The Original Sims

USC-Annenberg Digital Future Project Finds Major Shifts in Social Communication and Personal Connections on the Internet

Is the online world as important to users as the real world?

Large numbers of Internet users hold such strong views about their online communities that they compare the value of their online world to their real-world communities, according to the sixth annual survey of the impact of the Internet conducted by the USC-Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.

Among a broad range of findings about rapidly-evolving methods for online communication, the 2006 Digital Future Project found that 43 percent of Internet users who are members of online communities say that they “feel as strongly” about their virtual community as they do about their real-world communities.

“More than a decade after the portals of the Worldwide Web opened to the public, we are now witnessing the true emergence of the Internet as the powerful personal and social phenomenon we knew it would become,” said Jeffrey I. Cole, director of the USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future.

“The Internet has been a source of entertainment, information, and communication since the Web became available to the American public in 1994,” said Cole. “However, in 2006 we are beginning to measure real growth and discover new directions for the Internet as a comprehensive tool that Americans are using to touch the world.”

The findings about online communities and more than 100 other issues are published in the 2006 Digital Future Project, the comprehensive annual examination of the impact of online technology on America.

The project surveys more than 2,000 individuals across the United States, each year contacting the same households to explore how online technology affects the lives of Internet users and non-users.  It also examines how changing technology, such as the shift from Internet access by modem to broadband, affects behavior.

YouTube has made a long-awaited leap into the mobile telecommunications market by inking a deal on videos with Verizon Wireless.

FROM Ofcom Site

Ofcom today published the International Communications Market Report – the latest in the Ofcom Communications Market Report (CMR) series.

The publication analyses trends in the £840bn annual turnover global television, radio, telecommunications and wireless communications industries. It also compares UK data, consumer attitudes and industry performance against that of China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United States.

Key points include:

• In every country surveyed, broadband usage appears linked to a decline in conventional television viewing. On average around one-third of consumers with broadband access said they watch less television since going online. Conversely, internet access appears to have a positive effect on radio listening, offsetting a decline in hours spent listening to conventional broadcast radio.
• China leads the world in viewing music videos and television programmes over broadband; 76% of Chinese broadband users watch downloadable or streaming music video clips and 70% watch TV over broadband.
• Among 18-24 year old broadband users, the UK is second only to China in its enthusiasm for online video. 77% of UK 18-24 year old broadband users watch music videos online (87% in China) and 60% watch TV programmes via their broadband connections (82% in China).
• UK consumers buy more music online than consumers in any of the other European countries in the report, spending more than twice as much per head of population than the French or Germans.
• However, UK adoption of new services such as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP - phone calls over broadband) and Internet Protocol TV (IPTV – television programmes and video on demand over broadband) is slower than in other countries. 5.4% of French consumers use VoIP services and 1.6% subscribe to IPTV services, compared to 0.4% of UK consumers for each of these services.
• Radio is more popular in the UK than in any other country surveyed; UK average weekly listening per person is just under 23 hours. Listening to publicly-funded radio stations (for example, the BBC in the UK or NPR in the US) varies widely. After Sweden, the UK has the highest proportion of listening to publicly-funded radio (55% of total hours) of the countries surveyed.
• The internet attracts almost 10% of all advertising spending in the UK; a higher proportion than in any other country surveyed.
• The Republic of Ireland has the largest number of Wi-Fi hot spots per head of population (18.3 per 100,000 people), followed by the UK at 17.6 hot spots per 100,000 people. This compares to 10.5 in Germany, 8.8 in the US and 5.3 in Japan.
• The adjusted data suggest that UK households which make extensive use of the latest communications services benefit from greater value than households in any of the five countries surveyed. A household with two mobiles, a high level of telephone use, a premium broadband connection (with a high-end PC) and a premium subscription television account (viewed on a flat screen digital TV set) would typically pay £188 per month in the UK compared with £201 in Italy and £247 in the most expensive country – the United States.
• UK households with the lowest use of communications services – typically with low fixed-line phone use and free-to-air television – also benefit from greater value than households in the five other countries surveyed. The lightest users pay £28 per month in the UK compared to £31 in France and £34 in Italy.

