Not so long ago when someone mentioned ‘web’ we immediately thought about the technical infrastructure underlying the concept: the routers, the providers, speed of access. And now a few years later, once the infrastructure has become a commodity, the meaning has shifted: when we say web, we usually mean the ‘Social Web‘. The focus is now on the people, and technology has become an enabling piece: wikis, blogs, micro publishing, photo sites, user generated video, and the list goes on.
To put things into perspective, it helps to compare the numbers of a vanguard ‘traditional media’ powerhouse such as Thomson Reuters in 2008 to our new ‘Social Web’:
|
Thomson Reuters (“Traditional Media” ) |
User Generated Content |
|
3 million news messages / year |
1+ million blog posts / day |
|
730,000 alerts / year |
2+ million messages on Twitter / day |
|
515,000 photos / year |
10+ million new photos on Facebook / day |
|
54,000 video stories / year |
8,000 new videos on YouTube / day |
Thomson Reuters alone managed to produce roughly 350 new news messages / hour – try keeping up with that! However, this number pales in comparison to the 1 million new blog posts each day. Times have definitely changed.
Journalists no longer the first to bring breaking news
The sheer amount of information and the surrounding activity means that the role of traditional media has changed dramatically: journalists are no longer the first to bring us information on breaking news. Instead, their role is shifting to that of post-analysis of the vast amount of content generated by both the amateurs and professionals on the scene.
Wikipedia is the new information clearinghouse for developing news (a wiki page was created within 5 minutes of first news of the Mumbai attacks in 2008, and over 2,500 updates have been made since). Red Cross is using Twitter to communicate emergency news, share safety tips – all in real time. Flickr, PhotoBucket, TwitPic and Facebook offer real-time photo streams of the developing events. And thousands of blogs are created every day to provide conduits for aggregating content and self expression. While traditional media was banned from covering the Thailand coup in 2006, hundreds of citizen blogs were created with live updates, photos and commentary.
Information filtering is increasingly social
The amount of and speed at which new information is being produced on a daily basis also means that we need new tools to manage our workflows. As highlighted by Marshall Kirkpatrick, basking in the social media noise offers many great opportunities for serendipity, growth, and discovery, but it can also be quite overwhelming.
Interestingly enough, part of the solution to this problem also lies in the same data stream: information filtering is becoming increasingly social. More and more, we find our news and discover new content through friends and professional and special interest networks, which in turn means more sharing, more comments, and more user engagement. This information cascades from network to network and person to person on a daily basis – a pattern that we observe daily at AideRSS via our engagement analytics.
Monitoring this activity is a non-trivial task, but it yields a lot of really interesting data. For example, did you know that there does appear to be an optimal publishing time for your blog post? Our recent announcement of real-time analytics opens a whole new set of opportunities for analytics purposes, quick demos of which I’ll be sharing over the course of the next several weeks.
For example, what has been your experience with engagement cascades, have you ever analyzed or optimized for them? Next up, we’ll dissect a hands-on example.