twopointouch

The Guardian covers a poll of 2,012 UK adults which has uncovered a new demographic profile, ‘Digi Joe Public’, the man on the street who is heavily involved in online life. The poll revealed that “nearly four in 10 of that group have read a blog, with a quarter having started their own blog or website. Nearly three-quarters have downloaded music and almost a quarter have downloaded at least one movie”. Blogging and online socialising, it would appear, is no longer the preserve of geeks and teens.

So where are these people?

I don’t have the largest social circles in the world, but of the (say) thirty friends outside of media who I’ve talked to about blogs and blogging, around two have admitted to anything other than downloading music and ’stuff’. The majority said they didn’t know anyone who blogged either. Basically, they just looked at me in a strange way. That sort of look that you get when you say, “I really enjoy a good session of D&D”.

Every blogger I do know is someone who I’ve either contacted for research purposes or who has contacted me through this blog. Every single one of them blogs either as a part of or an enhancement of their professional work.

So are the results wrong, or do I just need better friends? One possible flaw is that it was an online poll, so the people questioned were (a) online (b) the sort of people who volunteer to do polls. That would skew the results, but not to the extent where they were totally inaccurate. It pays to be sceptical of polls, but not too much so when they’re the only facts we have.

One other possibility is that ’starting a website’ could be pretty broad. If you sign up with an ISP you might get free web space, does that count even if you never fill it up? Sign up for Plaxo, Linked-In, MySpace, Bebo, YouTube, Yahoo, Google, and you get a personal profile page of some description. Does that count? If they do, then I would have an easier time squaring the claims with my own experience.

‘Digi Joe Public’ probably prefers to go by just plain Joe.

Update: thoughts from Drew and Antony.

The majority of MySpace users (51.6%) are aged 35 and older, according to a press release from metrics company comScore.

An analysis of visitors to MySpace.com shows that as the site has experienced dramatic visitor growth, it has become more popular among older Internet users. The most significant shift has occurred among teens 12-17, who accounted for 24.7 percent of the MySpace audience in August 2005, but today represent a much lower 11.9 percent of the site’s total audience. Conversely, Internet users between the ages of 35-54 now account for 40.6 percent of the MySpace visitor base, an 8.2 percentage point increase during the past year.

By contrast, it is the network’s competitors, principally Xanga and Facebook that attract younger audiences.

What to make of this? Well, MySpace has been around for longer than a lot of its current competitors, if only by a couple of years. Perhaps older people are more likely to sign up for the best-known of these sites, rather than a younger competitor? Perhaps, too, older people are less likely to move elsewhere.

It is unclear, as well, whether these ‘visitor’ figures are drawn from accounts, or active users. If the former is the case, older people curious about social networking sites would presumably be drawn to try out the well-known MySpace rather than a lesser known site. That’s what I did, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that was true of other (crinkly) people.

A new survey from Nielsen NetRatings entitled ‘The 21st Century Digital Consumer’ shows that most British people are nothing of the sort. The majority of those polled have ‘never heard of’ a slew of new(ish) internet and home entertainment technologies. And this wasn’t a poll of the general population, but of internet users.

However, when researchers referred to these technologies in full, rather than using acronyms, recognition levels soared. 333% more people, for example, understood ‘video on demand’ as opposed to VOD. 350% more had heard of a personal video recorder. Whether this is because the full terms here are fairly self-explanatory is hard to say.

It’s a good reminder,though, for those of use who write technology pieces for a general audience that low levels of understanding and recognition are the norm and we really should do our best to cater for the majority.

Like a number of you, I expect, I attended Charlene Li’s webinar in relation to her ‘calculating the cost of business blogging’ post (covered here, three posts down). Powerpoint slides and an MP3 of the presentation ought to follow shortly - I’ll update when they are.

A lot of the content was covered in the original post but two key ideas for right now:

1) The best place to start is a recruitment blog. “Every company should have one.” It has to be the place where a company wants to talk one-to-one. Also, the ROI is completely apparent in terms of the number of applications. Experimenting here might help clarify the reasons for blogging more generally in a company.

2) The “biggest piece of advice is to just get started”. Take out a Typepad or Wordpress account and start to blog. Keep it password protected for the first 30 days while you work out your voice and what is and is not right for your company. Write down the top 20 posts you might want to write and have a go at them.

I’d temper the second piece of advice with the need to involve other key decision makers - get them to look at your blog and submit comments. You can always remove them, and any incendiary posts before you go live.

