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.

Comments

Seems low.

[eurleif]

That includes everyone who's responded to a blog entry, posted on a message board, etc.? It seems rather low. What would really be interesting is how many people have their own web page(s).

1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[Safety Cap]

So millions and millions of people post content, but how much is useful, easy to read, and informative? Probably less than one percent.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[radicalskeptic]

Well, if you take slashdot as a cross section of the internet, it's actually much higher. I usually browse at score: 4 & 5, which means nearly all the posts I read are worth reading. The ratio of posts in an average story that reach 4 or 5 is usually at least 10%, sometimes over 20%. Of course, this is assuming Slashdot is a descent cross section of the internet, which I'm not sure is true, although it does have, what, nearly 800,000 users now?

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[thogard]

One man's garbage is anothers treasure. I've got nearly 200 meg of junk on my site but according to google some of the info is only on my site. For example, packet dumps of a nasty phone system as well as how get the thing to spit out the GPL. I've got obscure hints on fixing an old VW. This stuff is completely useless to 99.99+% of the population but when you need it, its there. I get a few messages a day from people that found it and when it saves someone a few hours, its worth it.

Re:1/2 post, less than 1% quality

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, of course, if they're old enough, records of daily life can be fascinating to regular (okay, kinda geeky) people as well as historians. E.g., my grandmother has been translating my great-great-nth-great grandmother's diary out of rather archaic French for several years now. She was a young bride (sixteen years old, something like that) whose merchant husband brought her to Haiti in the 1700's. Most of her writing is, "It's hot here, there are lots of mosquitoes, I want to go home" -- stuff that would seem pretty boring and banal at the time, but now it seems fascinating simply because of its age.

Of course, it seems rather unlikely that anyone's LJ is going to be available for their remote descendants to read. Which is kind of a pity.

Created then abandonded

[foidulus]

It's amazing though how many people create these wonderful(or not so wonderful as your opinion may be) websites, then just abandon them. There was an article in the NYT a while ago(now it costs money) about how many bloggers haven't updated in a few months(the number was almost 50% IIRC) and how about 20% or so never got updated past the first post!
At least we have better search engines than we had a few years ago, I'm sure your all well aware of the frustration you encountered when searching for something meaningful and getting, "Jim's cool page of pics" etc.

3 Cheers for google!
Hip, hip, hooray!

So 56% of the net is composed of lurkers?

[Senjutsu]

That's actually quite a bit higher than I would have guessed.

How about companies?

[bc90021]

Just as interesting a study, I think, would be corporations that have posted or have websites vs. those that don't. We may take it for granted, but there are still a number of business (especially small businesses) that likely don't have a web presence.

Pruning for the public good?

[QuantumSpritz]

Makes me wonder - if all this content is in blog/comment format, what are we losing as we auto-prune our forums, our comments, out old stories? How to we save the nuggets and toss out the crap? Like BUMP posts - those should be confined to the seventh circle of hell. Dante, anyone?

Re:Pruning for the public good?

[adpowers]

That is why you never delete or prune anything. I was involved in a local online community as one of the sys admins. I set the message board to have no pruning and I would never delete threads (just lock them at worst). Unfortunately, there were other admins as well. They decided to prune stuff and delete posts. This is one of the largest reasons for leaving the community, I feel stuff should never be removed from the internet. Thank Jah we have archive.org.

Re:Heartwarming

[gid13]

As much as I love the idea of a "democratic" web, I have to disagree with more people creating content being a good thing. I've been arguing against copyright for a long time, and one of the reasons I do so is that it creates far too much of an incentive to create. It seems to me that we have a huge glut of material both on and offline. Having worked in a university bookstore for 4 years, I've personally seen how useless much of that content truly is.

Of course, it may be true that the more people creating FREE content, the better. Maybe. In any case, the main point I'm making is that as long as copyright law prevails over the net, I'd call it overly controlled.

Study Shows Half are Couch Potatoes

[billstewart]

While I'm sure the TV/Disney/Newsmonger conglomerates would like to think that "content" is something that they provide for us and we consume like good little couch potatoes, the really cool thing about the Internet is that anybody in the world can talk to anybody else, express themselves to the public, and provide valuable or entertaining information to the world. So the sad result of the study is that half the users don't seem to get it yet... How can we drag them in?

Of course, that doesn't invalidate Donaldson's Commentary ("Sturgeon was an optimist"), and there's lots of content that's not very interesting, but at least we need to get kids in the habit of providing things that are interesting to their friends and thinking of what they can do for society as a whole.

