World Wide Web "Shrinking" 115
An anonymous reader wrote in "According to this article in the LA Times, the web is "contracting." No, the number of sites is not decreasing, but web users are visiting the same sites more often & other sites less often. Interesting. The article has some good stats. "
Natural evolution of the web (Score:1)
back in the day... (Score:1)
Back in the day, there wasn't _anything_ out there that made navigation easier, so you tended to just walk through links and see where it took you.. now that there are directories and search engines coming out of our ears, there's no reason to just walk links, as there was before..
Of course, it's still fun just to goof around and see what you can find though
-s
...who? and doing... ? (Score:1)
As for Yahoo!, well, doing... what? Navigating through a hierarchy of links, trying to desperately escape Yahoo! and find specific content? Checking delayed stock quotes? What, in particular? If, say, they're snagging users via online games and e-mail accounts, that may matter more than those who simply grab the latest delayed (oxymoron? eh) stock quotes and don't care for any other services -- or advertising -- provided.
As for "contraction", sure. Seems plausible; some sites are going to be famous, and others not. More users are going to stay on the "famous" sites, now that they offer more services. Given that many new users mostly want basic information and services and aren't searching for, say, an online library of statistics papers to find the latest approaches to outlier detection on small datasets with no assumed prior distribution, or copies of the Federalist Papers, that's understandable.
Reason for this: (Score:1)
Imagine someone getting their first television set. They want to see 'friends' and 'ER' and all the shows that are popular that everyone talks about. After doing that, then they move to cable and check out lesser known shows on The Discovery Channel or the Sci Fi channel. Just as the popular shows on TV just get more and more popular even while more and more cable channels are being added with more and more different shows, websites on the internet are becoming more popular while it's still expanding.
"Dissenters" (Score:1)
At least it's infinitely easier for the "dissenters" to get out there on the Web than in the traditional media. And it's easier still for the people who really want to find those "dissenters" to do so on the Web.
Oh, wait, I forgot about paid placement on search engines.
*sigh*
Re:Someone explain the punch line to me. (Score:1)
Re:Misleading Balderdash! (Score:1)
the study used.
I think you need to get out of the office a little more often. ivillage.com is a pretty major women's community site / portal.
Re:Is /. one fo the top 50 sites? (Score:1)
As a result (since even before I knew this I only visited one or two sites/day unless I was looking for something specific), this is one of the only sites that I even visit anymore. I'm also getting a serious sense of deja vu writing this post for some reason.
Life may be worth living eventually,
Almost Ditto (Score:1)
When I first got online, there were some directories of sites and such. Gopher still worked quite well, too, in the non-web-world. So I browsed through things quite a bit. There were a few places I'd got all the time, but mostly I browsed from site to site. There were no "portals" where 1) my browsing options were more limited (despite the seemingly large number of links) and 2) where I could get "all my info at once" -- when I had to actually search for things on my own, I found interesting sites that I didn't expect to find.
Since then, the number of truly geeky personal pages has been replaced by tons of teen-age goth-girl wanna-bees complaining about their sucky families, life of depression, etc. (of course such problems exist, but you have to admit, the number of cookie-cutter home pages has gone up ... black, lavender, javascript role-overs, similar-sounding web-journals, framesets, etc.)
Even though my "usual" browsing is now more limited -- gotta see /., t.o., freshmeat, userfriendly, and a cast of other things daily, the most rewarding browsing still occurs 'off the beaten path'. Too bad, as was mentioned, there are so many dead links on sites/pages that haven't been updated forever (I, too, am guilty of this at times).
Anyway, time for cookie-cutter-me to stop rambling.
- Andra
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It's called... (Score:1)
Techno-lites v. old users (Score:1)
I hypothesize that most of the people getting online for the first time are not technologically oriented (read as: non-technical, older generation). This group is already swayed by standard marketing campaigns, which would give an edge to the large companies posting their URLs on TV, the newspapers, etc.
I, for one, still visit a shotgun pattern of sites (usually from an altavista search); as do many of my friends (generally technical). At the same time, my older relatives (parents, aunts, uncles) tend to find a program on TV and plug in its URL w/o any surfing.
Just a thought.
Decline of indexing a factor? (Score:1)
Re:That's about right (that's only half of it) (Score:1)
The reason? I couldn't be bothered to browse. I think people are realising that the web is really about as exciting as the telephone network, and are using it as such... calling who they know occasionally, rather than phoning everyone on the planet.
