Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, has had a phenomenal few years. It is by far the world’s most popular online encyclopedia. Protecting an online profile is vital to any website such as Wikipedia, because its loyal fan base may abandon it in droves if it is seen to make any major mistakes, either with its content or its technology.

Most of the bad press Wikipedia has received has been on account of the negative perception of its ‘freely sourced’ content, and the fact that anybody can add or edit articles, with only the most basic monitoring of uploaded content in operation. Editing poor content on Wikipedia is largely the job of its large online community, many members of which spend their days trawling its content to find errors, and correcting them. The bias of some articles has led to some negative media coverage and criticism of Wikipedia, with some claiming the structure of Wikipedia allows some subjects to be biased to the extent of being inaccurate, or not accurately or comprehensively sourcing information and images. In light of this, many colleges and universities have banned the use of Wikipedia in any academic function except casual reading.

Freedom of Knowledge

Nonetheless, Wikipedia generally has good press at is is seen as being part of a movement to ‘democratize’ information, making it free and available to all. Wikipedia recently came out in ardent opposition to recent American anti – piracy laws, and effected a ‘blackout’ of its English pages for a 24 hour period. Many came out in support of Wikipedia’s ‘blackout’ strategy. Wikipedia’s growth over the years can be best shown in the form of statistics and graphs:

Current article count (English): 3,860,798+
Estimated number of words (English): 2,100,000,000+

This graph shows the general increase in the number of articles on the English Wikipedia over the years 2001 – ’12.

This is a visual representation of Wikipedia’s size, if its english articles were compiled into a physical collection. The size of this collection would, by now, be far too big for anybody to read in a lifetime.

Forty years back, in October 1971, the first email was sent. The email was sent between two computers separated by a distance of 1 meter and presumably contained a test message (like ‘QWERTY’). Since then, trillions of messages have been sent over the web and email is today the primary mode of communication for a lot of us. So how many emails are being sent per day?

Number of emails sent per day in 2009 : 247 billion
Number of emails sent per day in 2010 : 294 billion

So how many emails will get sent on a daily basis in 2011? While there are no confirmed reports on this as yet, according to the Radicati group, the number of worldwide email accounts will increase from 3.146 billion in 2011 to 4.087 billion in 2015. Roughly one-fourth of this is expected to be corporate accounts. And these corporate users alone are expected to send 33 emails per day (per user). This average number is expected to rise to 41 emails by 2015.

It has barely been weeks since Google launched their new social network – the Google+. Despite its earlier failures at getting their social strategy right, Google appears to have cracked the social code this time around. The company has already announced the registration of 10 million members – a far cry from the 750 million users that throng Facebook, but still a huge base considering that the service is very much in invite-only mode and is limited primarily among the geeks in the Silicon valley and other major cities.

But 10 million is still a large enough number to make a general picture of what the social network now looks like. Thanks to work from FindPeopleOnPlus, here find the most important data about the demographics of Google Plus.

First, view the Gender Distribution on Google+
Read more »

Where do the most number of gamers on Facebook come from in the United States? A study conducted by AdParlor looked into data gathered from hundreds of advertising campaigns to extrapolate the numbers for the entire Facebook audience. Here are the top ten states and the number of gamers that each of these states contribute

1. California : 159,841 (17.00%)
2. Texas : 119,906 (12.75%)
3. Florida : 108,963 (11.59%)
4. New York : 101,642 (10.81%)
5. Ohio : 75,768 (8.05%)
6. Pennsylvania : 73,420 (7.81%)
7. Illinois : 72,306 (7.69%)
8. Michigan : 68,683 (7.30%)
9. Georgia : 57,398 (6.20%)
10. North Carolina : 56,895 (6.05%)

Here are some more highlights from the study:

• The states of California, Texas, Florida, and New York together account for roughly 30% of all US game players.
• The highest ratio of game players to state population comes from the State of Wyoming
• The highest ratio of game players to city population comes from St. Louis, Orlando, Salt Lake City, Dayton, and Pompano Beach
• Despite a population of almost 650,000 – the city of Boston only brought in 1,792 gamers

Google has an overwhelming presence on the internet and it is very unlikely that any of us remains untouched by their service yet. Even if you do not use their search engine, it is likely that you read blogs on blogspot, watch videos on YouTube, or read emails on Gmail. Despite this massive presence, do you know that Google has only tracked 0.004% of all data that constitutes the internet? Read on

Total number of people using the internet : 1.9 billion
42% of these users are from Asia
Total volume of data on the internet today : 5 million terabytes
Data volume indexed by Google : 200 terabytes (0.004%)
Total number of domain registrations : 193 million
46% of these domains are .com

Where does all this unindexed Google data lie? My assumption is that a good chunk of them must be secured information – email, document attachments,etc. But again, these alone cannot be 99.994% of the internet. What are your thoughts?