Full Report

Media Guardian : "Britons turn off television and put down the paper as they take up broadband"

The "digital divide" normally refers to the people who do not have access to the internet and the people who do. There is another divide that I have noticed very recently; the people who use the internet and the people who don’t where there is (almost) equal access. On two different occasions last week I was asked to explain to two different groups of people what You Tube is and what Podcasts are and what’s the difference between them and My Space.

BBC Online today have a special edition about how we will watch TV in the future and what to watch on the web.

There is a Survey:

"Online video ‘eroding TV viewing’

Video sharing site YouTube has taken online viewing to the masses
The online video boom is starting to eat into TV viewing time, an ICM survey of 2,070 people for the BBC suggests.
Some 43% of Britons who watch video from the internet or on a mobile device at least once a week said they watched less normal TV as a result.

The divide is often an age divide. I find the figure 43% astonishingly high - but very encouraging. I watch some programmes on my PC - but no more than one a week. And the media companies are off and running.

In the UK alone, and only in the past few days:

• Channel 4 is to offer a "catch-up" service for viewers by offering much of its programming online for 30 days after transmission for 99p per episode.
• BSkyB has struck a deal with MySpace to make the first two episodes of the new season of Lost available to watch online, free of charge.
• Sky Movies is no longer exclusive to your television! All Sky Digital customers who subscribe to the full Movies package can now download Sky Movies onto a PC - it’s totally legal and for no extra charge.

Also recently in work, we have been getting requests from people who have missed The Amazing Mrs Pritchard have been writing to us to ask where they can download the series. (We manage the web site, not make the programme.)

Over the last year or so I have been telling programme makers not to limit their thinking to just TV or radio, but to be "platform agnostic". I’m not always sure where that though leads, but clearly some in the audience are thinking differently about access to (mainly) video.

BBC plans to launch the i-Player next April or there abouts. I’m involved only on the fringes, but it is going to be a major shift for scheduling and contractual agreements and audience access. I’m still willing to be pursuaded away from my long held arguement that we are essentially lazy viewers and want to have a scheduler set out our evening viewing. But the other arguement is obvious that we have only one pair of eyes, and while some of can read a book or a magazine while watching TV, it’s damn hard to watch a video and a TV programme at the same time.And it is there that the challenge for broadcasters lies.

This is part of the Executive Summary from The Blogging Success Study which was was conducted by Dr. Walter Carl; the students in his Advanced Organizational Communications class (Spring 2006) at Northeastern University (Boston) and John Cass and his colleagues at Backbone Media, Inc. 

The objective of this research was to determine the reasons, conditions and factors that make a blog successful, and to create a list of criteria to help companies assess whether and how they should engage in blogging. 

In order to identify the elements of a successful blog, the research team interviewed twenty corporate bloggers from companies of varied size and industry, and asked each blogger a series of standardized questions. (See Appendix 2.0)  Only bloggers who had been blogging for over one year and considered their blogging efforts successful were eligible to participate.  While the selection of participants was, therefore, somewhat subjective and limiting (without the resources to determine the most successful bloggers on the Web), the research team was able to identify common elements among the subject group and distinguish a number of factors for blogging success.  These elements are discussed at length in sections two and three of this paper.  Herein you will also find case studies detailing how the twenty corporate blogs achieved success.  New and veteran bloggers alike will find the case studies and anecdotes enlightening, as they reveal a variety of different paths to success.  Thus, we have included summaries of all twenty blogger interviews within the study’s appendix. 

Interview results were transcribed and summarized in twenty separate case studies.  Each was then studied and analyzed with three questions in mind:

•  How does the set up of a blog contribute to a blog’s success?
•  What is it about how you blog that makes the blog a success?
•  What is it about the content on a blog that makes the blog a success? 

After careful review, the research team identified five factors for success.  The majority of the twenty participant bloggers pointed to these factors as important to the success of their blog.  We focus in on these factors in Section Three.

