Election Stats. !

The CNN site that some of us watched last night received 27 million unique visitors yesterday.

More than five times their normal daily traffic.

Those visitors generated 276 million page views.


Staggering.


via TechCrunch via Twitter

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On American Politics, the Internet and Twitter.

You will remember some months ago I commented upon the way in which Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were using Twitter to pursue their political objectives. I followed them they followed me.

Hilary is no longer as involved but Barack continues to lead the way in his use of technology.
Take a look at his web site.

Here is a politician who is really making every effort to connect and stay connected with his electorate in the United States, and with admirers world wide.

Looking at his web site we see a complete mastery of the internet as a medium for mass communication. This election campaign and his digital presence has raised the bar for politicians everywhere. He has achieved a world wide ambient presence.

On his web site, the home page is easily navigable, neat and clearly laid out. The navigation bar guides or leads visitors to information quickly and elegantly.

Casual and determined browsers are invited via rollovers to learn about Barack and his team and to discover what he thinks about the major issues. Users are offered a rich choice of Barack media sources (wallpapers, music and the like) and direct links to all the different types of people who have chosen to support Barrack. Additionally the site provides a Blog, a store for Barack merchandising and links to local Barack websites in each American state. And as you might expect there are opportunities for the faithful to contribute financially.

There is a list of things to do, including a reminder to register to vote (lets face it Americans need help in coming to terms with Democracy). There are videos, news articles, messages to Hilary's supporters and an astonishing list called Obama Everywhere.

Obama Everywhere provides links to sixteen yes sixteen places on the Internet where Barack can make his presence felt ..... worldwide.
So comprehensive is this list that I am copying it here.

Obama can be found on

Facebook, MySpace, You Tube, 

Flickr, Digg, Twitter, Eventful, 

Linkedin, BlackPlanet, Faithbase, 

Eons, Glee, MiGente, MyBatanga, AsiaAve 

and 

DNC Partybuilder.

This man is connected! (he even has his own app on the iPhone).

__________________________________________________

Knowing that Number Ten Downing Street can be found on Twitter I thought I'd have a little look round and explore the world of political tweets.

Consider the statistics (as of 6/10/08)

Plaid Cymru are on Twitter with 35 followers.
The Labour party are on Twitter with 133 followers.
The Liberal Democrats are on Twitter with 542 followers.
The Conservative Party is on Twitter with 606 followers.


Ten Downing Street is on Twitter, with 5,104 followers.
The White House is on Twitter with 1,174 followers

McCain is on Twitter with 2,451 followers.
Obama is on Twitter with 92,256 followers.

Note John McCain also has a web site, but in my opinion it's not a slick as the Obama offering.
Take a look and see what you think.

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On Google Chrome.

I've not looked at Google Chrome yet (I just love my Mac), but it's arrival on Tuesday has resulted in a torrent of speculation, observation and hysteria.

Yes we might be seeing the next chapter in the Browser Wars, but right now Google chrome is a new untested product. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera have the browser market covered. The new Google product will have to be good to make its presence felt.

Even now with Firefox seeming to be the browser of choice for many of my colleagues, it is still only used by less than twenty percent of internet users.

Somehow I can't see Chrome cutting up that market. Despite that I've signed up with Google to be informed when Chrome for the Mac appears, just in case.


As is so often the case with Google the user agreement paper work for Chrome wasn't quite correct.

More food for thought.

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On Plagiarism

Here is a curiously interesting story that requires a little thought and action.

BBC education reporter Sean Couglan notes that the Higher Education Authority and JISC have established the Academy JISC Academic Integrity Service "to help promote a culture of academic integrity in UK Higher Education"

It would appear that they face a monumental task.

"A study found only 143 students caught cheating were expelled out of
9,200 cases - despite almost all universities threatening expulsion as
a sanction."

I guess that tells us that the sanction isn't working.

"despite the repeated warnings to students not to cheat by using
someone else's work, those caught are unlikely to face particularly
severe penalties.

More than 98% of students caught cheating were allowed to stay
at their university - even though some of these students had been
caught before."

Perhaps more disturbing is the observation that

"the recorded level of plagiarism among postgraduate students was so
much higher than the recorded level among undergraduate student,"

It seems that the colleges face a problem.

Plagiarism can and is being detected.

The question is what should be done with the plagiarists?

On Politics and Web 2.0.

I see that Gordon Brown, our Prime Minister is taking an interest in Web 2.0 technologies.

Here on the Downing Street Channel he's posted a video, launching a sort of Prime Minister's Question Time on the Internet.

Members of the public can leave a question for Gordon, between 30 seconds and 1 minute long with "no party political content"!
Submissions must be made by June 21st.