In terms of number of hits versus site-count, the roportion of hits going to minor sites is probably dropping, while proportion of hits to the big portals is rising.
Well, it was bound to happen eventually (Score:2)
You see, there's a hell of a lot of JUNK out there on the web. And eventually people with a given interest are going to get tired of hitting every site they can on a given topic. They don't want junk, they want actual information on whatever subject(s) they're interested in.
I no longer try to look at every SCA or Amber page going. I keep track of my own barony and kingdom pages, and sometimes things like the Rialto archives and Cariadoc's Miscellany, because I KNOW those are good sources of info that are going to be there tomorrow.
Likewise, sometimes I'll hit "random" on the Golden Circle, but not always. Some of those pages are really useless. I check those that are updated frequently.
And yes, I'm a slight bit of a hypocrite, but until I can get my stuff off of GeoCities, I'm not updating it.
Re:Top 50 Sites... (Score:1)
Very Normal Process (Score:1)
The internet is the same way. Everything was new to everyone at first, but people gravitate to what is comfortable or convenient for them. I know that personnally I only visit certain websites that meet my personal set of criteria. (They have to load the page I select in 10 seconds or less, the information I'm seeking must be readily available: 60 seconds or less, ordering of products must be readily understood and easily accomplished. Security and privacy are very much required.) Of course, my wife has her own set of criteria when she's online as I'm sure everyone does.
The web is an evolving place and I have to laugh at the "studies" that predict $x of advertising or sales on the 'net in 5 years or whatever. It'll be another 5 years before the net is a stable place that can be predictable.
Dave Bennett
CIO
Inland Truck Parts Company
Re:Misleading Balderdash! (Score:1)
"The" top 50? No, but how about your OWN top 50? (Score:4)
My first experience of the WWW was in 1993/4. My first impression was "this is just like FTP or Gopher, but it decodes .GIFs and uses nice fonts!". There were only a few sites up, and I navigated everywhere from site to site, just seeing what was out there - content didn't matter as much as the novelty of going from one site to another with the click of a mouse.
Over the next year, people invented, and I discovered, search engines. "Cool! I can type in keywords and get something reasonably related to what I'm looking for!" Maybe my friend had put up a site with links to his friends' sites. Many "sites" were merely lists of links that the owner found interesting. Random surfing was still king. There was a wonderful War Games-esque feeling to be had from typing "let's play global thermonuclear war" into a window and getting results back that pointed to .mil sites :-)
Over time, I found myself visiting certain sites more often - they got bookmarked. I used a search engine as my default home page, but still spent most of my time feeding it interesting words to see what would come back, or words pertaining to technical questions to see if I could find answers.
Flash forward to today - I now find myself visiting only a handful of sites daily. Slashdot for tech news, a couple of major commercial media sites for local/national coverage, a financial site to get business news, and that's about it. I don't like watching the same news footage ten times during the evening TV news broadcast; why would I want to read the same news story ten times a day? There was an earthquake in Turkey. A buncha people died. What can FooNews tell me about that that BarNews won't?
I can count the number of sites I visit on a daily basis on one hand. I can count the total number of sites I visit on a typical day using both hands.
I suspect I'm not alone. Your stereotypical chatroom pornhound - does he really need to visit 2000 porn sites a day? Can he keep track of 50 "chat through the web" sites a day? No. He'll find one or two that he likes, and stick with them until he gets bored and moves on. A soccer mom - maybe a "moms with kids" bulletin board, and a few news sites. Her kid - a few entertainment sites, maybe the high school's forum page, and porn after he's disabled the censorware.
For most interactive sites, you find a community and then stay there until you find something more interesting. If the content is sufficiently compelling, (e.g. /.), you stay forever. Most other sites are static; a corporation's press releases occur weekly/monthly, and any given "this is my dog" page (which might be interesting to you if it's your best friend's dog!) can only be expected to change every few months, as most people don't change their families/pets/lifestyles on a daily basis - in either case, why waste time visiting a static site daily, since 90% of the time, nothing will have changed?
I doubt that I'm a regular visitor to more than 2 or 3 of the top 50 sites. I doubt I'll ever visit more than 10-20 of 'em. But I do know that - compared to my old days, where I'd surf to dozens of sites in a random walk through the web in an afternoon - well over 90% of the traffic on port 80 associated with my top 50 sites.