The five factors identified by the participants were:

1. Culture
2. Transparency
3. Time
4. Dialogue
5. Entertaining Writing Style and Personalization

A company should carefully consider all of these factors before making a decision to blog

The rest of the Executive Summary is HERE

and the Full Table of Contents of the Report is HERE

Having spent a few hours surfing round some websites for businesses in Northern Ireland, there are some matters which disturb me.

Apart from the obvious - sites that are never updated - the one big niggle I have is Flash Home Pages. The only place they are useful is on a design companies site.  But why on the home page either?  One click on would do.

The second point is that Flash pages are less likely to be updated than more basic HTML pages.

What a Flash homepage says to me is "Isn’t this business clever in hiring me - this flash designer and animater to build their site?"

A Flash Home  Page will always say more about the designer than the business it represents.

The user wants to get in, get the info and get out.  A Website should get them to the info they want as fast as possible, but then offer more so they are tempted to hang around the site and get more stuff.  That’s where the true design talent comes in.  Designing content navigation that compells people to stay.

Spent the morning at Eventure’s Media Eye event and had a really interestingtime meeting people who are largely in PR and Marketing.  The speech was OK - but I really enjoyed talking on e to one (although that was in groups). Having blown a whole section on YouTube and Blip.tv out of the speech I soon discovered that YouTube is not as well known to everyone as I had expected.  Most of the time people were interested in Blogs and Blogging.  Although it did get a bit hairy when I tried to explain how RSS feeds work.  It’s much easier to show someone rather that talk in abstract terms.

Also great to see some old friends like Harry Castles from Downtown and snapper John Harrison.

There was a lot of interest in Blogging which some people hadn’t heard of, some had but didn’t know what it was some who read blogs and none that Blogged.  I hope I didn’t over sell it, but I di encourage everyone who was really interested to read Naked Conversations and to visit sites like Strange Attractor

If you were there (or wern’t) and want to know more, the additional text and links are here

UPDATE:

Here is the audio of the final version

Tomorrow I’m making a presentation at this event.  with less than 20 hours to go, I think this is what I’m going to say.

More than ten years ago science fiction writer William Gibson said "The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed."  Ten years on I would say "The future is continuing to arrive, it’s being distributed but most of us haven’t read the User Manuel yet.

I have six minutes to tell you five things.
• The Future is Here
• We’re All in the Media Now
• Content Drives Media 
• Content is (almost) always driven by Stories 
• The Key to Storytelling – KISS

We’re All In The Media Now
Do you remember how it was? It’s the 1 November 1982 – Northern Ireland – the day before Channel 4 opened
We have three TV Channels;
There are 4 Radio National radio stations -
And there is Radio Ulster. Downtown and BBC Radio Foyle. and the two RTE stations
Oh and Radio Luxembourg was there too.

But that was - more or less - the Electronic media market 24 years ago.

Today there are now more than 530 channels on the Sky platform.
There are now 5 terrestrial channels.
In addition to the radio stations from 24 years ago - we have the Cool/DTR split, City Beat, U105 the several "Q" stations on the north west and even two other TV stations - Northern Visions in Belfast and Channel 9 in Derry.
There are three national commercial stations … there’s more, but that will do..
Today it is very different.
We could all go off today and set up a new TV channel – we’d need some investment and a few easy to get licenses. But we could set up a TV channel in a few weeks.
A Web based radio station is easier. We could do that in an hour.1.00

Easy
From Analogue to Digital
When media took the step from Analogue to Digital the hurdles that were access to the means of production and the means of distribution disappeared. The cost of the tools ranges from Cheap to Free
The first step most organisations took in Digital Media was a Web Site:
A Website is a basic tool - from there that you can develop a digital communications strategy. But the single most common mistake for business with web site is that they never change them. Week after week they are exactly the some. If a web site stays the same, people will not return. A Website used properly is a fantastic way to communicate - locally and Globally.

Putting up a website and not using it and changing it is the equivilant of going to a Industry Exhibition putting up an expensive stand and not staffing it - not having people there to talk to the customers.

Content Drives Media
There’s not much point of a TV station without programmes, or a radio station without music or presenters or conversation or stuff that will attract people to listen.
And we as consumers have better kit and ways to communicate. We are also better equipped to originate our own content, place it on our own platforms and engage with our own new audience.
The role of the audience is changing and the definition of the audience is changing to. The Audience Plays Along, is involved in determining the story line and the outcome. The audience is now the customer, the client the co-director most importantly Part of the Community.
New and emerging media is about participation.

