Don't ask me for details, but I have in front of me a media industry report that focuses exclusively on "social networking".

Among children and teens (age 9 to 17), Wikipedia ranks as the #4 "social networking" website visited.

Here's the saving grace, though -- only 13% say they visit it at least once a week. More than 3x that visit MySpace that often.

Greg

Hey, you're onto something there, Greg.

Where is the value in Wikipedia? Is it in the content? No, the content is questionable, free (and therefore without value) and unpredictable. Nobody's going to buy the content.

I believe that the value is in the community base, which is demographically young, well-educated, "techie" and probably has (or will have) a lot of disposable income.

The edit histories of users are a pretty easy indicator of what people will be interested in buying: Got a set of WWI replica tanks to sell? Who edits those articles? That's got to be searchable. What about a baroque opera recording? You've got your potential buyers right in the article histories...

I've already seen "scraper" sites that do just this to attract traffic for other products. All you have to do is to paste the content onto the page and voilà!

So, when the chumps finally realize that they've been had and have actually created a marketing tool to get even more ads, spam and other such things pumped down their throats, it won't surprise me at all....

"well-educated"?

as in "grew up in a 30-foot hole in the ground, and don't know their ass from it"?

Jon

Well, from a marketing tool's standpoint, they don't care of such people can actually think or not...They just want them to buy whatever it is that they're trying to sell.