Am I alone?
Zipf's law (Score:1)
Some recent studies (see CS-TR-98-016 at www.cs.bu.edu/techreports/ [bu.edu]) have indicated that, in general, the "slope" or "skew" for documents is actually decreasing, meaning the more popular documents seem to be (from a network perspective) "less more popular" ;-) than they used to be. This makes sense if you assume that people are using bigger browser caches (fewer repeated retrievals of the same URI are needed), and keeping in mind that sites are moving session state information that used to be embedded in the URI into cookies (thus reducing the number of "tail" documents that would have been hit once and only once).
The problem with popularity profiles is that they are generally not reflective of how much content is being disseminated - if I want my site to attract twice as many "hits", I just have to embed twice as many images in each of my web pages, then tell everyone they're "necessary for proper layout" so people don't get suspicious.
In summary, I'm not at all surprised by these findings, but I doubt the study would stand up to rigorous peer review; I would be curious to see the actual charts-n-graphs, which are _FAR_ more instructive than just "top 50, top 100, top 10%" numbers. Unless one of the distribution is super-skewed (Zipf exponent is less than -1.0), this is probably just part of the normal osciallation of popularity and centralization/decentralization that we've seen since the dawn of knowledge. (How's that for putting a grandeur spin on it?)
Re:Zipf's law (Score:1)
Samples? (Score:1)
I'm sure a great deal of people visit the same sites, but I'm curious how big of a pool would need to be sampled before this could be reasonably measured.
The big squeeze (Score:1)
One thing that I have definitely noticed recently is that it has become effectively impossible to find anything useful on the net. Back in my undergrad days if I tried to find information on anything all I had to do to find it was to type some creative synonyms in a search engine. Now everything I am referred to is either a useless 3 line blurb from zdnet (complete with 12 ads and a popup window) or an 'error 404'. I have given up on trying to find useful things on the net, unless I have in hand an url to a site that can send me to links.
I know there has to be much, much more information out there now than there was three years ago. Unfortunately most of the net is uncatalogued by the existing search engines. I think this is much more of a reason for the lack of diversity; people now surf the net looking for news and diversion rather than to learn or do research. Search engines reflect this in their queries. These queries become the basis for this news story. Bah.
Scudder
Misleading Balderdash! (Score:2)
1. Sites #2, #3, & #4 are AOL, MSN and Geocities -- sites where individuals can put up their own web pages.
2. Out of the top 10 sites, 5 are primarily search engines (yahoo, go, lycos, excite, angelfire).
3. Another 2 of the top sites, netscape.com and microsoft.com are (I believe) the default start page for two very popular browsers.
4. The first e-commerce site is amazon.com, at #11 with barnesandnoble.com at #35. The second most-popular commerce site is ebay.com
5. Free-email sites, such as hotmail.com (and yahoo.com) are prominent in the top 50.
6. The first 'news' site is msnbc, at #24, followed by zdnet at #26, pathfinder at #28, wather.com at #30, cnn.com at #31.
7. There are a few unexpected entries -- passport.com (????), ivillage.com ? Lends to questioning how broad of a sample the study used.
So, I would argue that the following are more adequate conclusions:
** Many of the most popular web sites are used only to find other websites -- either as search engines or start pages.
** The sites that provide access for user webpages, such as aol, msn and geocities, are very popular -- meaning that lots of people are doing their own web pages.
So, I would argue that rather than a contraction in web sites, we're actually seeing an expansion -- sure the number of companies hosting these sites is pretty compact, but there's a lot of interest in what amateurs are putting on the net! AOL was able to beat the pants off Amazon, BarnesandNoble, ebay and expedia, COMBINED, just by allowing their users to publish their own web pages!
The fact that the search engines are so popular indicates that many people are visiting sites that aren't the big popular ones (those are typically already bookmarked, or obvious: cnn.com).
So, rather than saying that 'the web is contracting', with the connotation of usage on the web shifting toward a few sites, I'd argue that it's expanding because individual people are creating sites and other people are visiting those sites *more* than they are most of the 'mainline' sites.
Re:Statistical effect? (Score:1)
hahaha.. so true man!
Re:1st? Nah . . . (Score:1)
I hate conservatives and I hate liberals, but most of all,
I HATE extremists! Kill them all!
