Internet Yellow Pages

The variety of social and digital media platforms is growing at a phenomenal rate. Almost every day I hear about a new tool or application that is the ‘next big thing’. It is hard to keep track of everything that is happening and to keep up to date.

A quick tip is to refer to ‘Go2Web20’ to update yourself with the latest buzz tools: http://www.go2web20.net/

This tool provides a comprehensive directory of Web 2.0 platforms and gives you a synopsis of functionality. It's a great reference tool.

Wikipedia becomes elite-ist

I’ve just come across this article in the New York Times about how Wikipedia is considering changing the rules to editing and posting of information.

In essence, the online encyclopedia is considering permitting only registered users to edit and post content. According to the article, because of ‘vandals’ changing facts on certain entries ‘"Wikipedia appears ready to introduce a system that prevents new and anonymous users from instantly publishing changes to the online encyclopedia."

This will mean a much smaller group of people responsible for published content. This raises a few concerns for me.

Firstly, it means the wide range of content will be reduced as the collective input will be smaller. Even if the content continues to be as wide ranging, it will surely take longer for the smaller group of people to come across new or interesting content. Secondly, we are relying on a smaller group of gatekeepers to decide what should / shouldn’t be published, what is fact or isn’t accurate and eventually what we actually see. Finally, part of the success of Wikipedia is based on user generated content from anyone who feels they have something interesting to share with the world or have a particular passion for a subject/issue. By introducing this type of ‘censorship’, is Wikipedia being elite-ist?

Social networking sites on the rise...

ComScore has just released its worldwide traffic stats for social networking sites for November (this does not include December). The top 20 sites and their unique visitor numbers are below:

Interesting points to note:

- The presence of regional sites like Baidu Space, hi5 and 56.com (China) and Orkut (India)
- Blogs are still very popular. Blogger tops the chart with an estimated 222 million unique worldwide visitors in November (up 44 percent from November, 2007). - Facebook is expected to dominate soon with 200 million unique visitors (up 116 percent).
- Facebook stands out as the social gorilla taking share from not only other social networks but blogs and other social media as well.
- Yahoo’s Flickr rises to No. 7, enforcing the popularity of photo sharing

Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore)

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)