Content is (almost) always driven by Stories.
The world’s second most popular entertainment is Story Telling. And the first? Conversation.
Kevin Anderson says on his blog "It’s become a new mantra for me: Blogging isn’t a publishing strategy; it is a community strategy."

There’s a young (aren’t they always) man in the US called Robert Scoble .
He is a leading Blogger, an original thinker in Blogging and his book Naked Conversations will change your mind about the value of Blogging.

By "Naked" he means communications that are not filtered through an employer’s marketing or public relations department—a key part of its appeal. He argues that every business can benefit from smart "naked" blogging. "If you ignore the blogosphere… you won’t know what people are saying about you. You can’t learn from them, and they won’t come to see you as a sincere human who cares about your business and its reputation"

So Who Should Blog?
Just about everyone - you, your staff, your friends, your customers. But you must remember that Blogging is a conversation, you are not trying to convert anyone. You are showing your passion, your expertise, your committment to your business and your customer. So you listen, you read you link you answer. The experience of Bloggers in big organisations is that when someone complains on a Blog, the other people who read it and support the product will rally round in support.

The Key to Storytelling – KISS
Don’t get caught up in all the jargon – http, RSS, AJAX, Flash, MP3, MP4
There is only one thing to remember - K.I.S.S.
Keep It Simple, Stupid.
How do you do that? Use new media as an opportunity for a conversation not a conversion.
Keep the conversation unfiltered by marketing and PR
It’s a place to answer questions, hear opinions
And should your audience take you off the linear path you had planned – go with them.
Using New and Emerging media means you are able to make use of the first and second forms of entertainment; Conversations and Storytelling.

How new is that? It’s what we’ve been doing since we sat in our caves and talked about what was over the horizon.

 

There is more here http://www.davysims.co.uk/eventure/ with links, other ideas and examples

READ THIS BOOK!

And here is the Blog and here is another Blog and here is an unrelated blog that is just as important.

I’ve been working on a presentation for a few weeks.  i almost had it nailed then I started to read Naked Conversations.

Now i think I have two things to say to the conference

READ THIS BOOK!

and Read this Other Book - or if you are a mean bugger just download it.

I downloaded it and hardly read it — it felt like a long boring report I#d printed off.

A book is a book - and a print off is -  ugly .  Buy the Clueteain Manifesto

Digital Media

Digital Media

Digital Media

Digital Media

Digital Media

ON my way to Television Centre I go through Paddington Station.  The announcement today was priceless.  "Due to the precipitation falling from the sky, the floor surfaces are particulaly wet."

Was the writer being paid by the word?

Believe me - I am all for airport secutity.  I live under two airport approaches and who knows how many flight paths.  I travel by air almost every week and if security want to search my stuff, frisk me or even if Special Branch want to ask me questions - well that’s OK. 

Today I was left feeing humiliated at Belfast City Airport.  Removing slip on penny loafers is one thing - but a random search which requires taking off high laced Timberland boots, was bad.  Worse was trying to re-lace them and tie them up as the passengers behind me filed past. 

I did call for the superior officer and said that I was not complaining nor was I angry (although truth is I was bloody angry), neither did I say I was "being himiated", but that I "felt humiliated" as I stood on one foot, the other on a chair I had dragged over to the X-ray trying not to fall over.

Not good enough - and really no way to complain without the fear of being restricted from taking the flight or any flight.

From Buffalo Business Journal (I think - those guys really gotta rethink ther design)

The NHL and YouTube Inc. have agreed to a deal in which the league will provide the video-sharing site daily footage including game highlights and behind-the-scenes features.

YouTube in turn will create a dedicated NHL channel within its site and supplement the league content with hockey-themed, user-generated material. Users will have access to video highlights of NHL regular season games, which will be available within 24 hours of the original broadcast, and to other on- and off-ice footage.

media.guardian

Channel 4 plans to launch its video-on-demand media player service on December 6 under the brand 4oD and charging 99p per show.

