[Web4lib] Interesting Web/Library 2.0 data (was particpationSkills for Library 2.0 Leaders)

[Mark Costa]

Ok, so now we know why Google bought Youtube, because there are many ways to
drive traffic to the site.

I think of it this way, just because I drive through a rich neighborhood, it
doesn't make me a member of the community. I'm just another guy passing
through admiring the houses. It's the same thing with Youtube, there are
just a bunch of people passing through; very few of them are community
members. Youtube gives people a good reason to drive through, and Google
knows how to sell to the gawkers.

Wikipedia throws me off a bit. You can't imbed the site's content, so its
not as easy to drive traffic to the site. But, they have to get a large
number of drive throughs because you can pick up one of its entries for
almost any Google search on a topic or famous person. Do more people
contribute because it is easier to add a line or two of text, rather than
contribute a video? Or is it because a larger percentage of the population
has an idea that they want to share, while only a small percentage of the
population has a video they want to share. Everyone's an amateur philosopher
and historian, very few of us are amateur directors.


On 5/3/07, K.G. Schneider <kgs at bluehighways.com> wrote:
>
> > I would have to say that for Youtube and Flickr, they generate a
> > tremendous
> > number of visits because people can imbed the image/video on another
> site.
> > That's a good way to drive non-contributory traffic to a site and skew
> the
> > ratio.
>
> This isn't "non-contributory traffic" that "skew[s] the ratio," since a
> major component of Web 2.0 theory/practice is the idea that content is
> portable/remixable. If I post a YouTube video to my site and people watch
> it, they are participating in YouTube (and likely to visit the site
> themselves).
>
> The idea that the site is the destination is very 1.0.
>
> K.G. Schneider
> kgs at bluehighways.com
> http://freerangelibrarian.com
>
>
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>



-- 
Mark R. Costa, MLS

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress
depends on the unreasonable man."
--- George Bernard Shaw