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook launching their own email service next week. The buzz is already so high that the new “Facebook Mail” is touted to be the Gmail-killer. With Google omnipresent in our internet lives, it may be easily assumed that Gmail is the biggest email service provider at present and the tag “Gmail-killer” for Facebook’s email service could make it look like the service could immediately topple Gmail to get to the top of the table.

But the ground reality is pretty different. Gmail is not the biggest email service provider yet. It never was. A post here on Tech Crunchies last year put Gmail at number 5 in the American market. How are things now? Here are the numbers

1. Yahoo Mail : 72.8 million
2. Hotmail : 48.5 million
3. Gmail : 25.1 million
4. Inbox.com : 7.4 million
5. Me.com : 3.1 million
6. Outlook.com : 1.9 million

Interestingly, the study does not include MySpace and AOL Mail in the list. Ironically, these two services were at number 2 & 4 respectively in the list made last year. Wonder what happened to them!

A couple of years back, people “networked” with friends on Facebook and “updated their status” over Twitter. At least, that was the original idea that Twitter was built upon. However, as usage as proliferated, the use-case scenarios have changed too. Today, Facebook is the network people use more for status-updates. Twitter has mostly become a thought-sharing or link-sharing service.

So what does this mean to social network access from mobile phones. As a status update tool, Facebook today finds more usage among the mobile phone population than Twitter. That, along with the fact that Facebook enjoys a user base of over 500 million, has meant that Facebook is used by close to twice the number of mobile phone users as Twitter. Here is the % of mobile phone users accessing the various popular social networks

Facebook : 52%
Twitter : 24%
FourSquare : 5%
MySpace : 2%

United States has the largest number of users on Facebook – the world’s largest social network. Yet, the US is not even in the top 10 list when it comes to the list of countries with the heaviest social networkers. A recent study from Comscore has shown that Russia leads the world when it comes to social network engagement and Yandex, the country’s top social network is the place where most Russians hang out. Only two countries from the English speaking world are in the top 10 and that’s UK and Canada. Speak about the opportunities available for the vernacular networks.

Here are the top 10 countries ranked on the basis of the average number of hours spent per visitor per month.

1. Russia : 9.8
2. Israel : 9.2
3. Turkey : 7.6
4. UK : 7.3
5. Philippines : 6.2
6. Canada : 5.8
7. Indonesia : 5.3
8. Finland : 5.0
9. Spain : 5.0
10. Puerto Rico : 4.9

Worldwide : 4.5

Over the past one year, location sharing services have proliferated quite a bit – at least in parts of United States and Europe. Services such as FourSquare and Gowalla primarily incentivize people for frequently “checking into” locations by offering them “badges“. While this may appear to be a futile exercise at the outset, companies are also realizing the impact that such services can have on the businesses. For example, some businesses offer discounts to the ‘Mayor‘ on FourSquare – a badge given to the user who has checked in the highest number of times thus incentivizing people to check in more often. Facebook has recently come up with their own location sharing service that is not only good for users to check out friends in the neighborhood, but also helps in finding deals at businesses in the vicinity.

A recent study by Pew has summarized the user demographics of services like FourSquare and Gowalla that you can find below. All numbers are as percentage of internet users in the United States

Gender
Male : 6%
Female : 3%

Race
White : 3%
Black : 5%
Hispanic : 10%

Age
18-29 : 8%
30-49 : 4%
50-64 : 2%
65+ : 1%

Annual Household Income
< $30,000 : 3%
$30,000 – $49,999 : 6%
$50,000-$74,999 : 6%
$75,000+ : 4%

Education
Less than High School : 5%
High School : 3%
Some college : 4%
College + : 5%

Despite all the buzz around “new media“, the tried and tested forms of online marketing still remain the most popular channels to reach the consumers. A recent study by market research firm Lyris showed that email marketing was still by far the most popular online marketing channel among corporates; followed by the company website. Sorry, mobile marketing has still not caught on and just around 22% of those surveyed having responded positively about having used it.

Here are the various online marketing channels and their popularity in terms of the percentage marketers who used it.

Email Marketing : 97%
Company website : 96%
Social media marketing : 82%
Search Engine Optimization : 79%
Search Engine Marketing : 72%
Mobile Markating : 22%

Does it surprise anyone that companies do not seem to be using SEO as much as one may have imagined? Or is it that SEO has become too expensive and unreliable compared to Social media marketing?