We are invited to "come back soon to vote on your favourites". Then having considered the "wisdom of the masses"
Gordon will answer the top voted questions on YouTube sometime towards the end of June.

It's not exactly what you could call instant interactivity, but it's a start.
I think it's quite an interesting and brave experiment.

Looking at the video on YouTube, away from the Downing Street Channel I see that Gordon's introduction has been viewed 13,230 times. That's not bad for a 40 second video clip that was posted barely three days ago.

I also notice that the channel has 3,725 subscribers, while webcameronuk has 846 subscribers.

As you might expect mainstream media has picked up on the story, here, here and here.
Apparently several thousand people have already submitted questions.


PS Gordon already has a presence on YouTube. You can sing along here.

More On Coffee

I've had an email from Joffrey's thanking me for participating in their blogging for free coffee promotion.

They tell me that my coffee is on the way. I hope so because this BBC report suggests that drinking coffee might have benefits for me.

It seems that

"Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body"

You can read an abstract of the original paper here

Not that I need an excuse to drink coffee.

On Facebook Statistics

Here's an interesting web site / company.

Adonomics an open analytics and advertising platform for Facebook
(Note, they state that their site is in no way affiliated with Facebook)

It's well worth going to explore this site which contains a weath of statistics and information about applications in Facebook.

Their leaderboard shows the total (world wide) numbers of users of particular facebook apps. The board shows the total number of installs per application, the number of active users of an application and the percentage of active users.

Their charts page shows a top 25 list of facebook application companies, clicking on the company name provides a list of applications and a to show daily active users graphed over time.
A superficial examination of random graphs reveals that many of these apps have declining user numbers.
Go see for yourself.

Adonomics offer their services to application developers, and provide a Marketplace for application sellers.

Those of us who are curious about Facebook, its users and its applications can find much to explore here.

On Social Network Fatigue

Anyone who is interested in the world of social networking reads Mashable the social networking news blog. They point at new applications, highlight industry news and provide gossip.

This recent article caught my eye and reminded me that it is time for me to check out the Welsh Facebook stats.

Writing for The Register, Chris Wiliams suggests that people are bored of social networks. Here is the heart of his argument.

"it seems .... that a delayed Friends Reunited (remember that?) effect is kicking in.

When Friends Reunited enjoyed its "phenomenal" growth period people would join, log in maybe a dozen times, catch up with those class mates they wanted to, then forget about it.

On Facebook behaviour seems much the same; join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted.

Similarly, once the novelty of MySpace wears off, most people only stop by to check out bands or watch videos."

While these observations reflect what many of us think, it appears that the facts are beginning to confirm what we know.
(The raw figures can be found at Creative Capital)

I wonder if these figures are reflected by users of social networks in Wales?
Can I find out?

On the Hair at the End of the Tail

It's been a month since I last posted so it's time to return to the blog with a review of last year.

According to Google Analytics between January 1st 2007 and January 1st 2008, On a Hill received 2,637 visits from 2,207 absolute unique visitors, who between them made 3,957 page views.

My guess is that in the scheme of things that's pretty pathetic, but the statistic makes me smile.
Whether any of my visitors learned anything from On a Hill remains a mystery.
I hope they did.
I on the other hand have gained and learnt much from maintaining this simple blog.

During the last year I made 93 posts and visitors made 24 comments.

The ten most visited pages in order of popularity are listed below.

1. In search of gradatim ferociter
2. Gradatim ferociter
3. On deleting Facebook
4. On Facebook, students and porn
5. On UCAS, plagiarism and pyjamas
6. Gradtim ferociter, the search goes on
7. Problems with Facebook
8. On Facebook Fridays
9. Notes on Facebook
10. On email addiction and statistics

As is ever the case the subject about which I and the world know least remains the most popular. It might be time for me to make another post about Blue Origin and it's enigmatic motto!

45% of my visitors used Firefox, 45% Internet Explorer, and 6% Safari, with the remaining few percent using Opera, Netscape, Camino, Blazer and the curiously named HTC-8100.

72% of my visitors used Windows as an operating system, 24% used Mac, 2% Linux, the rest used AIX, PalmOS, Playstation Portable, SunOS and iPhone.

Visitors came from 96 separate sources with 70% coming via Google, and much smaller percentages of visitors arriving directly from blogger, sitemeter, technorati, computing research at glamorgan, phdweblogs and similar sites.

Geographically America provided the most visitors, followed closely by Europe. Asia, Oceania and Africa followed a long way behind. The figures show that very few visitors came here from South America (I guess that's a language thing) and very very few from Africa which remains the dark continent on my map of visits. The stats show one visit from Aghanistan! Perhaps I should add one of those map widgets to the blog.

