DUBLIN -- While analysts on the west coast of the US look at one way of tracking the veracity of news sources, several Irish broadsheets cover long-awaited JNIR/Monitrack statistics on Internet site traffic among Irish. The west coast analysis documents microcontent linkages. The Irish survey focuses on Internet properties that pay to be measured. In the meantime, people like Bill Gates suggest the sweet spot of the Internet is in newsfeeds from microcontent sources, not in Web properties.
It may take some time before the rise of microcontent publishing is noted and documented in Ireland. This is remarkable because several microcontent authors have shown that the smaller sites often offer a viable conduit for promotion of messages, especially among early adopters of technology.
The problem is that memes that weave around in blogging circles often are not the ones that get front page coverage. I watch several Zeitgeist summaries alongside Daypop trends. It's rare to see half of the Zeitgeist simultaneously reflected among Top 10 results from Daypop or Blogdex.
For example, the following items appear at the top of Daypop at the start of the 21st week of 2004:
- Mena's Corner: "It's About Time"
- Six Apart: "Pricing Structure"
- Seymour Hersh -- several stories like "The Grey Zone" about Rumsfeld approving unethical questioning techniques.
- "Mark Pilgrim: Freedom 0"
A scan of the Lycos Zeitgeist shows "Iraqi prisoner abuse" receives top 10 mention but none of the rabid conversations about Movable Type cross over into the mainstream. Even without quantitative analysis, it's relatively easy to draw a conclusion that microcontent publishers keep their niche audiences by focusing on highly specialised topics. What might be a concern of anybody measuring the pulse of Irish Web users is how these weblog sites, with visitor demographics no more than one-tenth the slice of mainstream sites, can influence public perceptions. That's happened with issues like e-voting in Ireland, pricing structures for Internet connectivity and the perception of "rip-off Ireland." Many of these issues gained critical mass as microcontent items before surging into the mainstream media.
After I read recent Sunday newspaper accounts, I thought the measurements cited in several reports about Irish browsing habits focused on sites that opened their books to analysis of site metrics. That would explain why the lively discussion boards such as Boards.ie don't feature, even through their demographic would put them into the top 10. As it turns out, the Monitorack metric covered by the Sunday press is not a site metric. Monitrack, the company behind important consumer surveys, researched 2398 people offline and 9317 people online as part of a commissioned JNIR project designed for the advertising industry. You get into the pool by paying for the research.
It's interesting to measure interest in Web sites by conducting well-structured market research. Monitrack does that well. Web developers acknowledge problems with the site metric approach. There are difficulties trying to associate meaning to Page Rank. Andrew Orlowski, in regular columns with The Register, has inflamed the passion of many in the microcontent publishing business with his rejection of the algorithm Google uses to award standing to Web sites. This is a daunting challenge for companies trying to leverage advertising resources.
What confuses me is how some of the current Irish research shows only Yahoo as the search engine that respondents visit. That's what some research seems to suggest--until you read the fine print. During recent data gathering by Monitrack, the national broadcaster (RTE) was undergoing a site revision and didn't want to release its numbers. Neither the Irish Independent nor the Sunday Tribune paid for inclusion in the current reports. No government websites, like the popular Revenue Online Service or the Company Registration Office, feature in the recent Irish report. These are popular sites. To be omitted from a report about a browsing demographic throws up questions about the universal conclusions of the research findings--important only if universality was a design goal of the research.
Some quick facts concerning the 17 websites that were measured by the recent survey:
- The number one site in Ireland remains Yahoo with 664,000 visitors while Eircom.net had 449,000.
- Of the 656,000 people who use the internet weekly, 52 per cent useYahoo and 30 per cent use Eircom.
- Overall, 38 per cent of Irish adults are regular internet users, up from 33 per cent in the last survey.
Steve Outing -- "Who reads blogs"
Anthony Quinn -- "for the record"
Monitrack -- "Counting what counts"
Catherine O'Mahony -- "Survey shows big rise in web usage" in the Sunday Business Post Media&Marketing, May 14, 2004.
Lycos 50 -- "Daily report"
Daypop -- top memes changing hourly
JD Lasica -- "Blogs, newspapers, and link authority"
Karlin Lillington -- "Boards.ie knows how to get people talking"
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