Jul 4th, 2007 | Linguistics, Other Stuff, Robert Scoble, Technology, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments
Robert Scoble likes Google better than Microsoft (but not much) - and I have proof for that. He also holds his wife Maryam dearer than his company PodTech, but sadly she is outranked by Twitter and Apple. Ah, cruel World 2.0 capitalism.
How do I know? Simple, I have a list of 1,587 posts with 273,994 running words of text that Mr. Scoble has produced between 2 Aug 2006 and 4 Jul 2007. That translates into 18,362 sentences. An average Scoble blog entry has a length of 172.6 words, with 14.9 words per sentence and an average word length of 3.8; all of which is fairly - deep breath - average for a blog.
All, except for the word count. It’s pretty impressive, especially when you consider that he’s been at it for almost 6 years (I believe he started in October 2001 - correct me if I’m wrong). That’s 69 months of blogging, which translates into an estimated staggering 1,65 million words. That would make him twice as productive as William Shakespeare, who (only) managed 884,647 words in his entire lifetime, though in all fairness it has to be noted that Mr. Scoble didn’t have to write all that with a quill pen.
And here are his favorite nouns, by frequency (the number after the word indicates how often in occurs).
1 Google 1015
2 blog 779
3 Microsoft 776
4 people 688
5 video 503
6 stuff 393
7 things 365
8 something 357
9 way 354
10 Web 343
11 lot 322
12 today 320
13 time 301
14 thing 290
15 link 280
16 Apple 267
17 week 259
18 Search 258
19 world 256
20 post 245
21 videos 229
22 bloggers 220
23 interview 217
24 Twitter 215
25 blogs 213
26 company 206
27 one 199
28 Maryam 199
29 update 197
30 day 195
31 fun 193
32 someone 192
33 news 190
34 team 185
35 companies 178
36 lots 177
37 iPhone 175
38 service 172
39 Steve 171
40 show 171
41 site 170
42 TechMeme 169
43 business 165
44 phone 160
45 Windows 159
46 conference 158
47 year 158
48 PodTech 153
49 minutes 153
50 developers 151
Aug 16th, 2006 | Other Stuff, Technology, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment
Although this article is now two weeks old, I still think you should throw a glance at it if you haven’t already. The Wall Street Journal explores web stardom (bloggers, YouTube comedians, Flickr photographers, podcasters) and comes up with a list of “cewebrities” who earn their living by producing content. If you scan the list, one of the most consistent (and, in my opinion, unsurprising) characteristics of these individuals is that they profit from producing content, but they do not sell content. This is a bitter pill to swallow for a large part of the traditional media industry. They have tried in vain to somehow condition internet users to pay for professionally produced content for about a decade now - as far as I can see there are still no major success stories. And now they are being outflanked by non-professionals (and by that I mean non-incorporates) who aren’t even making an effort to sell the content they produce, but prefer to market themselves (and their connectedness) instead, mostly through advertising. Though “friends” on MySpace are hardly the equavalent of real-world friends, having direct communicative access to roughly a million people should still translate into some very real marketing potential. I believe what further accellerates this development is that it is so much easier for individuals to build an image-based business than it is for corporations to sell content. Consumers see through the information-as-a-packaged-product analogy and are literally not buying it. And while the lack of a secure and ubiquitous micropayment system and the fact that many pay-for-content schemes are still too focused on facilitating lock-in are both part of the problem, the problem itself is far greater. The cost of media-transmitted entertainment and information for the consumer has always been closely tied to the cost of its distribution. Those costs have been reduced almost to zero (at least while everyone pays for their own internet access) and the consumer knows it. The only way to persuade him that your content is still worth paying for is to convince that it is better than what he can get elsewhere. And because better increasingly means 1) less conventional, 2) less streamlined and 3) more personal and immediate, mass-produced content is losing out. Scarceity - your content being available only to a select few - is no longer a selling point. Proliferation drives relevance: if what you produce is not being read, watched or heard by enough people it will not be relevant, nevermind selling anything. Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which people actually stopped to pirate music and movies. Would they simply start to buy all that content or would they turn to other content producers? My money is on the latter, not because blogs are “better” than the New York Times, or YouTube “better” than Hollywood movies (in fact, the comparison seems surreal, at least at this point), but because you simply don’t buy what you don’t know. The strong belief of traditional media companies that their product is simply “better” reveals a) that they lack in-depth knowledge of the options available and b) they erroneously assume that consumers know this, believe it, or care.