-Terov
Almost true... half credit. (Score:1)
fink about it!
Re:That reminds me ... (Score:1)
"The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
-jafac's law
Don't they WISH! (Score:1)
I heroically refrained from calling him up and declaring his classical music to be rotting in its grave, since 0% had been composed in the current year. B-)
Regardless of how much of the phenomenon they report is a sampling artifact and how much is the result of a few good sites being so useful that they get a lot of repeat attention, at least one of their inferences is faulty:
What this misses is that the web remains un-gate-kept, and continues to grow. Commercial convenience sites may cause those pages they link to be found more quickly. But they can't stop ideas they dislike from reaching an audience by ignoring them - just as the editor-controlled mass media no longer can.
Even if ALL the current convenience sites started systematically ignoring pages propagating a particular set of ideas or a particular side of an argument, they'd just discredit themselves and start another backlash, like the one against the establishment media.
Meanwhile, ANYONE can start a NEW convenience site, just as anyone can post a page. Anyone can put up a page linking their favorite non-establishment postings and link to it from any page they control, mail the URL to their friends, pass out handbills, or scrawl it on bathroom walls. Any group of people with some shared non-establishment views can create a "literature" by mutually linking, making a bigger target to be found or linked into.
Just as the Sturgeon's-law chaff didn't stop people from finding the good stuff before, so the flood of distractions doesn't keep people from finding the stuff they want now. There's more they don't want, but there's more of what they're looking for, too. And there's no concentration of the printing presses and broadcast outlets in the hands of a power-structure to bar entry.
This just in.. (Score:1)
Re:Decline of indexing a factor? (Score:1)
Zipf (Score:1)
What it means is that there are a very small number of sites that get a very large amount of attention/hits/bandwidth, a medium number getting a medium amount, and a very large number getting a very small amount.
Zipf's law is seen in a number of facets of Web traffic, both within a site and across the Web (such as site popularity). When you take into account the nature of Zipf curves, it's not surprising that they're seeing more traffic on the high end; in the scale of things, this is just a blip.
Jakob Neilson has a good intro to zipf's law in regard to Web traffic: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/zipf.html [useit.com]
Blue Mountain (Score:1)
--
Cable companies.... (Score:1)
Down with cable companies!!!
Re:"The" top 50? No, but how about your OWN top 50 (Score:1)
Nope. That pretty much describes my web history, with the additional note that although the total number of sites I touch is way down from a few years ago, the amount of information I glean (and use) from those sites has gone way up. Also the total number of hours has gone up - I don't have to pay long distance charges or hourly ISP fees anymore; I'm more likely to read that 10 page report.
-matt
Re:Virtual evolution. (Score:1)
In the web, there are many thinking persons behind both the sites and the surfers -- it is not by random chance, nor is it driven by survival of the fittest -- it's survival of the smartest, and the richest, which are not accidental occurances.
No, the web was created (In the beginning DARPA created the ARPANET. And the ARPANET was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And many hackers moved upon the face of the packets. And Marc said, let there be graphics, and there were graphics. And the hackers saw the graphics, that they were good, and they called the graphics "the Web", and the rest they called e-mail and ftp......) Finish the analogy.
Throughout the web's development, it has been guided by intelligence -- not chance.
Lamar Owen
WGCR Internet Radio
Re:World Wide Web Is Shrinking (Score:1)
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Is the research dumb or is it just the media? (Score:1)
For instance: If the web is *growing* and the portals are *growing*, then the smaller sites are garnering more hits and a larger audience as well!
Who would have thought we'd see the old rich-get-richer argument on the web? So what, they get an increasing percentage of eyeballs? Everyone else gets an increasing *number* of eyeballs, and the will continue as long as the "virtual economy" continues to expand. Must we create class divisions where none exists?
Did anyone look at NetRating's top ten? Seven of them are portals, and only Yahoo can make the claim that it's the only place you need go. This is akin to saying:
"Well yes, New York, gets more tourists then ever before, but look! 40% of them go to this one visitor information booth"! Geez, more people are looking for instructions on where else to go? Sounds like a crisis! Alert the media!
"Should this trend accelerate",... says some Xerox Parc researcher, looking up from his Mac II, "The web could contract into a superdense web of virtual fibers around Yahoo and its sattelites. Their mega-content model would then take on a very ironic twist as their web servers would then collapse into an embryonic black hole." Professor speilman paused, lost in thought. "Of course, this might affect their future streaming content, and possibly destroy California."
