========== 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+