Random Culture

Download the 2007 Web Design Survey

The folks at A List Apart have released a great survey of over 33,000 web design professionals. The survey is a comprehensive profile of web designers across the world.

"Like many aspects of web design itself, our research process took the form of a dialog and included multiple stages of discovery. Preliminary findings answered some questions and raised others requiring additional study. The more we unearthed, the deeper we dug.

The attached report shares everything we learned. We offer it freely to this community that has given us so much. For the curious, we also provide an “anonymized” version of the raw data. It contains every answer to every question by every respondent, excluding only personal information—no names, just the facts. Crunch it yourself and tell us what you find."

Download the results of the survey here.

Portable Video Players Going Mainstream

Video has been the big topic this year, and it's worth noting that the growth we've seen in online video viewing has been accompanied by the portability of it as well. According to a recent report by Parks Associates, shipments of portable multimedia players (PMPs) will grow rapidly over the next 5 years.

Say thanks to Apple for the introduction of the video iPod, and bringing video to the iPod Nano. It's also important for content publishers to consider the growth in PMPs as they look towards distribution strategies.

Link via Podcasting News.

Research Tool: Newsletter Archive

Keeping tabs on competitive emails is a tricky business. We just completed a competitive email audit, and had to subscribe to many email programs, and then monitor them over 60 days. Well, the Three Minds @ Organic blog posted about an interesting new resource that could help make the process easier... The Newsletter Archive.

It's not the most comprehensive resource, but for a quick dig into a particular industry or company, it looks like it could shape up to be a good tool.

Business Week: Innovation Insights

Business Week has a great piece on innovation from their annual survey of top executives. The article focuses on the role of innovation in Business, such as research & development. There are some interesting findings, such as the priority of innovation, the biggest barriers to innovation, and how innovation is measured.

Read the full article here.

Link via Influx Insights.

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Mike Tucker has launched a website worth checking out, "An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth." It's an interactive manifesto built on the words of the well-known designer Bruce Mau on subjects such as creativity, work ethic, collaboration and ideology.

America Loves Wikipedia

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has just issued a new report (PDF) on Wikipedia. According to the report, 36% of American adults consult Wikipedia. One of the more interesting aspects of the report is the amount of traffic to Wikipedia that's driven from search engines. The report cites Hitwise data that showed "over 70% of the visits to Wikipedia in the week ending March 17 came from search engines." This success must be one of the reasons that Wikipedia has announced they plan to launch a search engine.

Link via Micropersuasion.

State of the Blogosphere

Dave Sifry has posted a new Technorati "State of the Blogosphere" report. Here are a few high level points from the post:

• 100,000 new blog are indexed daily
• Over 70% of pings are from known spammers (yikes!)
• 1.3 million blog posts daily
• Top 50 blogs are dominated by traditional media companies

View the entire report here

Link via Micropersuasion.

The Economics of Abundance

Chris Anderson, of The Long Tail fame, spoke at the recent Pop!Tech conference this last weekend. His presentation, entitled "The Economics of Abundance", is getting a bit of buzz. You can check out his blog post on the subject, or download the powerpoint presentation in its entirety.

Talent Survey

After the dot-com crash, the interactive industry was left with a ton of job seekers, but not many available positions. Times have changed, and now it's becoming difficult for companies in our industry to find qualified people. Along with ChaosScenario, I'm posting a link to this survey to find out how people find jobs now, and happy they are with their current jobs.

I'll post the survey results here once it's complete.
Take the talent survey here.

Google Trends Launches!

Google has launched a pretty cool new product called "Google Trends." The service allows you to compare multiple search terms against one another in terms of search volume.

Check out this sample trend search. In your face television advertising!

Link via TechCrunch.

Podcasts Surpass Radio Stations

Hold on to your hats, podcasts naysayers... Feedburner is reporting that the number of podcast feeds it serves has surpassed the total number of radio stations worldwide. And since Feedburner doesn't have a stranglehold on the podcast market, the actual number of podcasts is certainly much larger.

What's more, the growth they are reporting is pretty impressive. Podcast feed creation through feedburner is growing at 15% per month, and subscribers to podcast feeds are growing at 20% per month.

One more interesting note... Feedburner has seen more downloaders than subscribers. This reinforces the idea that there's a large potential audience outside of iTunes.

Link via Podcasting News.

Don't Believe the Forrester Hype!

Heard about the recent Forrester report claiming that only 1% listen to podcasts? Don't believe the hype.

In my opinion, Forrester is just trying to generate some controversy for buzz. Why? Check out my post on Chaos Scenario about the research details you might have missed from this latest podcasting report.