In other news, the DLA (Destroy Los Angeles) released a communique, threatening to leave their browsers on Yahoo until their demands are met. Local officials remain unruffled, saying that Los Angeles will remain the best city to live in in the nation, even if in a Black Hole. Mayor Chomsky declared a state of "mild alarm", and anticipating DLA's success, petitioned for a renaming of the city to "Philadelphia".
Damn (Score:1)
miyax
Re:How'd they get their stats? (Score:1)
404 error (Score:1)
discovered about.com (Score:1)
By the way ... (Score:1)
Heh - at least this is true for me.
timothy
Site visitation (Score:1)
World Wide Web Is Shrinking (Score:1)
Trends (Score:1)
I think it may have something to do with the "type" of visitors. In the old days the people visiting sites where the ones who had allready been on the net for quite some time and where used to it. Now alot of the users are new, and I dont find it very strange that they go to sites they know that they will find something on instead of trying searching for themselfes.
I am sure this will change when this "wave" of new users has become veterans too.
Eddies in the bitstreams... (Score:1)
As more and more people get on the web, interest communities will become more common. Such as Slashdot for the linux/geek crowd, others will appear for other topics, and people interested in that topic will start using that site as the place to go for information, as it will provide better, more detailed, and more appropriate stuff while filtering out the garbage that the portals are still filled with.
After all, would you go to Yahoo to get information about Linux when Slashdot is here? Not once you've found it.
I think the portals are going to be the places of choice for the newer users, and those that just get onto the web sporadically, but more topic-based sites are likely to keep popping up and providing better hubs for that topic.
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That's about right (Score:1)
Geez, looks like I need to get a life.
Unconvincing (Score:1)
Unlike Nielsen's TV counterpart, there's no easy way to make the figures they generate anything other than wild guesses. PHB alert: A sufficiently naive interactive account manager or media planner will believe anything you tell them, as long as there's a chart attached.
I don't buy it.
Take it with a grain of salt (Score:1)
Yea, I thought so...
1st? Nah . . . (Score:1)
I hate conservatives and I hate liberals, but most of all,
I HATE extremists! Kill them all!
-Terov
Is /. one fo the top 50 sites? (Score:2)
I think it is to early in the developement of the web to start pointing at these trends. Most people are still relative newbies, and tend towards the big sites they know.
My experience is the opposite, new people to the web hit sites like yahoo and the search engines all the time, while people who are used to the web almost never touch them (and when they do they use the better but less fancy ones like Google and alltheweb).
Statistical effect? (Score:1)
However, I'm not suprised that people are becoming more discerning. How many "This is my dog" websites can you go and see without exploding?
Still early (Score:1)
However, it isn't like the WWW has been in popular use for all that long. I have some doubt that "trends" really mean much. Perhaps I missed other references in the article, but it seems that they are only comparing this year to the last. In this industry, I think we can expect to see more changes in the near future that may affect web usage.
Am I a cynic to wonder if some of the major portal sites had some influence in publicizing these statistics?
YS
Re:/. in top 10 sites! (Score:1)
How to lie with statistics (Score:1)
Apples and Oranges and Sites (Tenth post!!!!!!!) (Score:1)
If, for example, I read the New York Times site once a day, and then spend the rest of the day checking my Stock [yahoo.com], does that mean I like Yahoo a hundred times better than the Times? Do I prefer
These statistics mean nothing, really.
Re:Unconvincing (Score:1)
Not just a trend (Score:1)
People tend to stick with what they know. In the 'real world' most people shop for mystery novels at Border's and Barnes & Noble, instead of going to the little Mystery Bookstore down the street. Most people watch the major networks more then the History channel. Most people go to the big multiplex theaters instead of the little art house that plays organ music between shows.
They go to places they know or have heard about a lot. Thus it is not surprising that most people, who are casual internet user, tend to spend most of their time at the big name, well known sites.
The reason that this trend is becoming more so is that there are many more casual users then a year ago, and there will be even more casual user next year. At some point it will level out, and it will change a little from year to year, but it will still remain generally true.
This does not however lessen the impact of all the other sites out there. They will still exist and many of them will gain large amounts of traffic, because even if only one person in a thousnd visits a given site that makes for a lot of people when there are hundreds of millions out there.