The new 4oD service, the first media player to be launched by a UK broadcaster offering all of its own programming, will charge 99p per show to view or rent.

Rental content will be stored in a personalised library for up to 48 hours after first being watched.

Consumers will also be given the option to "download to own" TV shows for £1.99. Films will cost £1.99 to view.

MORE>>>

 MediaGuardian.co.uk

Controversial proposals to put advertising on the BBC’s international websites have been approved by the corporation’s executive direction group, the most senior level of management before the BBC governors. In an email obtained by MediaGuardian.co.uk, staff at BBC News Interactive were told this morning that the board has agreed that "both the UK and international sites will carry advertising when viewed from abroad". The News Interactive head, Pete Clifton, emailed staff stating that ads will fit around the current site design, as outlined in a BBC online article published in April.

MORE>>>

A wee gem on Radio Ulster last night.  Electric Mainline presented by Stephen McCauley.  It has been running on Radio Foyle on Saturdays for some months, but has come to Radio Ulster for ony 30 minutes on a Tuesday evening at 7.30.

Catch up on Radio Player

Mr. Greedy used to be Ivan Martin’s nick name - few of us call him that any more.  But poor Ivan has been more sleepy these days than greedy. Having spent God-knows-how-many-years doing Downtown’s breakfast show, he returned last November to the U105 breakfast with his old partner Richard Young.

I had lunch with Ivan last Thursday - first time I have seen him all year.  He told me that the long days, early starts and late nights working on his sports reports were mounting up and he’d decided to drop the U105 show.

I had been listening to it from time to time - not as often as Radio Ulster (well, you have to be loyal to your employer).  It was a good show -  mildly nostalgic, I suppose, but not intentionally so.

U105 does seem to be struggling to pull a strong audience.  I don’t need to look at the audience figures to know that.  Get into any taxi in Belfast and check out what the driver is listening to.  Rarely is it U105.

However that is not a scientific way of collecting audience data.  The drivers don’t often listen to Radio Ulster - by far the market leader.  The driving constituancy do like their City Beat.  That was always going to be U105’s competition was going to be; not Radio Ulster.

It has been my ambition for about a year to establish a network of groups and individuals in Northern Ireland to gather stories about the places they live and the people they know.

The first version of that emerged about five years ago under the name Sense of Place, which for very good reasons morphed into Your Place and Mine.  It has been doing great work since it was establishes and developed a brand relationship with the Radio Ulster programme of the same name.

Today we took another small but positive steo forward to that goal. We are beginning a pilot of the Story Finders project in north Antrim within weeks.  More info when the site is launched.

It hardly seems like six months since the Internet Made Easy CD was distributed throughout Northern Ireland.  Some of the participating members of the steering group met today to begin the review.  What is interesting is that not only was there an impace in Northern Ireland, but the idea/content is now being talked about in UK, Italy and Slovakia.

Although more than 750,000 we distributed, there are still a few hundred left.  The Educational Guidance Service for Adults website has more information.

This List is — let me put it this way.  I was at a meeting recently and someone quoted "People" who claimed that "The Internet would replace books."  I didn’t get my hand up fast enough to shoult - "Whoever claimed that was woefully ill informed.

This List isn’t "Woefull ill informed". Just incomplete and scewed.

There are at least four people I know who are much more important in shaping online journalism.  They don’t have a lot of money or hold a Directorate in a major broadcasting organisation - but they have significant influence.

From Net Imperitive

How is the advertising industry adapting to the demand for online video content, and who stands to gain as the Web and TV converge? Last month, Vividas Europe assembled some key suppliers, agencies and media owners to discuss if the Internet really can replicate the brand-building power of TV for the YouTube generation…

Follow link to content

American, British and other internet users are constantly bombarded with offers of low-priced internet connections.

Accessing the web via a telephone line – which may sound old-fashioned but is still used by millions – costs just a few dollars a month.

Yet people’s willingness to pay more than the absolute minimum needed for a basic web connection has surprised stock market investors. So much so that last year’s fears of an all-out price war that would erode profits – which hit cable and telecoms stocks – have all but disappeared.