I wonder what percentage of those shares aren't completely generic, how many actually add anything?<p>As a relatively late adopter of "social", I was disappointed to find that the vast majority of sharing seems to be raw repeating. No opinion or contribution, just a contextless spray of links - bookmark broadcasting.<p>It would be interesting to see how the level of contribution when sharing varies by site/topic.
I don't think your Facebook data is right. You're using the "total" count, which includes likes and comments, rather than just shares. While this does measure engagement, it isn't a measure of shares, which is what the data is marketed as. For example, you show 28k likes for the #1 story, but Facebook's data[1] says this:<p><pre><code> share_count: 7023
like_count: 14341
comment_count: 7328
total_count: 28692
</code></pre>
[1] <a href="http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?format=json&method=links.getStats&urls=http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/12/10-reasons-why-2013-will-be-the-year-you-quit-your-job/" rel="nofollow">http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?format=json&metho...</a>