Most people follow the herd, some don't, and that will always be so.
Aaahh! Comma fits! (Score:1)
I hate conservatives and I hate liberals, but most of all,
I HATE extremists! Kill them all!
-Terov
I'm helping that by coming to /. (Score:1)
Re:1st? Nah . . . (Score:1)
Rise of the portal (Score:1)
If you're a fan of Stephenson's Snow Crash, this consolidation shouldn't come as any surprise. I view his Metaverse as a large portal site describing the physics of the world, interfaces for the avatars, and renting of real estate (a la Ultima Online). Each building is then a seperate site which implements the specified interface. Within the streets of the Metaverse, there is advertising - not much different from the banner ads at the top of this web page. The characters in the novel divide their time between wandering the streets and visiting connected sites.
Snow Crash is only a story, but like many successful sci-fi novels, the characters in the story think and behave in ways familiar to today's reader. The best reasons for this is commercial self interest: if the readers don't identify with the characters, less copies will be sold. There are deeper reasons, however, for assuming that technology will not change human psychology [with the possible exceptions of gene modification or cyborgs]. Consider the Gilgamesh sagas or Greek tragedies. Despite major technological revolutions, these works are still readable and the personalities recognizable two to four thousand years later. The same will certainly be true for the next several decades.
As a result, the consolidation of the internet is inevitable. I believe that television is the best metaphor, but consider newspapers for a minute. Whereas once several dailies competed in each of the major cities, most cities have only one paper. In the future, national papers may dominate the market. There are many economic reasons for this, but I'll focus on human psychology again. The role of geography has greatly diminished as a barrier to communication and friendships. Assuming that you still read newspapers, how often have you asked: 'Did you read that article in last Friday's New York Times?' In this way, a local or national paper such as the NYT helps define a common reference point in the communication between two people. As the culture continues to globalize, the scope and importance attached to brand names will grow.
Likewise, how often have you asked a friend or colleague the question, 'Did you see ____ on television last night?' A discussion of the personal problems / sex life / clothing choices / etc. of the characters often follows. For the last few decades, television shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, and South Park have provided a reference point around which the human need to gossip may be satisfied. As an exercise, try spending a day without discussing anything you've heard in newspapers, television, movies, or the web. Now imagine meeting someone like this. You'd probably describe them as a social misfit - and you'd be right!
There is no reason to assume that the internet will be any different. The chances are that you're already addicted to this place [slashdot.org] and many of your friends probably are too. Whether it is a mailing list, a portal site with instant messaging (AOL / Metaverse), or a chatroom and news board (/., Black Sun), a limited number of places will become the focal point around which the entire internet will be viewed.
Re:Unconvincing (Score:1)
#2: IBM DeveloperWorks
#3: Sun
#6: Slashdot
#8: Error 404 File Not Found
(hehe, thats what it says. but it points to borland)
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Re:Is /. one fo the top 50 sites? (Score:1)
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Re:"The" top 50? No, but how about your OWN top 50 (Score:1)
Nope. That about sums it up.
Motivation (Score:1)
It's probably related to the motivation to write free/open software!
That is, the odds are only unsurmountable if you choose to play by the established rules (such as, security through obscurity, release late and infrequently, charge lots of money, restrict freedoms and so forth).
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QDMerge [rmci.net] 0.21!
Re:Well wasn't this to be expected? (Score:1)
I have experimented with FrontPage 2000 at work (contrary to what my link below might indicate, oops!). In my defense, however, it was only to train some of my users on how to make web pages. The plan is to wean them off of FP2K and on to Notepad, eventually.
I guess FP2k is okay for automating some of the repetitive and/or tricky stuff, but the default templates make pages that look like PowerPoint slides! Yuck!
The disturbing thing to me is the idea that one has to spend lots of money and or time to have a good web site. That web site will look like all of the others (animated 'Catch The Monkey' ad banner at the top, links to other stories on the right, more ads in the middle... yuck) and it'll cost you $x00 for Office 2k to do it, and $x000 for NT server and IIS to run it and....
Does that make sense? I think lots of those big sites aren't saying much besides "We are giving you a little bit of free stuff just to deliver your eyeballs or your personal information to big companies who also want to deliver your eyeballs to other big companies...." and "Wait here while big graphics and plug-ins download, unless you're not using the latest greatest web browser. In which case, go away."