It's worth noting that the visitors from the smaller traffic sources (ie everyone except Google) stayed longer and visited more pages per visit.

I guess they really wanted to be here and didn't arrive by accident.

How did you get here?

Web 2.0 in the local news.

Compare and contrast these two articles.

In the first the BBC reported on a survey which suggests that in the UK

"233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees "wasting time" on social networking."

In the same article the BBC helpfully points to research undertaken at Sheffield Hallam University wondering whether social networking is changing the face of friendship. They find that

"Online social networks tend to be far larger than their real-life counterparts, but online users say they have about the same number of close friends as the real-life average person."

In the second article the BBC report that

"Three council workers have lost their jobs for spending too long on the internet auction site eBay. One was sacked and two resigned after managers at Neath Port Talbot Council found some staff were spending up to two hours a day on the website."

Against this sort of background I cannot help but wonder whether the rush to integrate social networking sites with PLEs is sensible.

On deleting facebook

As my cynicism about facebook grows I have been so pleased to come across this post from Brian Heys writing about "How to delete your facebook account".
(update 18.01.08 I'm not certain this link works anymore)

Good advice, but remember should you decide to close your facebook, it is deactivated; which I guess means that all your data, your profile, etc. etc. will be preserved for when you realise the folly of your ways and want your friends back.
It will also be preserved for facebook to access as they see fit.

I'm not certain if deactivating an account is the same as removing user content?
Reading the terms of use we discover that....

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Returning to the book to reactivate a dormant account should be easy.
I might try deactivating my account and returning to see what happens.

I wonder do Facebook include dormant accounts in their user numbers?
Remember the doubts about Second Life statistics?

Update. 14.02.08.
Facebook introduce choice between deactivation and deletion

On statistics (again!)

Lee Le Fever at Common Craft Blog (the people that brought us the outstanding RSS in Plain English and Wikis in Plain English videos) points at some interesting statistics produced by Harris Interactive for Wet Paint an American wiki company.

"16% of the US online population is familiar with what a wiki is.
Even if you just look at the online trendsetters (18-34 year olds), only 27% of those online users are familiar with wikis.
Blogs, which have universal awareness among nearly anyone reading this post, are only familiar to 35% of online users. And familiarity with social networks as a category still ranks below that of online forums at 28% and 35% respectfully.
For context, consider that 76% of the same population know of search engines and 97% of toilet paper."

These figures are confusing.

Given the hype and publicity around wikipedia, how is it that the wiki recognition figure is so low?
How can it be that only 76% of the same population know of search engines?
What context does that provide?

My informal observations of students and academics confirm what Lee suggests.

"We're making assumptions about what people understand about our online world. There is more misunderstanding than understanding and more confusion than solution."

Where are the digital natives?
Not in my college!

On Danah, Facebook and Wales.

Danah at apophenia has written an excellent blog essay, (a rough work in progress paper) which she has called "Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace."

Its an excellent read, far better than many of the press articles describing its contents.

Regular readers of Danah's blog are I think aware of the way she works. She finds her own observations "disconcerting". It is interesting to note how many of those who commented on her thoughts, choose to criticise her rather than her observations which suggest that

"Hegemonic American teens (i.e. middle/upper class, college bound teens from upwards mobile or well off families) are all on or switching to Facebook. Marginalized teens, teens from poorer or less educated backgrounds, subculturally-identified teens, and other non-hegemonic teens continue to be drawn to MySpace. A class division has emerged and it is playing out in the aesthetics, the kinds of advertising, and the policy decisions being made."

I need time to think about her observations as I'm not certain how her theories might translate to the UK, or to Wales. I'm not convinced that the urge to Facebook or MySpace is as central to UK student life as it is in America, but it is growing. In the last week I've noticed several relatively prominent Welsh bloggers writing about the use of Facebook by politicians (locally and nationally) and by journalists seeking copy.

Here are a set of notes made by a blogger who heard Danah speak at Harvard.
The blog provides a good example of how a blog can be used to present notes taken at a lecture, seminar or tutorial.

Out of curiosity I've explored Facebook this morning and looked at the regional and college statistics for Wales. These figures are correct as of today.

The WALES network has 65,952 members.

In hierarchical order the college networks (in Wales) have the following numbers of members.

Cardiff, 15,104
Swansea, 6,447
Aber, 5,995
Bangor, 4,145
Uni Glam, 2,243
UW Institute Cardiff, 1,653
UW Newport, 716
Swansea IHE, 481
Lampeter, 469
Trinity, 333
RW College of Music and Drama, 332
NEWI, 356

A total of 38,274 facebook memberships.
(How many students are there in Wales?)
(How old are these networks?)

