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Information Is Not Knowledge: Six Months of the Nonprofit NetMeter
By Michael C. Gilbert, October 1998
As regular readers of the web edition of Nonprofit Online News will know, every day we feature two numbers at the bottom of the news: the number of web sites with the word "nonprofit" indexed by the AltaVista web crawler and the number of news articles with the word "nonprofit" indexed by Excite's NewsTracker.
After six months,we have collected an enormous pile of data. But it is time to ask: Have we learned anything interesting about nonprofit organizations online? The honest answer is: No, not really.
Let's look at the web site results first. For the first two months, the number of web sites indexed with the word "nonprofit" by Altavista hovered around 230,000 to 240,000. Then, for the next four months, the results hovered around 260,000 to 280,000 sites. There were only four significant variations from these results. Twice the numbers dipped to around 170,000 for a few days and twice they dipped to around 200,000.
What can we conclude? I think that if we're learning anything, we're learning much more about Altavista's web crawler than we are about nonprofit activity online. If, after looking at the chart of our results, you have any other ideas, I hope you'll consider sharing them.
Let's turn our attention to the other data: the number of news stories with the word "nonprofit" indexed by Excite's NewsTracker. They do not appear to be as much pure artifact as the web search numbers do.
The number of news stories averaged about 260, but they varied much more than the number of web sites. There was a peak in mid May of nearly 450 stories and a trough in mid September of about 180. There is a gentle slope up and then down over the course of the Summer months, reflecting the common wisdom that nonprofits get more coverage when the news is typically a little slower.
But there is not much to go on here. We don't have records of what was in these news stories. Nor do we know what else was happening at the times of high or low results. Again, if our readers have any theories, I hope you will be bold enough to speculate along with us.
We're going to continue with the idea of a Nonprofit NetMeter. It may be that the most interesting results will appear over much longer periods of time. But other measurements are certainly needed. Some of the one's we're consider are: the number of messages posted to the nonprofit mailing lists and newsgroups of record, the number of .org domain names registered, the number of nonprofit web sites registered with sites such as Action Without Borders, and the number of web sites returned by other search engines. We may also dig more deeply into the content of some of our search results and we may consider changing our search terms.
I'm very interested in your feedback and ideas!
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