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Wikipedia
Is There Life After Wikipedia?
Jason Lee Miller | Staff Writer
Pondering where surfers go after Wikipedia is interesting enough,
but what was more interesting was the cyclical pattern of behavior
among them that begins with Google and ends with Google or
Google-related services (just to generalize - you could say search
- Wikipedia - search - blog - social networking).
Hitwise's Heather Hopkins notes that there is increasing interest in
the concept of Internet flow - where surfers go after visiting
specific sites.
Wikipedia, she thought, would be a good place to begin an exploration
of the concept, a case study that showed there were only a couple of
clear authorities by category.
The rest, in categories like television and travel, are scattershot
- so splintered that there is room still to become the dominant
resource in those categories.
Hopkins begins by mentioning that Wikipedia receives over half (54%)
of its traffic from Google, generated from a set of keywords that
includes the standard king of keywords, [sex], and memetic group
that indicates most searches stem from whatever current zeitgeist
is afoot. These keywords include [richard hammond],
[hurricane katrina], [series 3], [france], [high school musical],
and [steve irwin].
Writes Hopkins:
In doing this analysis, the thing that really struck me was that
there are clearly a handful of sites that are viewed as authorities
in particular industries (such as Amazon, IMDB, and BBC News). Whilst
visits are fragmented among hundreds of different websites in some
categories (such as Lifestyle - Blogs, Entertainment - Television,
and Travel) in other categories there is one clear authority.
Most Wikipedia users leave the site and go directly to computer and
Internet-centered sites like search engines, social networks and chat.
One might assume to either look up more information, post what was
found on a profile or blog, or to discuss what they've just learned
at Wikipedia. The search engine category is one, says Hopkins, where
a clear authority exists: Google.
But it also means that it is somewhat a reciprocal relationship.
Google drives traffic to Wikipedia, Wikipedia drives traffic back to
Google (or Blogspot, or MySpace, where search services are provided
by Google).
Another dominated category is the movie sector of Entertainment. Over
two percent left Wikipedia for the Internet Movie Database. The closest
competitor was Rotten Tomatoes, which only brought in 0.12 percent of
Wikipedians.
The dominance of Google, Amazon, and IMDB is not reflected in other
categories. Instead many of the other categories, like television and
travel, are splintered to the hundredths of a percent degree
(divided among hundreds of websites).
Google News Joins Mobile Japanese
Jason Lee Miller | Staff Writer
Those on the Tokyo subways will have more to do now besides sleep
standing up and fend off the pervs pressed up against them. Google
is offering its Japanese-language Google News service free of charge
via mobile phones.
This will give Google an advantage over other mobile news services,
which charge a fee to deliver news to mobile phones, which next to
no one in Japan doesn't have. (I apologize for the previous syntax.
It should have said, "everybody in Japan has a cell phone.")
The service will update news from 30 different Japanese news sources,
like Asahi Shimbun and the state-run NHK (which is good if you like
boring, incomplete, and culturally insensitive).
The PC-version of Google News Japan carries about 600 news
organizations. But, as is widely known, PC-users in Japan are far
outnumbered by mobile users. Though Internet cafes are popular.
Google News won't be the only freely updated service to Nihon's
mobile phones. Google joins the all-you-can-delete porno spam text
message distributors. Unfortunately for all the ex-patriots that
can't read Kanji, they won't know the difference.
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