That's hardly a revolutionary message. My idea of quality has more to do with content than presentation, though. Vive la difference!
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QDMerge [rmci.net] 0.21!
Re:Self-Serving Propaganda (Score:1)
If we knew where the money for the "survey" came from then we'd know why the results were the way they are.
It reminds me of when Gates required a poll that would say that about 85% of users prefered something and a couple of weeks later a poll comes out saying exactly that. It's only during the DOJ trial when we peruse the MS email that we see the money trail between the desire and the results.
Media manipulation is exactly what it is. You don't need to invoke "Evolution of the Web" explainations. Simple greed explains much.
It's only a matter of time (Score:3)
And then of course the search engines to help you find Slashdot, News sites, Disney, Microsoft, and Porno, Warez, and mp3 sites.
Re:Site visitation (Score:1)
Re:Unconvincing (Score:2)
One Q: Is that 35% of the same size pie from year to year? Probably not....
There are ways of doing the data collection, though. Check out
http://www.hot100.com/.
If you want to know how /. is doing try
http://www.hot100.com/dev/
Forrest J. Cavalier III, Mib Software Voice 570-992-8824
The Reuse RocKeT [mibsoftware.com]: Efficient awareness for software reuse: Free WWW site
lists over 6000 of the most popular open source libraries, functions, and applications.
Well wasn't this to be expected? (Score:1)
Of course it's "contracting". There is no barrier to entry for anybody on the web, for personal sites, or business. It's the easiest place to put something up about yourself or your "business".
With tools like FrontPage floating around too, it gets even easier to put something up that's got the quality level of a cow's paddock.
So the sites that are frequented the most are going to be the ones with good content, good interfaces etc. Those sites are usually (usually) run by the big companies. Therefore it only makes sense that the flows of traffic would bend towards that area of the web.
--
Mark Waterous (mark@projectlinux.org)
think they're right (Score:1)
I was used to browse more different sites per day
now I have my prefered news site(try to guess which one
files download site, etc.
it's faster than searching the net by using big services like yahoo
Re:Statistical effect? (Score:3)
10,372 according to the late Dr. Sebastian Markoff.
Top 50 Sites... (Score:1)
TOP50 [12c4.com]
And this one:
TOP50 [internet.com]
Re:1st? Nah . . . (Score:1)
Re:/. in top 10 sites! (Score:1)
I still think stats are BIAS.
Re:Statistical effect? (Score:1)
Discerning? I don't think so. I think you just have these massive amounts of dummies coming online who don't know how to get anywhere. These are the folks who are running their 17 inch monitors at 640x480 with Win98 and a Start button as big as my shoe. Who will still be running IE5 in 2 years, because thats what was on their machine. Who, if they actually DON'T have AOL, have their start page set to their ISP, or Yahoo, etc, because thats how it came.
I don't believe these statistics because the people who are being measured don't understand the web, and the people who write about them don't understand the damn thing either.
I have to laugh almost every day when I read about some new amazing life-changing possibility soon to be brought to us via the web. The other day it was something about controlling your home remotely. The people who are supposedly going to use and benefit? The same bozo's whose VCR clock has been flashing for 7 years... Yeah, Right!
======
"Cyberspace scared me so bad I downloaded in my pants." --- Buddy Jellison
Re:Is /. one fo the top 50 sites? (Score:1)
I first heard about Slashdot in a magazine but promptly forgot about it. Then I saw Slashdot listed on 100hot.com and figured it must have something to offer if so many people visited it, and it did.
In my opinion bigger sites are, on average, better than smaller ones, even though there are many exceptions. Just as the Beatles and Stones in the 60's were, on average, better than the Hollies and the Small Faces. Popularity does correlate weakly with quality in many entertainment media.
The Old 20/80 Axiom (Score:1)
It goes for web sites just as well as it goes for clothes, programs, recipes, TV shows, etc...
Re:Seems true... (Score:1)
Bah... (Score:1)
The market today is gung-ho on a concentration trend; only the biggest few of *anything* attract enough attention and approbation from Wall Street people (resp. any other major stock market) to compete effectively in a world where Wall Street's nod means life or death.
I suspect there is, fortunately, a counter-trend at work in the Internet, which is one of the few places where diversity generates immediate value and stagnation immediate penalties. Which of the two trends will win out might be one of the most interesting things to watch for in the century to come.
