==========
Hitwise research gives Wikipedia details
==========
http://www.govtech.net/news/news.php?id=93945
Hitwise research, "a leading online competitive intelligence service,"
released a report on Wikipedia and other reference site recently, with
deep details for the four weeks ending April 16. It was picked up and
announced by a number of news channels today.
Fast, fascinating stats :
1) readership is evenly split M/F
2) WP seems to be fielding 1 in 2000 Internet views ( 0.05% on the
graph at the end of the article), more or less the same as
dictionary.com
3)
Answers.com shot up to a heady popularity in February, but has
levelled off; WP has expanded its reach dramatically over the past
month as hardware problems have been solved -- it increased over 50%
from March 26 to April 16 (and another 40% since then... see links
below*).
4) WP is the 33rd most popular site in terms of "getting hits from
search engines," up from 146th last June
5) Young millionaires love us.
- 18-24 year-olds are 50% more likely to visit than average
- users with household incomes over $150K are 34% more likely to visit
6) The "Government Technology" news staff has been planning this
article since April 22, when they checked the article and page counts.
* Today saw a spike over yesterday's traffic, after some growing pains
with the 20 new machines:
http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/
** Notice that all sorts of bandwidth madness break loose around April 18.
http://65.59.189.201/www.bomis-total/www.bomis-total.html
==========
II. Other charming news
==========
A. Kevin Holland writes in his blog for and about "associations" :
http://associationblog.blogspot.com/2005/05/those-wacky-wikis.html
'[O]ne can easily imagine communities developing around wikis used for
such purposes ... without the need for an association. While "blogs"
are great tools, they're not going to fundamentally change
associations. Wikis will.'
B. ''Fortune'' features Clusty, asks if it will be the next Search Engine
King:
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/cool/articles/0,15114,1056784,00.html
"Topping the results are the sponsored links, followed by links to
relevant pages Clusty has found. To leave no stone unclustered, one of
them is a definition—readable right on the first results
screen—courtesy of Wikipedia. Clusty indeed."
Who was it who said definitions have no place in WP ? Vox populi
seems to be confused about that.
--
+sj+