twopointouch

The latest Hitwise Consumer Generated Media Report reveals that MySpace’s dominance over other social networks shows no signs of slowing down. MySpace has a market share of 81.92% among the social networks, with users spending over 30 minutes on the site in an average session. This is the second-longest session time in the survey, with only the more child- and game-centric Gaia Online beating it. This increased dominance is ironic, since readers may recall two prominent newspapers saying it was all over for the network just a couple of weeks ago.

However, the site’s users may well also belong to other networks, which are also showing strong growth. A quarter of visits to the other networks come from MySpace. I expect that this trend will continue and that different networks will come to specialise in different areas. MySpace has always been strong when it comes to music, so it would make sense for others to work on presenting themselves as the ‘place to be’ for nightlife, fashion, sports, movies, games, etc.

The report is available for free here, though you do have to register.

These are the highlights on social networks:

Social networking websites have emerged to become an integral part of web activity for many Internet users – in September 2006, one in every 20 Internet visits went to one of the top 20 social networks, nearly double the share of visits compared to a year ago.

• In September 2006, the market share of visits to the top 20 social networking websites accounted for 4.9% of all Internet visits. This was an increase of 94% compared to September 2005.
• The growth of MySpace has outpaced the category, with its market share of visits increasing by 129% in the past year, and 51% the six months between March 2006 and September 2006.
• Users of social networking sites tend to belong to more than one network: in September 2006, 24% of visits to the remaining 19 websites in the social networking custom category came directly from MySpace. Other fast growing social networks between March and September 2006 were Bolt, up 271%; Bebo, up 95%; Orkut, up 63%; and Gaia Online, up 41%.
• The share of upstream traffic from MySpace to the Telecommunications, Shopping and Classifieds, Banks and Financial Institutions, and Travel categories increased by over 70% from March to September 2006.
• The Shopping and Classifieds sub-categories receiving the largest share of visits from MySpace in September 2006 were Music, Ticketing, Apparel and Accessories, Auctions, and Video and Games, reflecting the interests of MySpace users.

Pew Internet & American Life Project has released its second Future of the Internet survey, with experts and pundits broadly agreeing that by 2020:

• A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.
• Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.
• Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.

Lanjut →

This is the most interesting woman in the world.

I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by interestingness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon.

The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe.

What makes for interestingness on flickr? It’s an aggregation of the number of notes, comments, favouritedness (sorry) and links to a submitted image.

Lanjut →

Some very big numbers in David Sifry’s new report about the statistics thrown up by the blog tracking service Technorati:

• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

Sifry notes that English has become the number one language of the Blogosphere with 39% of the posts. However, 31% of posts are in Japanese, and large parts of the French and Korean blog community are not tracked by Technorati.

Currently, just 12% of blogs are in Chinese. However, by the end of 2006, it is predicted that China will have more broadband lines than the US, which ought to redress the balance somewhat. Currently, no Indian languages feature among the top 20, but again, I would guess that rapidly growing access to computers in India over this year will soon change that.

I find it interesting that the blogging phenomenon does not appear to be culturally specific. It has clearly taken hold in countries like Korea and Japan to a greater extent than many Western countries, but few areas with reasonable technology penetration are missing. It seems that the technological drivers for blog use (access to IT, easy tools, broadband, free hosting) are far more important than any of the cultural drivers that have been suggested to me - dissatisfaction with mainstream media, desire for self-expression, etc. Unless, of course, those things are universal.

Update: smart post here on how the rise of blogging means that everyone will be doing it in 12 months.