We know all about user-generated content, masses of users contributing to burgeoning Web corpus. It’s a manifestation of Web 2.0, the participatory Net, which companies like Google (YouTube), Yahoo (Flickr), Fox (MySpace), etc. are feasting on. In parallel, users are contributing a potentially far more lucrative Web currency–metadata about themselves. It’s the currency that will help Facebook grow into its $15 billion valuation. In addition, users are also contributing structured (meta) data about data, which will help the semantic Web to flower.

comScore, a leader in measuring the digital world, today released a study of UK traffic in July to a selection of leading social networking sites.

Web traffic to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210 percent year over year in December (see Table 1). The overall unique audience growth to these online newspapers was 9 percent year over year. Unique visitors to blog pages accounted for 13 percent of their December 2006 Web traffic, up 9 percentage points from 4 percent in December 2005.

The number of Americans who cited the internet as their primary source of campaign news in 2006 doubled since the last mid-term election.  Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002. 

Hitwise reports that Search Engines continue to be the predominant source for visits to the Lifestyle - Politics category, sending 28.17 percent for the week ending November 4, 2006. Among the websites within the Computers and Internet - Search Engines category, Google sent 18.74 percent of visits to the Politics category followed by Yahoo! Search with 4.73 percent and then Ask.com with 1.48 percent of visits for the week ending November 4, 2006.