There’s been a lot of talk in the blogosphere recently that we are risking an attention crash with all the demands and pressures of an always-on social media world.
“By 2009, the Radicati Group predicts that we’ll spend 41% of our time managing email. Now add to that the IMs, documents, Facebook pokes, RSS feeds, Twitter tweets and text messages coming at us and we’re officially way oversubscribed. Unfortunately, the problem will not abate. Human attention is finite. It doesn’t scale. Worse, the pace of change today is so rapid there’s a huge need to stay digitally savvy.”
He’s right. What balance I once had has now been ruined with my new found love for Twitter.
Clay Shirky, NYU professior and author of the new book “Here Comes Everybody” offers another perspective. In this presentation from last month’s Web 2.0 conference, Clay makes the case that Americans actually have a tremendous “cognitive surplus” from hours of TV viewing that can be applied to participation activities online.
To illustrate the scale of this surplus, Clay estimates that the entirety of Wikipedia represents about 100 million hours of human thought. That my sound staggering until you realize that Americans spend about that much time every weekend just watching TV ads. According to Clay, the 200 billion hours that Americans spend watching television each year represents about 2,000 Wikipedia projects. That is per year.
Nobody is implying that behavior will shift that dramatically, but just a 1% shift of American’s time from TV to participation online would amount to 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.
So while the social media savvy may feel over saturated with information, we have to remember that a majority of the population still haven’t joined the party.
In the world of social media, we often hear of the wisdom of the crowds—present a problem to the masses and they are likely to find the best solution. Today, Justin Wolfers suggests that rather than supplying wisdom, the masses may be crowding out the true wisdom of the experts in his Freakonomics post on the lack of academic commentary on the current state of the economy.
Crowding out: The wisdom of crowds is at its heyday and experts have lost market share in the public square. Everyone with a blog and ten minutes to spare is offering a view (including yours truly), and this is crowding out thoughtful discussion.
It seems everyone is talking about the current economic situation in the US and the world. And when everyone is talking, how do you as an individual identify the truly relevant information? Do you rely on the masses by getting your news from DIGG, Reddit or another aggregator with user rankings? Do you rely on some secret sauce coded algorithm such as Google’s page rank or Technorati’s blog rank that balances the crowds voice with hidden metrics? Or, do you rely on an influencer to tell you what is really happening?
The truth is, it’s easy for your message to get “crowded out” without the right influencers behind you. At DIG we emphasize a marriage of marketing and outreach to get a message to the masses so they can share it with the crowd. Then the crowd gets the chance to see the wisdom you share.
Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject. So you know you are getting the best possible information. – Michael Scott
This week one of the world’s most popular encyclopedias turned 7! It’s hard to believe that Wikipedia, which is often credited with jump starting the user-generated content revolution we all know as “Web 2.0,” went from a small experiment to one of the world’s most reliable resources covering a ridiculously wide array of subjects. As of January 14, 2008, the English Wikipedia had over 2,176,000 articles with over 946,000,000 words! That’s 371,271 new words added every day!
Now I wouldn’t recommend citing Wikipedia articles for your thesis or term papers, but if you wanted to find out who Chris Crocker is…… well that’s another story lol.
Have you noticed the new features on YouTube? I love the new beta page—it’s cleaner and just feels better in my browser. Today I noticed that they’ve also added forward and back navigation buttons to the recommended videos at the end of each clip. The forward button also has a timer feature that lets you know when the presented clips will change. I’m thrilled about these nav buttons since I can never mange to click on an interesting video before it is replaced by a new one. They’ve also added thumbs up/down buttons to the comments to help filter out the drivel, which I greatly appreciate.
Successful Web services like YouTube have learned that they have to continuously improve in order to stay relevant. But, they also have to earn revenue. In addition to other improvements this week, YouTube has rolled out a new advertising format that overlays the videos like a news ticker at the bottom of the video. Its use is very limited right now, and I had to watch a number of videos before I found one with the new ads. The blogosphere is voicing its opinions about these ads in posts like these on Profy, CyberNet News, and Jaffe Juice.
According to Mashable, Google is making the ads optional for the content owners. If these ads survive the current maelstrom of mostly negative reaction, Google could potentially use the format to make revenue from the extremely popular embed feature, which currently allows people to put ad-free clips directly on their blogs and Web pages.
Corporate America has capitalized on the platform by sponsoring vloggers, posting their commercials, and buying banner ads. The new ad format may increase commercial use of YouTube and water-down the user generated content, but as the largest video community on the Web, it will continue to get the eyeballs marketers covet.
