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.
...half the trash comes from.
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).
So millions and millions of people post content, but how much is useful, easy to read, and informative? Probably less than one percent.
Yeah, right.
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
Who would post online? Not me!
Novel theory: Modern Man evolved from psychopath
With this post i can die happily knowing i have made a contribution to society.
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
Do posts made by AC trolls count?
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!
That's actually quite a bit higher than I would have guessed.
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.
libertarianswag.com
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?
there's about 800,000 users whose sole purpose seems to be to take that content down, one site at a time...
And sometimes we even turn on eachother.
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.
-----
In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet &
American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the
Internet to publish their thoughts, respond to others, post pictures, share files and
otherwise contribute to the explosion of content available online. Some 44% of the
nation's adult Internet users (those 18 and over) have done at least one of the following:
21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their
computers.
17% have posted written material on Web sites.
13% maintain their own Web sites.
10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have
posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong
such as church or professional groups.
7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see
live pictures of them and their surroundings.
6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through
building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files
Content Creation Online
2% maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone
survey. In other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in
early 2004, we have heard that between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have
created diaries or blogs. In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read
the blogs or diaries of other Internet users. About a third of these blog visitors have
posted material to the blog.
Most of those who do contribute material are not constantly updating or freshening
content. Rather, they occasionally add to the material they have posted, created, or
shared. For instance, more than two thirds of those who have their own Web sites add
new content only every few weeks or less often than that. There is a similar story related
to the small proportion of Americans who have blogs.
The most eager and productive content creators break into three distinct groups:
Power creators are the Internet users who are most enthusiastic about contentcreating
activities. They are young - their average age is 25 - and they are more
likely than other kinds of creators do things like use instant messaging, play games,
and download music. And they are the most likely group to be blogging.
Older creators have an average age of 58 and are experienced Internet users. They
are highly educated, like sharing pictures, and are the most likely of the creator
groups to have built their own Web sites. They are also the most likely to have used
the Internet for genealogical research.
Content omnivores are among the heaviest overall users of the Internet. Most are
employed. Most log on frequently and spend considerable time online doing a
variety of activities. They are likely to have broadband connections at home. The
average age of this group is 40.
----
why? forty-two.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
According to the study, 44% of all internet users have contributed something of value to the content of the internet.
The other 56% argue about vi vs emacs.
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
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!]
Please help metamoderate.
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!
Don't you mean "Garbage In, Junk Out"? Oh...wait...that's GI JO...
:: slinks away ::
Nevermind.
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.
Given the per capita fitness attitudes in the US, that'a whole lot of content most of of the world doesn't want to see.
*ducks*
According to them, only 2% of adult American internet users visit "adult websites" on a typical day.
More seriously though, I find it hard to believe that only 54% of adults with internet access use that access on a typical day.
-"It seems like you're trying to exploit a security hole. Would you like help?"
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?
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
By the numbers now, if 44% of people surveyed contribute content to the internet and 98% of the internet is porn, than a wopping 43% or about 120 million americans are involved in the porn industry. Statistics are a wonderful thing.
Don't mess with the bunny, outsideworld.org
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")
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
What? oh, sorry, I wasn't paying attention....
yeah but what you say is true - 99% of it is shit - except for my brilliant prose, of course.
(ego the size of a planet? moi?)
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
"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".
By posting this, I am adding content to the web and contributing to the figure in this study.
Not unless this is your first post.
hmm, "create content for others to enjoy" this is quite dubious. From my experience only a minimal amount of content provides me with enjoyment and advances my position along this positive path. Hence the reason i take my input from moderated and colaborative sources(eg slashdot.org +3 and news.google.com) in order that which I wish to avoid.
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Really there are only 10 of us, all with dupe accounts. Move along.
I think I'll make a webcam page of my wall and paint it so people can watch it dry.
# nslookup ihavenolife.com
Server: ns1.nac.net
Address: 207.99.0.1
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: ihavenolife.com
Address: 69.15.89.66
bastards stole my idea
MoFscker
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
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.
"Until you do what you believe in, how do you know whether you believe in it or not?" -- Leo Tolstoy
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. --
The headline is misleading. From the report in html version
17% have posted written material on Web sites.
That wasn't the impression I got from reading the part of the article that was a link. Creative journalism indeed.
Yes, this is a source of potential bias.
Internet users are more likely to hang up the phone on telemarketers or surveys.
(Lies, damn lies, and motivations ascribed to people about whom no real data exists.)
Microsoft Windows is, fittingly, the official Desktop OS of Olig
They are the expression of the human subconcious, given shape and voice through the power of the incredible /. machine. Luckily, we have moderation to stop them from destroying us all...
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.
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
The other half are Anonymous Cowards.
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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.
does pr0n count as art?
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. :-)
A few decades ago, a small local cable company set an unused channel to a camera pointing at a fish tank in their office, and there it stayed for several years.
When they finally got another feed and switched the channel to that, they were flooded with complaints! Seems a significant chunk of their subscribership left their TVs tuned to "the fish channel" much of the day, and were quite upset when it was no longer available.
Upshot: the cable company switched the channel back to showing the fish tank.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
1) Everyone disagrees on which 10% (or less) is not crap.
2) Without the ability for unqualified people to post uninteresting content, the people who have something to express and the ability to express it well might never do so (because they might never think to do so, or because they have a lower opinion of their output than is deserved)..
I don't want someone (not necessarily, just some power in general) telling other people what they should and shouldn't post because it isn't likely that the reviewer knows exactly what is and is not crap. The torrent of useless data isn't good, but my chance of finding something in that pile is nonzero (but low); if it isn't there, my chance of finding the desired information is exactly zero.