Nielsen Netratings Blunderfest 2006

I swung by iMedia Connection today, and saw a headline for a story that made my jaw drop. Underneath the headline "Yahoo! Outnumbers Google" was the statement "Despite Google's reputation, Yahoo! ranks as top search engine." Um... what is Nielsen Netratings smoking?

This statement is completely and utterly false. The numbers Nielsen is basing this statement on are numbers not just for search engines, but portals and communication destinations as well. Sure, Yahoo! may be the top portal, but that doesn't mean it's the top search engine.

This is a REALLY irresponsible statement for Nielsen to make, and I hope they correct it right away. The fact is, Google is by far the top search engine, and that's not up for debate. In fact, Nielsen's own search data from November of 2005 shows Google's search engine market share at 46.3%, and Yahoo! at only 23%. For Nielsen's statement to be true, Yahoo! would have had to steal half of Google's market share in a mere matter of months. Yeah, right.

How anyone at Nielsen or iMedia Connection could allow this slip-up is beyond me.

Recasting the Concept of Podcasting

The Diffusion Group, which employs a friend of mine, has launched a short article on Designtechnica entitled "Recasting the Concept of Podcasting." It's getting some buzz, specifically for a figure that's quoted:

"80% of podcast downloads never make it to a portable player or another device"

That statistic, from a recent survey by Bridge Data, confirms a suspicion that I've had for a while. In my personal experience, I listen to most of my podcasts on a computer. Why? Because I spend more time with my computer than any other electronic device (including the TV). And I'm not alone.

Now, the central idea of the article is that podcasting's definition, which has a specific connection to personal audio devices, is wrong. I agree with that. I cringe every time I hear a news report or read an article about podcasting that defines it in this manner.

But change the term? I'm not so sure. In fact, check out the Wikipedia entry on podcasting. In it, you'll see that not everyone refers to the "pod" in "podcasting" as an iPod reference. I'm partial to "pod" standing for "personal on-demand." In the meantime, Apple's not complaining.

Alexaholic

If you're addicted to Alexa data, Alexaholic is just what you've been looking for.

Alexaholic allows you to create customizeable Alexa graphs comparing up to 5 websites, and even allows you to paste the code for the graph on your site. Create your own here. One thing I'm a little disappointed by... you can't resize the graphs to fit your site. That's why I didn't put an example directly on the page here.

If you aren't using Alexa to look at competitive site data such as relative traffic, average page views, etc... you should be. It's a great free tool, particularly if you do anything in an attempt to map out a competitive landscape for your own company or your clients. Of course, you have to take the data with a grain of salt, because all the data is coming from the folks that have downloaded and installed the Alexa toolbar.

Link via TechCrunch.

State of the Blogosphere

In case you missed it, Technorati founder Dave Sifry posted what is becoming an annual "state of the blogosphere" report. This first part of the report focuses on the growth in size of the blogosphere, as well as spam blogs (splogs), and the rise of tagging. Stay tuned for another installment of this report.

The Mysterious iTunes User

Nielsen/Netratings has released a report (pdf) about the mysterious iTunes user. According to the report, about 14% of the active Internet population used iTunes in December. In addition, Nielsen/Netratings says that iTunes traffic increased 241% over the last year.

The study also reveals some interesting demographic and behavioral details about iTunes users. iTunes users are fairly even in the gender split, at 54% male, 46% female. They like Volkswagen, Audi and Subaru, and have a preference for hard cider? What the heck, hard cider?

I'd say we should take these numbers with a grain of salt. Nielsen/Netratings didn't reveal their methodology for this report, and it's likely that it has about the same credibility as their DVR panel, which was based on 60 DVRs. You can read more about that fiasco here.

Link via AdFreak.

Gallup Poll Releases Podcasts

The Gallup Poll is now offering audio and video podcasts that are daily briefings of important news. These podcasts also contain poll information. You can access these podcasts from the Gallup site, or in iTunes.

On the video podcast, the folks at Gallup receive a thumbs down... This has got to be the worst use of green screen technology I have ever seen. I mean, look at the picture. There's not supposed to be a distinct, shimmering outline around the host!

Edelman & Technorati Blog Study

Edelman and Technorati have teamed up to publish a study on blogs. The meat of the report is a survey of bloggers conducted through Technorati, that asks questions related to blog publishing, and many are looking at these habits through their relation to PR. These questions include asking bloggers if they've been contacted by PR, if they'd be willing to review products, and how they feel about employee blogs.

Although none of the results are really groundbreaking, it's worth checking out. You can download the PDF here.

Link via B.L. Ochman's blog.

2005 Google Zeitgeist

The 2005 Google Zeitgeist has been released! In it, Google highlights some of the significant events, celebrities and technologies that shaped 2005, from the perspective of people's search behavior. Always an interesting read.