To make sense of these figures, some statistical work will be required to show the number of facebook memberships as a percentage of the student population of each of the colleges, as we are not really comparing like with like here. (I suspect that Cardiff on Facebook includes the College of Medicine.)

I wonder if I can find similar figures for Bebo or MySpace?

On email, addiction and statistics.

A poll by ICM research (prepared for Nasstar) presents some new statistics about email use in the UK. It appears that up to half of us depend upon email or are addicted to email.
I'm really not certain that the survey shows evidence of email addiction, but it makes for a good headline and who am I to criticise how the BBC might use language?

41% of teenagers indicated that they were reliant on email
50% of 25 - 34 year olds indicated that they were reliant on email
44% of 35 - 44 year olds indicated that they were reliant on email

I can't locate full set of figures but the press release suggests that email usage is lowest in Wales with only 34% of people saying that email was vital to them, as compared to 43% of people in the South East. No surprises there, just a little more evidence of the growing digital divide in our country.

These dependency figures probably say something about digital natives.
Some might argue that teenagers as digital natives don't send emails, I don't think the average teenager has much need to send emails. Communication between teenagers is far more likely in the form of short texts, instant messages, or twitter like communiques within social networking sites.

The 25 - 34 year olds are more likely to be in the sort of environments where emails are essential for work and business. In fact I suspect they may well be using email in addition to other methods of "electronic communication".

As is ever the case statistics never tell us the whole story.

On "No More Jam"

Back in March the BBC took the decision to suspend BBC Jam its online interactive learning service for 5 to 16 year olds. It was said that Jam had 170,000 users.

At the time there was quite a fuss about the possible loss of jobs and loss of educational provision. I remember that in Scotland and Wales some comment was made about the loss of Welsh and Gaelic language resources. Commercial providers of online interactive learning had complained to the European Commission and the BBC suspended production.

Seb Schmoller wrote to the BBC asking for further information under the Freedom of Information Act.

The data provides much food for thought. As Seb quite rightly states the killer fact is the extraordinarily low average weekly use per registered user. Jam may well have had 170,000 registered users, but they weren't really using the service provided, were they?

Once again we are faced with a set of statistics that show us how difficult / impossible it is to determine the use of an online service. We should also note that service providers who have access to meaningful statistics are reluctant to release all their data. Registered users doesn't mean what it says ........... all too often registered users are people (like me) who register (because we have to); have a look round; decide we don't like it and never go back again. Compare and contrast with the discussions about Second Life users, or the number of blogs in the world.

What was the budget for Jam? How did they spend it? Did it provide value for money?

As an ex provider of primary education (in another life) I found the graph of registered users by school year interesting and revealing. The peaks and troughs are quite telling. A peak at Year One, (why no Foundation Stage), a peak at Year Six (preparation for SATS in England or development of independent learning skills?), then an extraordinary decline as the children join the secondary school system. Jam just wasn't doing what it said on the jar.

The graph showing the number of unique users by week, although difficult to read shows troughs and peaks that presumably reflect the school year, the troughs clearly show holidays, suggesting that most Jam users came via schools. Not much evidence of independent out of school learning here.

For those of us in Wales, the preferred language stats might be of interest. Seven hundred and eighty one registered users declared their preferred language as being Welsh, that's 0.47%!
No registered users declared their preferred language as Gaelic.
(update 22.30 ......... apologies I've just realised Gaelic was not offered as a preferred language)

I'm no statistician.
Someone else can analyse those figures.

On Internet Use, Social Networking and Age

In their May press release Nielson/NetRatings tell us that 18% of online Britons are women aged between 18 and 34.

Looking at the graph, it appears that the split between male and female users of the internet is fairly equal, but in the over fifties more men than women are active online.

In the words of Nielson's chief analyst

"The Internet is no longer dominated by young male adults times have changed considerably and many will be surprised to see that women aged 18-34 are now the most prevalent group online and that a quarter of the online population is at least 50 years of age."

The BBC report on this story suggests that young women visit a variety of sites including those dedicated to fashion, family and lifestyle issues as well as social networking sites.
They're shopping!

I have to confess that I find the figures for the under 18s surprisingly low, or is my perception of internet use amongst teenagers wrong?

In the light of the Nielson data it might be interesting to examine the age profile for male and female users of social networking sites.
Rory Cellan-Jones writing for the BBC suggests that as a 40 something Technology Correspondent he found it difficult to find friends in MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Twitter. He concludes his article by deciding that he is too old to Twitter and too mature for My Space.

