"We are watching more TV than at any time in the last five years.
That statistic is usually followed by 'despite the rise of the Internet'. We're in the opposite camp. We believe TV viewing is increasing because of the Internet. The social web turns TV into an event, a shared experience.
And as the social web becomes increasingly central to our lives, these events become more and more important. It becomes the nationwide, and sometimes worldwide water-cooler."
A nice little nudge from Information is Beautiful reminding me to post one of Clay Shirky's stickiest stats about cognitive surplus:
200 billion hours of television watched in the US vs the 100 million hours estimated to have been spent on the creation of Wikipedia. Or to put it another way the US watches a wikipedia's worth of TV advertising every weekend. It's pretty easy to go binary at this point (as many have) about what Clay Shirky's suggesting. TV bad, digital creation good. He's the first to acknowledge that there will always be those for whom consumption will continue to dominate and be preferrable. The point he's making is about what happens when technology enables two new actions - create and share - that amplify the ancient human behaviours of socialise and belong. This is where technology becomes it's most interesting and most powerful: the intersection between new enablement that amplify hard-wired primeval needs.
Twitter for the stuff that happens between email. Hmmm. Very interesting piece in the Harvard Business Review. Here's a skimmed top line overview. Full fat here.
Cocks and Hens Splitting the tweeters and followers by gender reveals some very interesting things:
Men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get
this figure, we cross-referenced users' "real names" against a database
of 40,000 strongly gendered names.
Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly,
an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.
Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another
man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different
tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.
These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On
a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around
women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know,
and women follow content produced by women they knowi.
Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or
from women. We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises
because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter
more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the
content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo
sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).
Twitter's Usage Patterns
Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical
on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely.
Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.
At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On
a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30%
of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely
analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors
account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ii. In other
words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated
among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though
Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that
Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service
more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.