Where, not how much!

[SuperBanana]

All this is great and wonderful, but hides a serious problem. There are several problems facing the internet these days, IMHO. You can see the signs in the quality of link-quantified based search engines like google.

Problem #1: when people contribute, they do so on corporate sites. Epinions. Livejournal. Even Photo.net is a perfect example of the clustering that happens, as is mp3.com...and mp3.com is an even better example of the problems with this. a)someone else suddenly gets rights to your stuff, and b)when they disappear, so does a huge chunk(relatively) of the net. c)While all this web-application crap is lovely and cute, we've discovered that it costs money and you can't do it just off banner ads- so a large number of these companies fail pretty fast if they don't find some way to charge for it, and people don't like paying anyone but their ISP, really(and that won't change with micropayments, IMHO). Nobody realized that the only people who could afford to host pictures etc- were the ISPs themselves, because they're actually getting paid for your access. Shock, gasp- the old model was better than the new one.

Problem #2: overreliance on search engines. The web really isn't anymore- its more like a branched tree in many ways, because people don't rely on links from, say, their ISP's homepage. They fire up google instead. The internet is supposed to recover from major chunks disappearing, but what happens if google goes off the air tomorrow? I bet you'd see an immediate drop in traffic(well, aside from a hundred million people IM'ing/emailing each other saying "hey, did you know google is down?"). People would be lost. I remember in '96 I used my ISP's homepage as a jumping point; now that's virtually unheard of. People use portals, not their ISP's homepage- the predecessor to portals. Again, gasp, shock- the old system was better.

Problem #3: Companies that host these sites really don't like spiders; they suck up bandwidth and often cause dynamic apps to crumble under the load- I've seen it happen, and I've killed/blocked spiders myself because they would have run up enormous bandwidth bills(I help run a mailing list with about 11 years of archives). Either that, or the spider might not be able to index the dynamic content. Add this to point #1+2, and oops- a large chunk of content contributed by that 44% just dropped off the radar of the rest of the world...because remember how dependent we are on search engines like google?

Problem #4: people just don't link to stuff they like anymore, really. It used to be techno-gear-heads like us, and we usually posted our favorite links or even our bookmark files directly. Joe Shmoe doesn't. The mere fact that a very small bunch of people with blogs(not to mention the companies that manage to get 60 links to the same page into google results) can sway google is a perfect example of how few people link anymore off their homepages. Don't like it? Put up links to your favorite stuff on your homepage, and 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!)

And now, my head is about to explode from all this deep thinking :-) [discuss!]

Good for the US and all, but..

[cmacmanus]

Despite the fact that most of the people who populate the internet are from North America, what are the statistics for the rest of the world?

Re:And yet broadband providers CRIPPLE us.

[cpghost]

and by gutting upload speeds to pathetically low rates of transfer.

It would be nice if ADSL were extended to allow a kind of "reverse bandwidth" command. This command could be used dynamically by the customer's [router's] IP stack, e.g. like this: "As long as there's nothing receive, allow maximal outbound bandwidth. As soon as content is received, reverse direction."

BTW, not all providers' policies forbid servers. It's just a matter of switching to more user-friendly companies.

The biggest problem for Joe Schmoe is finding suitable DNS providers for their brand new domain name. DynDNS, ZoneEdit etc... will not continue to provide this for free for very long...

How about companies?-Unecessary.

[Anonymous Coward]

"We may take it for granted, but there are still a number of business (especially small businesses) that likely don't have a web presence."

Nor do they need one. It's a common misconception. A "keeping up with the jones".

Re:Heartwarming

[mpe]

As much as I love the idea of a "democratic" web, I have to disagree with more people creating content being a good thing. I've been arguing against copyright for a long time, and one of the reasons I do so is that it creates far too much of an incentive to create.

It's worth asking if copyright actually does provide such an incentive. It being kind of hard to see how something which outlives its creator by nearly a century can motivate anyone :)

Depends on where your post your stuff

[FePe]

How your content (comments, photos, files etc.) is being valued is also related to where you put it on the Net. Sites like Slashdot is reliable, which means that a bad comment posted here will be more valued than a comment posted on a personal homepage. A site like photo.net is a very good place to upload your pictures, and though your picture isn't considered of high quality, all other pictures on the site add up to a relatively high quality overall.

Re:so thats where...

[The Snowman]

...half the trash comes from.

Speaking of trash, I wonder how many end users contribute to television?

Maybe that is why I find the Internet much more interesting and useful...