The second piece of caution is, of course, to know a little bit about blogs and blogging. “Read 30 blogs religiously for a month” is a piece of advice I have read or been told elsewhere (sorry for the lack of attribution).

The comments section on Charlene’s blog post also contains an interesting note from David Phillips who challenges the idea of ROI. Since it can’t calculate the incalculable value of some aspects of blogging (relationships), then should it really be used as a way of judging its value? Would SMART objectives be a better measure?

Research outfit InStat has produced a press release relating to a new report. The release, which was promoted to the digg home page, says that:

User-Generated Content (UGC), such as that found on YouTube and MySpace, will continue to grow significantly in popularity and generate increasing revenue over the next several years, reports In-Stat (http://www.in-stat.com). By 2010, the volume of downloads/views on these sites will surpass 65 billion, and revenues tied to UGC video are expected to exceed $850 million by 2010, the high-tech market research firm says. Revenues are those directly linked to videos in the form of banner/skyscrapers, embedded video, Google Adsense, and/or branded pages/channels.

Buzzword drivel. Anyone playing the Web 2.0 drinking game that’s been doing the rounds today will be totally hammered by the end of the release.

Why? Because, like a lot of research reports, it will be pretty tricky to falsify this one. Even if any of us remember this claim in 2010 - though you might if you spent $3495 on the full report - the terms of reference are so vague that they’re certain to be provable. Depending on how you want to take ‘user-generated content’, it’s probably already worth $850mn in revenue.

However, the real treat is the following graphic, presented without explanation:

Well, I think that pretty much clears everything up.

Pew Internet & American Life Project has released its second Future of the Internet survey, with experts and pundits broadly agreeing that by 2020:

• A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.
• Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.
• Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.

Lanjut →

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise UK has published some interesting figures based on what young commuters do online. Her hope is to be able to offer some guidance to our ailing newspapers on what topics to cover more fully. People in this age group apparently have little loyalty to traditional newspapers and are turning to freesheets.

The second of her two tables lists the categories receiving the highest concentration of visits from internet users in this age group:

Lanjut →

From a study by Telecom Express, a company that provides competitions, polls and other interactive services to newspapers, magazines and broadcast:

The most trusted source of information was television, scoring 66 per cent, just as highly as family and friends.
Radio was listed the fifth most trustworthy source of information, below national newspapers, but above websites. [...]
The most marked contrast was between the credibility of established media brands, compared with websites (36 per cent) and blogs (24 per cent).

Complete nonsense. Of course you can trust blogs.

I’m actually quite encouraged by these results. It’s pleasing that 24% of Britons know what a blog is. It would be interesting, though, to see these results on a historical scale. Do more people trust the internet than a year ago, for example? It’s also good to see that there is a fair bit of critical thinking going on: maybe “One Third of Brits don’t Trust TV” would have been a better headline.

via E-Consultancy

An important but under-represented part of Web 2.0 is mobility. The use of RSS, podcasts and CSS design is partly predicated on the idea that we’ll all be accessing web resources from all over the place, using all kinds of devices. Sadly, five years after the launch of the first GPRS (2.5G) services in the UK, it still doesn’t work very well and it costs a fortune. IT Week reports that there’s little appeal for such services in the UK:

Nearly three-quarters of people are avoiding the mobile internet because of high costs and poor experiences of the technology, according to research published today. The findings highlight the need for firms to develop mobile-compatible content, said experts.

In a survey of 1,500 UK consumers by web hosting firm Hostway, over a third of respondents said they were frustrated by slow-loading mobile web pages.

A quarter said they did not use mobile devices to access the internet because often the web sites they wanted were not available, while others complained that it was too difficult to scroll and navigate their way through pages via mobiles and PDAs.

“We’re in the dark ages compared to desktop browsing,” said Hostway product manager Phil Turnbull. “Firms should take [the design of their mobile web sites] every bit as seriously, and because they have to be more ruthless about how the site is designed, it’s potentially a greater challenge.”

TechDigest reported: “At the moment, most websites just aren’t flexible enough to be accessed on mobile phones,” said Neil Barton, a director at Hostway. “There’s nothing wrong with having a flash website with all the bells and whistles you can muster, but you’ve got to be aware that mobile users simply aren’t going to be able to access it. The research illustrates that even if people do wait for sites to load, quite often it’s impossible to actually get at the content itself because of the way that sites are built.”