Media and Consumer laziness is normal, not trendy (Score:1)
Don't you just love the willful faux naivete of reporters who would rather ignore any complicating facts they may have learned if they get in the way of a good, focused, controversial story? (Yes, you heard the sarcasm.)
What makes "Web Travelers Follow Beaten Paths to Similar Sites" by Charles Piller so ridiculous and hypocritical is the fact that, to get a job at the L.A. Times, he must have developed some degree of skill at researching and hunting down relevant information that is not already media-predigested. After all, as a newspaper, the L.A. Times is expected to present stories that include at least a little new information, and he is getting paid to write for them. Evidently he expects his readers, who mostly have access to a breadth of information sources through the web that the best funded newsroom could never have afforded ten years ago, to take no advantage of it. Unhappily, I am sure that he is right for far too many people.
But when has it ever been different? Even in historical golden ages of learning most people made no real effort to get out of the rut their lives were in, and likewise most businesses tried to make the best of their situations instead of creating better ones.
The internet lets people connect to information when they want. Is it any wonder that many choose to find structured news - international, financial, weather, sports - through a portal site where it can always be found, and where it is expected to be up to date, rather than looking through a newspaper or waiting for the TV or radio news? I'm not sure this says as much about the internet as about the traditional media.
The real story with the internet is not that the greater part of society continues to make little effort to create and look after their own interests, but that those who don't want to be bored and boring have access to a world of information without needing a major budget.
So only 80% go to websites the repiort categorized as "other" each month. What else is new. Here's the real question: how many experience some of the breadth of the web every week, or every day? How many of them regularly did something similar before the web?
Yes, people who gain some experiance use the web as a tool, rather than just surfing around, but it is the most multivalent information tool civilization has ever had. Lest anyone forget, even the most mainstream of portal sites offers access to a greater variety of information than the 11:00 news ever did. And any story that piques interest can be researched right then.
You don't have to be an activist, or interested in dissent from the conventional, or a Noam Chomsky disciple, to simply want to know more about your skills, your field, your hobbies, your interests, than any portal site will have prepackaged.
It was, after all, people who got really interested in things the mainstream didn't have available who created Yahoo and Hotmail and Amazon. However much big media money enters the web sphere, however much big media pressures the
More importantly, for the individual, there's effectively an infinite number of paths ahead at any time, paths to involvement and challenge or at least customized distraction. Meanwhile, just like always, most people most of the time are bored or tired enough to consider buying what big media is selling a fair trade. Face it, for almost all of us it is a fair trade at least a bit of the time. But really, which is the big story here?
My top X (Score:1)
Bill Cooper
Jeff Rense
Art Bell
but what I really like to do is run
searches. just to see what turns up.
just the other day I was looking for
Zappa mp3's, found a program that acts
like an old analog synth. It's cool, almost
have all the controls worked out. and it's free!
and I've become a shoutcast fan too.
to me the Internet is like a pawn shop, never
know what you will find.
That reminds me ... (Score:1)
Sure this wasn't sponsered by amazon.com? (Score:1)
A "click" is still only 10 seconds away (less shortly), as oposed to a 15 minute car drive.
I still would not place a big bet on any of the Yahoo's, Amazon's and Ebays' will still be number ones in ten years to come.
Because of better sites. (Score:1)
With the explosion of people onto the web, the technology related to web sites (cgi, DHTML, Java, JavaScript, Flash, etc) has allowed sites with the ability to really provide dynamic, informative and most importantly current content.
As i recall when i used to parouse with mosiac and netscape 1.1n, all the pages were static unless someone spent the time updating things manually so, of course, surfing meant hitting mainly new things.
-Z
Not surprised... (Score:1)
Re:Apples and Oranges and Sites (Tenth post!!!!!!! (Score:1)
That is exactly what advertisers (what many of these sites depend on) look for when determining where to put up banners. A lot of time all they really care about is how many people will merely glance at their ad, because only like
So these statistics do mean a lot.
Portal sites, News for the Masses (Score:1)
I think what's next (at least what I'd like to see) is that the people that write the news start getting more attention than the news sites. I want to read articles by [d6.com]
Chris Hecker, not articles by ZDNet or any other publication.
The role the publishers play is the role that the record labels play - they screen all stuff they get and decide what is worth passing on. MP3 is proving we don't need them for music, but what about news?
- Steve