In the interests of research I have profiles in several social networking sites.
I have to agree with Rory.
I'm just too old and mature (and I'm older than him).

LOL

On the State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry has written another quarterly report on the State of the Live Web, with this change of title Technorati indicate that their work now includes all sorts of social media.

As ever it makes for interesting reading. The report is full of fascinating statistics.
Right now Technorati is tracking 70 million blogs, with 120,000 being created every day. No matter how you think about it that is an extraordinary figure.

I struggle as I am sure many do with visualising large numbers
Here's a page that shows one million dots, and here's a clock that counts out the seconds in a day.
Does that help you contemplate 70 million blogs?

Sifry notes that the rate of doubling of the blogosphere has slowed; and interestingly that the rate of posts created each day has also slowed. The report also suggests that "a significant number of people who are blogging are doing it during work hours."

I was also interested in the report comments about the adoption of tags. The number of people using tags is growing fast, by February 2007 35% of all posts tracked by Technorati used tags, with about 2.5 million blogs posting at least one tagged post.

I still can't but help wonder about dead, non active , abandoned or neglected blogs.
There must be many blogs just sitting out there in cyberspace, I presume that Technorati still counts them.

Those of you interested in the state of the UK blogosphere might be interested in this list at Modern Life, to my shame I don't read any of them regularly except for plasticbag.org.

I shall check them out over the next couple of days!

Counting Academics

Dysg points to statistics about Higher Education in Wales.
Readers of this blog might be interested to note that:-

"In 2005/06 there were 17,705 staff at Welsh publicly funded HEIs, 525 more than in 2004/05.

Cardiff University employed most staff (5,685), more than double the next largest - the University of Glamorgan (2,065), University of Wales Aberystwyth (2,015), University of Wales Bangor (1,830) and University of Wales Swansea (1,640).

Less than a half - 8,150 staff - were recorded as academic professionals."

Interesting, for every academic post there is at least one non academic.
I wonder would it be worth making such a comparison for FE, secondary or primary education.

Internet Inequality

Sarah Richards' report "Internet Inequality in Wales Update 2006" is now available from the Welsh Consumer Council. I mentioned it earlier in the week, but since then I've been able to read the original report. For those of us working / thinking / learning in Wales it makes for interesting reading.

• Data for March 2006 showed that 47% of Welsh homes had an Internet connection. In 1999 that figure was 10%.
• The likelihood of home connection is unsurprisingly still related to social class, 64% of ABC1s are connected 67% of C2DEs are not.
• Of particular relevance to us at Treforest is the low connection level in the Valleys, 40% as opposed to 53% in Cardiff. (I wonder how many of our students actually come from the valleys?)

The figures relating to students are curious. The report states :-

"Students are by far the most likely to personally use the Internet with 94% doing so compared to just 23% of people who are wholly retired or not working. Interestingly, only 72% of students have a home Internet connection but 94% personally use the Internet, suggesting that they use computers in locations outside the home and / or mobile technology instead of a home connection."

This raises all sorts of questions for HE planners.
(I wonder what the definition of home might be halls of residence, digs or real home address).

I suspect that these figures suggest that student Internet access is done from on campus, it would be interesting to discover just how much time students spend on line. Perhaps they are really not that connected!

This an excellent report, clearly and precisely written.

Kudos to the Welsh Consumer Council for reminding us that

"it is important to note that over half the population of Wales still do not use the Internet".

Those of us who access it daily would do well to reflect upon that.

Non Web Users

The BBC writes of the work of the Welsh Consumer Council today. This is obviously breaking news as I can't find the original report. (or my search skills are not as good as I'd like to think they are!).
15.02.07 The report is now available.

I don't think there is anything new in the report in which we are told that
"53% of all adults in Wales still do not have access to the Internet."........."at home, at work or in public spaces like libraries"

I believe that the population of Wales "in the 2001 census was 2,903,085, which has risen to 2,958,876 according to 2005 estimates."

A careful look at the figures does show a change since 2005, particularly in the Welsh valleys where the percentage of home Internet connections seems to have risen from 26% to 40%. The same figure for Cardiff has risen 5% to 53%.

Tellingly the report tells us that many of those not connected to the Web
"do not think being online was relevant to them or an important resource."

The Consumer Council advise that these figures show that public bodies should maintain face to face and telephone advice information systems.
No they don't.
Public bodies should maintain face to face and telephone advice information systems whatever the take up of Internet access.
There's a difference between being connected to the Internet and being able to use it.
The time has come to start considering how effectively those that are connected, use the available resources.