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Kevin: Pete Warden does a very interesting analysis of Facebook in the US and looks at who is connected to connect to whom. "Looking at the network of US cities, it's been remarkable to see how groups of them form clusters, with strong connections locally but few contacts outside the cluster." He breaks the country into areas like Dixie, Stayathomia (the Mid-Atlantic, Ohio River Valley and upper Midwest), Greater Texas (Missouri, Arkansas and Texas), the Nomadic West, Pacifica (the Seattle area) and Socalistan (southern California). It's a very interesting analysis.
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Kevin: Facebook has overtaken Google News for referrals to news and media web sites. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic writes: "Facebook's page view explosion in the last months of 2009 — plus new evidence that it is becoming the major driver of news — has some analysts wondering whether the site is taking over Google News and personalized Google Reader accounts as America's leading information hub. "
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Kevin: Demand Media, which has fine tuned an approach to inexpensive text and video content online, is looking to sell its content to traditional media. They optimise content to what people are searching for online. Demand produces 4500 pieces of original content a day. Some writers are getting very anxious for the fact that Demand pays roughly $15 per 500-word piece.
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Kevin: Robert Andrews of paidContent UK gives a great list of proposed amendments to the UK Digital Economy Bill. There are some very interesting things lurking in these amendments. Conservative Lord Ralph Lucas has tabled this amendment: “Protection of the right to link to publicly available information on the internet”, which states: “The creation, aggregation, copying and publication of any link to publicly available information contained on websites on the internet shall not constitute an infringement of copyright.”
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Kevin: Dan Lewis James looks deep into Hunch at the social network design principles. This is a fascinating look at how to build social spaces based on the goals and pyschological motivations of users. While working for a content site, you wouldn't re-create Facebook, but if you look at the goals that people have in terms of finding and sharing content, you can easily see how you would build a news site different to add social elements not just around participation but also in terms of helping them find the content that they want. This is a really well done and thoughtful post.
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Kevin: Fascinating discussion from the DeSilve-Phillips Dealmakers Summit 2010. “We believe in content but we’re struggling to monetize it,” said Jeff Horing, managing director of Insight Venture Partners. Interesting discussions as well in terms of paid content versus advertising supported content. Investors see opportunities for investing in magazines that serve attractive niches, but they don't see investment opportunities in newspapers. "Newspapers have a fundamental issue where they don’t deliver as much value as their alternatives," said Richard Zannino, managing director of CCMP Capital Advisors.
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Kevin: This year's Edelman Trust Barometer. Richard Edelman says: "The events of the last 18 months have scarred people. People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It's a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."
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Kevin: "Everybody goes online, everybody has a cell phone, and kids hate blogging and Twitter, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project."
Daily Archives: February 9, 2010
Report: Pew’s Social Media and Young Adults
Pew’s Internet & American Life Project has recently published their report Social Media and Young Adults, which looks at social media usage by teens and young adults.
Two Pew Internet Project surveys of teens and adults reveal a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older. Even as blogging declines among those under 30, wireless connectivity continues to rise in this age group, as does social network use. Teens ages 12-17 do not use Twitter in large numbers, though high school-aged girls show the greatest enthusiasm for the application.
The report goes on to say that whilst blogging amongst teens and young adults has dropped since 2006, down to 14% of online teens compared to 28%, it has risen amongst the over 30s from 7% in 2007 to 11% in 2009. 73% of online teens use social networks now, compared to 55% in 2006 and 65% in 2008. 47% of online adults use social networks, up from 37% in 2008. Furthermore, adults are “increasingly fragmenting their social networking experience” as 52% have two or more different profiles.
There’s lots more information, about Twitter, connectivity and gadget use. I haven’t yet had a chance to read the whole thing, but none of the above statistics should surprise anyone.
Teens never were particularly into blogging and if they were going to blog anywhere it was going to be on LiveJournal. Different blogging tools had radically different profiles in 2006, with tools like Typepad having a middle-aged, white male demographic and LiveJournal attracting mainly teens, 75% female, with a focus on cultural minorities. The blogging landscape has changed a lot since then, and the tool-specific cultures have grown or receded along with the tools themselves. LiveJournal, which had just been bought by SixApart was sold to SUP, a Russian media company and now has 11.6 million users. Movable Type/Typepad seem to have decreased in popularity. WordPress has developed is now one of the most usable and extensible platforms available. It currently has 202 million users.
Culturally, blogging has moved into the mainstream – a good enough reason for many teens to see it as ‘something old people do’ and that they should, therefore, avoid. And those teens who were on LJ in 2006 are growing up, hitting 20 and going to university or getting jobs. And I can say from experience that blogging really is easier when you’re underemployed!
The wider social media landscape has changed too. Facebook had started off as a closed, school-/university-only site, accessible only to those with an educational email address. In 2006 is opened its doors and so all of those teens/early-20-somethings who were facing having to leave their friends behind as they lost their university email address could continue their activities into the workplace. MySpace, which in 2006 was the most popular social network, became a lot less cool. In 2008, Facebook took MySpace’s crown and it is now pretty much seen as Facebook’s ugly little brother (even though MySpace is a year older).
Twitter, of course, barely existed in 2006, and whilst it’s still not hugely popular amongst teens, plain ol’ SMSing is. Teens have greater access to mobile phones now than they did, with 75% of American teens between 12 and 17 owning one. I’d suspect the pattern is the same in the UK and Europe. Text bundles are now very generous, so teens have no need of Twitter – their social circle is based on their school friends and neighbours for whom texts work well enough.(In most cases, they have yet to develop geographically scattered networks that tools such as Twitter are useful for sustaining.)
As for adults using more social networks, but fragmenting their social experience, well again, there are a lot more networks to join now than their were, and they don’t all do the same thing. I can’t do on Twitter what I do on Flickr or Dopplr. So I would expect to see usage and fragmentation continue to increase.
I love the Pew reports. We don’t have anything like this in the UK, although we desperately need this sort of research to be done. As I’ve said before, Ofcom and the Office for National Statistics do some work, but it lacks the focus and detail that business and government need if they are to base decisions on evidence instead of anecdote. However, it is important when we read these reports to remember that the digital landscape is continually shifting, and we can’t separate out the changes we see in online behaviour from the development of the web. As such, I’d say there is nothing that surprises me in this report, nothing that seems out of place within the wider context of technology change and adoption.