Ironic secret: I don’t really like most wikis, though that’s probably putting it too strongly. Ironic because I love both Wikipedia (and, especially, collabularies), but I grit my teeth pretty much every time I hear somebody suggest we need another wiki.

Putting it tersely: if wikis are so great, why do we need more than one of them?

I think my concern is that wikis appear to depend on either very large or very, very active communities. Critical mass doesn’t come easily, and just because anybody in the world can edit a page, doesn’t mean they will.

Take the World66 Denver travel guide as an example. The site doesn’t have much more than a link to the slightly more informative Wikitravel page for Denver, and even that falls far short of the possibility or promise. Who’s contributing to these things, and why? Who would want to?

Jenny’s thoughts on the argument from Internet Librarian 2005 (yeah, a year ago) address the rather specific issue of Open Internet Librarian Blog and the Internet Librarian Wiki (both now abandoned). Thing is, the real gem in her post was her suggestion that “the tool that ended up working the best in this situation was Technorati. It was the one spot [where] everything was pulled together.”

And that’s where I think Josh Porter’s thoughts fit in: “personal value precedes network value.” That is…

…each person on the network needs to find value for themselves before they can contribute value to the network.

Blogs are intensely personal, wikis less so. Issues of “ownership” and our definition of “personal” all play a larger role online that might have previously been imagined. One of the mistakes of Web 2.0 is the notion that users will generate content for free. Money may not be the issue, but “value” is.

Perhaps the pre-burst notions of the attention economy were correct, or maybe something else is at work. But even without an economic theory to explain it, none of us has ever heard of a “wikier,” even as the world appears overrun by bloggers. (“Wikipedians” are the exception that proves the rule.)

Perhaps I cringe at any suggestion to create a new wiki because I wonder why that content can’t be published on an existing wiki. Perhaps I cringe because I wonder if the proprietary motivation to create a new wiki is itself in conflict with the community nature of wikis. Perhaps anybody can have a blog, but it seems to take a whole community to raise a wiki.

community, critical mass, rant, wiki, wikipedia, wikis

Rebecca Lieb reports for ClickZ Stats that, based on US Census data (report), most Americans have PCs and web access:

Sixty-two million U.S. households, or 55 percent of American homes, had a Web-connected computer in 2003, according to just-released U.S. Census data. That’s up from 50 percent in 2001, and more than triple 1997’s 18 percent figure.

Home Web use continues to skew toward more affluent, younger and educated demographics. Both computer ownership and Web use are lower in households comprised of seniors, among blacks and Hispanics and among households comprised of people with less than a high school education.

Conversely, nearly all households earning over $100,000 — 95 percent — own at least one computer, and 92 percent are online. In homes earning under $40,000, the online figure plummets to 41 percent.

Children have benefited enormously from the growth of home computing. In 1993, only 32 percent of children had access to a computer at home. In 2003, 76 percent of school aged children had access to a home computer, and 83 percent of America’s 57 million schoolchildren used a PC at school. Again, these figures skew when ethnic and economic criteria are applied.

In 1997, only 7 percent of adults said they used the Web to get news, weather and spots. That figure spiked to 40 percent in 2003. Those seeking government or health information grew to 33 percent from 12 percent in 1997, and over half (55 percent) used the Web for e-mail and instant messaging, up from 12 percent 10 years earlier. Eighteen percent banked online; 12 percent looked for a job; nearly half sought product and/or service information and 32 percent purchased online, a radical jump over 2.1 percent in 1993.

Of the 45 percent of households without Web access in 2003, the most common reasons given were: “don’t need it/not interested (39 percent); and costs too much” or “no computer/computer inadequate” (each 23 percent). Two percent cited Web access elsewhere. Issues of privacy, child safety and security concerns were rarely cited, each accounting for only one percent of the reasons.

Homes in the West are the most wired at 67 percent, closely followed by the Northeast and Midwest. Southern households had the lowest percentage of online computers at 52 percent.

us census, census, internet usage, statistics, usage statistics, internet access, access, information age, networked information, critical mass, the coming information age

That headline might seem a little late among the folks reading this. But we’re all geeks, and if not geeks, then at least regular computer users. Regular computer users, however, are a minority. Worldwide, only around 500 million people have internet access, and fewer than 100 million people in the US have internet access at home. With populations of over 6 billion and 300 million respectively, there’s clearly a lot of growth potential.

Truth is, computers are the poor cousins to phones and television in terms of market penetration. In the US, Nielsen estimates there are over 275 million people with TVs in their homes today, and the CTIA says there are over 180 million mobile phone users.

The market opportunity is clear, but I think our notions of what a “computer” is have to change. Yes, computers have been through a lot of changes in 20 some odd years, but they’re still very much the same. Some might say that cars are basically the same as they were 100 years ago because they all mostly run around of four wheels and be happy with it. But transportation has seen tremendous change. Computers as we know them don’t own the internet any more than cars own the road or railroad or bike trails or skies.

Email was the killer app that made people interconnect their networks, the web was the killer app that got 90+ million users online already. And those users are the critical mass that pushes the development of real web applications — applications that are starting to beat desktop apps at their own game and doing things that desktop apps can’t.

With this flowering age of web applications, the age of internet connected information devices is coming. But we need something different from the computers we’ve become accustomed to. We need a device that is designed to serve the 90 million Americans who have cell phones, but don’t appear to have their own computers or home internet access. We need a device that replaces TVs as the leading entertainment and news medium. Because the information age will have arrived when there’s a dozen kiosks in every mall hawking internet tablets and we see them lined up at Best Buy with differentiated models for the kitchen, living room, the kids rooms, and for camping.

Background: this post is grew out of some discussion at TeleRead, NoSheep, and here at MaisonBisson.

tags: access, change, change computers, computer, computing, critical mass, desktop apps, email, geek, geeks, information age, information system, internet, internet access, internet connected, killer app, market opportunity, network, paradigm shift, penetration, portable computing, web, web applications