Jure Cuhalev

Image by carf via Flickr

Is content creation a problem at all? Countries in the emerging EMEA region have incredible growth and it’s just going to keep expanding.

 

Global content creation:

Ton to 25% of the web is new each time we index. 60 billion emails are sent per day.

Every day around 120.000 new blogs are created. 3.7millions photors are uploaded to Flickr. Around 11.000 hours are uploaded to YouTube.

 

BUT

Less than %1 of the offline creation in MENA is online.

 

Example: Arabic content

 

Online crawlable content:

Approximatly half of the turkish content (even though we have approx. 250% more Arabic language internet users)

Approx. 1% of the english content.

 

URLs per internet user:

20% of those per Turkish language users

8% of those for english language users

 

 

Why is there so little content?

 

• Internet user growth: Access infrastructure, Access pricing
• Content creation: eGov, education, users, business
• eCommerce development: advertising market, credit card penetration

 

These all need to be in a balance and without access to all these things it’s hard to have a healthy growth.

 

Possible strategies:

 

• Organized approaches: example – Google Booksearch. They partner with libraries, scan them and bring them online.
• Automated approaches: example – Google Translate
• User based approaches: example: Google Site Creator
• Community approaches: example: Wikipedia; MapMaker

Related posts:

1. Florence Devouard – Some thoughts on Wikimania/Wikipedia [#Wikimania 2008 notes]
2. Hoda Baraka – Education and the Wiki paradigm; a tug of war? [Wikimania 2008 notes]
3. Use of wikis for political participation > Three initiatives in Spain – Enric Senable Hidalgo [Wikimania 2008 notes]
4. Free Network Services – Benjamin Mako Hill [Wikimania 2008, notes]
5. Angela Beesley – Beyond encylopedias – The rest of the library [Wikimania 2008 notes]