[atlarge-discuss] Re: FC: Jakob Nielsen on "media consolidation": Nobody rules the Web!

[Jeff Williams <jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com>]

Declan and all,

 It finally is beginning to look like allot of the work that
IENGroup did two years ago is now beginning to pay off.

  We did a nearly exact study two years ago and have
continued it ongoing currently that  makes many if not
all of the same conclusions that Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier
make here, for our members,  in your link below Declan.

  It is too bad that organizations like ICANN, the ITU and
others, cannot seem to grasp that it is the stakeholder/user/consumer
that makes these sorts of decisions and they dam well better
get to understanding that reality.  And those same
stakeholder/user/consumers make those decisions on the
internet based on their desire or need in any given
moment in time.

Declan McCullagh wrote:

> http://useit.com/alertbox/20030616.html
>
> Specialization Means Nobody Rules the Web
> Because of the debate about ever-more centralized mass media and changing
> FCC regulations in the United States, the question of whether the Web is
> also becoming centralized has become a hot potato. However, the Web is not
> a mass medium. It's not broadcast. The Web is on-demand, driven by each
> customer's specialized need in each moment.
>
> In a recent New York Times op-ed piece titled "More News, Less Diversity"
> Matthew Hindman and Kenneth Neil Cukier argued that the FCC is wrong to
> view the Web as a diverse information environment, since most traffic
> accrues to the biggest sites.
>
> Hindman and Cukier mention that two-thirds of all hyperlinks point to the
> ten most popular sites of the 13,000 that cover gun control, and that the
> top ten sites on capital punishment receive 63% of the topic's links.
> Nonetheless, considering the Web as a whole, diversity is still ensured.
>
> The question here is not whether some topical sites are bigger than others.
> They obviously are, given the power law for the Web and its subsets. The
> question is whether the same few sites would always dominate, regardless of
> a user's goal. As a sidebar looking more closely at Hindman and Cukier's
> examples demonstrates, that is clearly not the case:
> There is zero overlap between the top sites for the two topics they mention.
> Looking at more specialized sub-issues or slightly rephrasing the questions
> leads users to yet other sites.
> In a different domain, the main sites for economic issues are almost
> completely different from the main sites for crime-related issues.
> In total, searches on seven different topics identified 59 different sites
> among the 70 entries on the search listing's first page: only 16% of cases
> were multiple listings of the same site. Not exactly indicative of a few
> sources monopolizing Internet debate.
>
> All of these searches were performed on Google, which is currently the
> largest search engine. Still, there are many other search engines with big
> market shares.
>
> On Microsoft's MSN search engine, only two of the top ten gun control hits
> were included on Google's list. And none of the nine sites in MSN's top ten
> capital punishment sites were included in Google's list (Amnesty
> International appeared twice on MSN, but not on Google). More proof that
> sites might be big in some contexts, but are rarely big everywhere.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list
> You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html
> This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/
> Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/
> Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------

Regards,
--
Jeffrey A. Williams
Spokesman for INEGroup LLA. - (Over 131k members/stakeholders strong!)
"Be precise in the use of words and expect precision from others" -
    Pierre Abelard
===============================================================
CEO/DIR. Internet Network Eng. SR. Eng. Network data security
Information Network Eng. Group. INEG. INC.
E-Mail jwkckid1@ix.netcom.com
Contact Number: 214-244-4827 or 214-244-3801



---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: atlarge-discuss-unsubscribe@lists.fitug.de
For additional commands, e-mail: atlarge-discuss-help@lists.fitug.de