London Regional ICT Champion

Whilst we’ve not always been very keen on the web 2.0 hype, we at ICT Champ Towers believe the underlying functionality of web 2.0 has real benefits for voluntary and community sector organisations (VCOs) willing to embrace it – such as community colloboration, widening social inclusion, being able to tell your story to a wider audience, reducing the cost and complexity of IT investments, and so on.

However, the latest data on Internet participation reveals that [whilst many sites such as MySpace and Facebook are reporting increased traffic] only a very small percentage of Internet activity is related to users creating and publishing content.

“According to Hitwise, only 0.2% of visits to YouTube are users uploading a video, 0.05% visits to Google Video include uploaded videos and 0.16% of Flickr visits are people posting photos. Only the social encyclopedia Wikipedia shows a significant amount of participation, with 4.56% of visits to the site resulting in content editing.”

Not only is the percentage of participation very small online, but there are some very strong skews as to who is participating.

Visitors to Wikipedia are almost equally split 50/50 men and women, yet edits to Wikipedia entries are 60% male. The gender gap is even greater for YouTube, a site whose visitors are equally male and female, but whose uploaders are over 76% male.

With age comes experience, as well as the desire to disseminate knowledge.

There is a clear age difference between visitors to Wikipedia and editors of its content. Over 45% of visitors are under the age of 35, while 82% of those making edits are 35 years old or older.

Like Bill Tancer of Hitwise says, right now web 2.0 “feels as though we’re in the awkward and uncomfortable position of being one of the first guests to arrive at what promises to be a very cool party.”

So there you have it: According to Hitwise, web 2.0 visitors are equally gender split and in the magic demographic of 18-35 – these are the cool people hanging around the drinks making all the noise – whilst web 2.0 content contributors are male, over 35 and desperately trying to impress everyone with cool stuff. More Twiglets, anyone?