of 'cool sites to look out for', if I could, say, plug in answers to a ton of questions about the things I like, and if that service was smart enough to find me sites that were really interesting to me, I'd use it more often.
Content isn't the problem. Finding the content is still a problem, google-success aside. (Hey, I like google, but search engines don't fill the entire need...)
If anyone has recommendations for cool, regularly (daily) updated sites on the subject of technology, music, music technology, gadgets, meeting real nerd chicks online, and travel tips for Europe, I'd sure like to know them.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Depends... does a blog they don't ever post to anymore count as a web page?
It's interesting that you should mention how search engine-centric the modern web is; I was just going some February access statistics for a couple of web servers I administer and noticing how the vast majority of referrers were search engines. It's somewhat rare to be linked to by another site, and even when it happens, the number of click-throughs for these referrers is always far less than from search engines (even uncommon search engines besides Google).
Personally, I think we've benefited from this trend in that good sites are designed with the expectation that you just arrived on any given page from a search, which makes them generally more straightforward.
The great thing about the Internet is that it means everybody can publish.
The worst thing about the Internet is that it means everybody can publish.
LiveJournal is still much better than the "My first homepage" group, mainly because it's harder to set an animated gif as the background image.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
Aw hell, who cares that most of what is on the internet is stuff and nonesense? Not I. True, Blogs tend to be tedious, self-indulgent twaddle. In more enlightened times, they would have been kept under mattress, lock and key and never revealed to the world. But thats doesn't mean there is no value in them.
... website. It's pure self-indulgence. I write about ... stuff. It goes largely ignored by most denizens of the net. But there is a small subset of people from all over the globe, that visit regularly. And sometimes, if the fancy takes them, they'll contribute and comment. How amazing is that? To have an audience for your thoughts and ramblings, on an international scale!
I keep a website. It's not a blog. It's just a
What an amazing world we live in!
http://www.davetansley.com - you proba
Of US users post content. I'd venture to say 99% of all that has something to do with the user's pet(s), which nobody really gives a damn about anyway. How many US users actually post content that is worthwhile? Prolly none, from the looks of my post, as well as others...
Now watch this drive.
The simple action of typing this troll is counting toward that very statistic of providing "content." It's another question, however, if this will get modded down. Most likely it will. :-)
After having read what you had to say I feel that I should address a few points. Word - is not some magic formula that is going to make you a writer, hard work is, and that hard work has NOTHING to do with the tools. Im impressed with the fact that you realize that it is hard work that is going to get you there, but just because you buy a hammer dosent mean your going to build a house.
I see all kind of people lulled into a false sense of security by the "tools" thinking that they (the tools) make them something that they arent. And here is the nail in the coffin...
1) Get out word (yes I know MS but that is what ever one who is posting is using)
2) Find a poem by e.e. cummings
3) Put poem by e.e. cummings into word
4) let word correct the poem
The product isnt going to be cummings. I would have to ask would cummings produce the work he did with "modern" tools? I would like to think (hope) so, but what are these tools doing to REAL creativity?