TheWayoftheWeb

A recent study by Purewire revealed that only around 20% of Twitter users are contributing to the service, with 80% having fewer than 10 followers, and 37.1% having no tweets – leading Techcrunch to suppose most people on Twitter are sheep.

Meanwhile the New York Times reports the shocking discovery that bloggers who assume it’s an easy way to get a book deal or give up their day job often get disillusioned and give up. The article quotes the 2008 Technorati State of the Blogosphere, with 7.4 million (5%)  of the 133 million blogs tracked by Technorati having been updated once in the last 120 days.

The most active 2% of Wikipedia users made 73.4% of edits in 2006 (including maintenance and administrative edits).

The iPhone OS had 8% of the smartphone market, but generated 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of html usage.

Are we noticing a pattern here?

I suspect around 20% of the people reading this post will be knowingly thinking of Vilfredo Pareto, who noticed that 20% of the people of Italy owneed 80% of the land back in 1909, which was then generalised by Joseph M Juran in 1941 into the Pareto Principle, as the common rule of thumb that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, i.e. a Power Law with a The Long Tail.

Internet access gives everyone the ability to self-publish – it doesn’t mean everyone will. Or entitle everyone to be able to make a good living out of it.

And more importantly…

Even if just 1% of bloggers, people uploading video to Youtube, or podcasters achieve sustainable fame and income – how does that compare to the number of aspiring writers, film directors or radio DJs who never even got published or broadcasted under the old model?

The Long Tail never said everyone would get rich – you can either try to rise up to the hit end by being one of the small percentage working harder, being smarter, and getting luckier – or you can aggregate the long tail by working harder, being smarter, and getting luckier, just as Google did with Adsense.

As usability godfather Jakob Nielsen broke it down in 2006: “In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.”

The internet doesn’t radically change that dynamic (although it’s definitely possible to move the figures slightly within a specific online community). What it does is hugely increases the numbers included in that 1%, and in that 9%, which has a bloody big impact on the 90%.

That’s the big lesson – a small number of people can get Wikipedia over 55 million U.S. visitors in a year, or create the fact that 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute (equivalent to Hollywood releasing 86,000 films every weekend!). It’s what got facebook to over 200 million users, and Twitter to over 32 million.

It doesn’t mean it’s all popular, or high quality.

It just means that most of mainstream media is likely to end up covered in content as if it went out in a desert sandstorm – and successful businesses need to figure out how to engage and build on that 1% or 20% which creates the value for everyone else.

I’ve finally started upgrading the back end of this blog to start tackling the increasingly important issue of connecting with the discussions posts can prompt in a myriad of places.

Whereas discussion was generally confined to the Comments section in days of old, now it can spring up on Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed etc.

As a commenter, I’ve found Backtype to be useful for aggregating the comments I’ve made, but when it came to starting to tie it all together here, Disqus was an obvious, and easy choice to install and start using.

All of the comments made directly have now been imported into the new system, and I’ve added the ability to post with your Twitter and Facebook usernames, as well as importing discussion around a post from locations like Friendfeed. You can even post a video comment via Seesmic.

I’ve also installed a Disqus widget to show the Top Commenters, Recent Comments and Popular Comments, so you should see that start to hopefully fill out in the next few days in the right side bar.

In addition, I’ve also started combining my saved bookmarks by posting to both Diigo and Delicious, to provide some cloud-based backup and to see which is the best route for publishing any links I want to share – as well as looking at which plugins/widgets might be contributing to long loading times.

All aimed at providing a better service to you, the readers that make all this worthwhile, so let me know if there’s anything you’d suggest, or things you think I should definitely keep or get rid of!

After a year of aggregating feeds on a pretty large range of topics, Alltop has released personal MyAlltop pages.

MyAlltop - personal alltop pages

What was nice was that existing Alltop users like myself got an email from Guy to give us the chance to secure our usernames before anyone else turned up.

And it’s a reasonably nice and easy set-up – register, log-in, and then visit any existing Alltop category, and simply tick which feeds you wish to include on your own page – then order them by dragging and dropping.

(For reference, this blog appears on Social Media, my Twitter account is on Twitterati, and my other blog, 140char is on Twitter)

And there are now accounts for Dan Thornton, BadgerGravling, TheWayoftheWeb and 140char on My Alltop – although so far, I’ve only had time to add my own feeds and will have to dedicate some time tonight to aggregating my favourite sources to the TheWayoftheWeb and 140Char accounts.

But why?

What’s interesting to me is why they’ve launched personal aggregation – one reason is probably the number of feeds in each category has become a little overwhelming. Guy Kawasaki is claiming the service features 31,000 sources on 550 topics already.

Obviously there is also an SEO benefit in having hundreds of people linking to their personal pages, and it means the service is more likely to get repeated fresh links as people add to their personal pages.

And it might boost usage as some people will prefer their personal aggregation over the category pages.

Plus, bearing in mind Alltop currently serves display advertising, there’s suddenly a lot more real estate being created, promoted and potentially becoming popular.

But:

I’m hoping there are more reasons for launching this new service, in addition to those listed above – otherwise it might not really fly.

As others have rightly pointed out, public and personal aggregators already exist – Netvibes, Pageflakes and iGoogle for starters. Plus options such as Google Reader, which also offers shared items (My shared items are here).

(Incidentally, Marshall Kirkpatrick has been posting some interesting stuff on Netvibes)

And then there are the popularity based aggregators such as SocialMedian, more semantic options like Twine, and the old school (e.g. Digg).

In addition, MyAlltop is hampered slightly by only allowing feeds already listed to be included, and not having any search functionality – meaning you need to skim through some fairly big pages to find your own feeds and any you know/might think are on there.

So what could there be?

Some people might find it slightly simpler to aggregate existing Alltop feeds than on rival services – particularly those who don’t necessarily already know a load of social media bloggers ( for example), and have their RSS feeds in other services.

Then there are the future possible options to include other feeds, display the selection as a widget, flag up favourite posts, perhaps group invidual posts around topics/questions etc, etc.

But from a quick brainstorm, I’m missing what really makes MyAlltop stand out at the moment – so I’m hoping you’ll give me some ideas to include?

This clip should probably become standard issue for anyone who is in a panic over the latest newspaper headlines concerning health – and particularly for anyone talking or thinking about the latest concerns about Twitter and Facebook:

Helpfully, Dr Goldacre has posted the papers and research he referenced on the Bad Science blog,  and there’s some very interesting reading – well worth knowing for anyone who works with social media and social networks for any future debates.

(I already posted responses from the NHS and The Guardian’s Charles Arthur, plus my own response to the Sigman paper)

Clip found at Johnnie Moore’s Weblog, apparently from David Smith’s Delicious feed.