Philosophy, Summarized

While I usually try to add something to the conversation rather than copy and paste other’s words, this one is probably true, and worth spreading:

“Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.” - Paul Graham

Lies, Damned Lies, and HitWise

Not to be outdone by his competitors at ComScore, Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise, engages in some shoddy reasoning practices on his blog:

“Our regional map gives some clues as to interest in the Dunkin Donuts brand, note there are currently no franchises in California yet it ranks 10th in states sending Internet traffic to the site.”

Also note that California has more than 10% of the total US population, and sends just 2.83% of the traffic to the Dunkin Donuts site. That’s 10 times more people then Connecticut, which sends almost 3 times more traffic (7.43%) to Dunkin Donuts. So a person in Connecticut is (which ranks 3rd to California’s 10th) is roughly 30 times more likely to visit the Dunkin Donuts website than someone in California. Now doesn’t this sound much less sensational?

Weak?! Participation in Web 2.0 sites

This story from Reuters cites finds that Web 2.0 “is far less participatory than commonly assumed”.
Only 0.16% of YouTube visits are by video uploaders, only 0.2% of Flickr visits are by photo uploaders and a mere 4.6% of Wikipedia visits are by page editors.
The article’s title, “Study finds weak participation…” makes it clear that this is an attempt to diss the sharing phenomenon. Now this is a classic case of reading the data plain wrong, and is based on the assumption that participation means “everybody talking and nobody listening”. Instead, what it proves is just how well the whole sharing thing works - people do a little bit of talking and a hellovalot of listening. In a world with so many voices, that’s the only way to have a conversation… The unidentified Reuters author forgets that participation means listening too.
Now let’s take a look at the mechanics of a Web 2.0 site. After I upload some photos to Flickr, I send an email to my friends to come in and see them. That’s one small visit for me to upload, and a large number of visits to watch. When they upload their photos, it’s the same. Also, I occasionally wonder around Flickr to look at photos by people I don’t know. Some of them are absolutely stunning.
So, is my level of participation “weak”? No. If everyone uploaded more photos than everyone else looks at, then the average photo would have an infinitely small number of viewers. Uploading on average 2 photos for every thousand I view, means that on average photos have hundreds of viewers (averages lie of course, as this “market” probably has long tail attributes, but that’s besides my point). Now that doesn’t change the fact that I’m a participant - I did my share of sharing my own content.
The difference between this new phenomenon of social websites and user generated content and what we had in the past is that now everyone has a change to participate at all. I bet that 99.9% of Flickr users never presented their photos in a gallery. We must also remember that the economics of digital content, or virtual stuff don’t work the same as those of actual atoms. That the amount of content that the average user donates is much smaller than the amount he consumes is just fine.

Update:

Here’s an interesting related article on the parts different people play in social networks.