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

Even though there have been a few high-profile scandals of late, Wikipedia has been proving itself time and again to stand up to traditional encyclopedias in terms of quality. Notsocommoncents has a post about the latest study from Nature magazine that tested the quality of Wikipedia vs Britannica using expert scientists. Errors were found in both, but the margin of error between the two was not that much. And it's getting better... take Wikipedia's recent decision to not allow anonymous contributions.

I think we'll continue to see the quality of Wikipedia improve, but we'll certainly see our share of scandals as well. Even if you aren't a fan of Wikipedia, you'd better believe that a very large group of people don't share your opinion. And that list of people is growing.

Cyber Thanksgiving, Not Monday

As a follow-up to the Cyber Monday post from yesterday, eMarketer has released data showing that Thanksgiving day was actually a larger online shopping day than Black Friday. This is really interesting news, since most of us were probably under the impression that people were too busy spending time with their families on Thanksgiving day to be online... let alone actually shopping online.

What's more... Hitwise shows that Thanksgiving day itself is the largest online shopping day of the year.

Read more about this study at eMarketer.

Teen Content Creators

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released their latest study, Teen Content Creators and Consumers. It's a great piece, and should be a harpinger of what the future holds in store. The insights into the differences between bloggers and non-bloggers is particularly interesting, as well as some of the insights into the sharing of created and downloaded content.

Simply stated, this is a MUST READ.

Open Source Education

Recently, we've been hearing about educational institutions embracing podcasting for lectures. Stanford, in particular, has been making headlines for their efforts. But what I find really fascinating is that they are not just making this material available to students. They're making it available to the public.

All you have to do is visit Stanford on iTunes. They make available faculty lectures, music, interviews with authors, speeches and much more. Is this the beginning of open source education?

Here's an example that illustrates the point, The Personal MBA. The basic concept is that you could learn much of the same information you would getting a traditional MBA by accessing many of the books and resources yourself. This doesn't mean that a traditional MBA doesn't have benefits, but that the knowledge gleaned isn't exclusive. As Josh Kaufman, the creator of The Personal MBA explains: "Business schools don't have a monopoly on worldly wisdom."

I think Stanford on iTunes is a great idea, and hope to see more schools and institutions follow in their footsteps.

Link via Biz Stone.

State of the Blogosphere

Technorati has released another "State of the Blogosphere" report. This report focuses specifically on growth, and relies on data from blogs tracked by Technorati. Founder and CEO Dave Sifry gave these findings in a presentation at Web 2.0, which he makes available for download.

Here are a few interesting findings from the report:
- The blogosphere is 30 times bigger than 3 years ago
- 2% - 8% of new weblogs are fake or spam weblogs
- About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day

I think it's interesting that the growth Technorati has been unrelenting over the last 36 months. In other words, it isn't slowing down. It's important to put a caveat on these findings, since they're being made from Technorati data, but they're still interesting results that should be taken seriously.

Link via Micropersuasion.

Unaware RSS Usage

The Business 2.0 blog points out a new twist in RSS usage. A recent Nielsen study that found only 11% of internet users were using RSS feeds. But a new survey from Yahoo! found that almost 31% of them are, but only 4% know it.

comScore schmomscore

Uh Oh... It looks like there are some serious issues surfacing with the comScore blog study released yesterday. Questions started to be raised by some bloggers that had problems with some blog rankings that appeared in the study.

For more on the issues surrounding this study, check out this, this and this.

comScore Blog Study

comScore has released a study entitled "The Behaviors of the Blogosphere" (PDF) that looks at the size, composition and activities of the blogosphere. There's some pretty interesting data that alludes to an affluent and extremely active audience, and the blogs they're surfing are starting to rival existing media outlets in terms of traffic.

Some interesting take-aways:

• Blogs reach 50 million people in the US (30% of US Internet users)
• Blog readers visit twice as many webpages as the average user

Get ready for the blog advertising dollars... here they come.

Link via Rick E. Bruner's Business Blog Consulting.

Update: Uh oh... issues with the study

Comscore Blog Metrics

A VC blog has posted some interesting blog numbers from Comscore. The data centers around the popularity of blogging platforms. Platforms adopted by younger bloggers, such as Livejournal and Xanga are much better at garnering repeat visits than more "mature" platforms such as Typepad.

As an example, Xanga garners a whopping 16 visits per visitor, whereas Typepad comes in at a just 2 visits per visitor.

Teens and Technology

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a new report entitled "Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation."

There are a number of areas of significant growth with teens online, including online gaming and significant growth in online shopping. One of the most interesting findings, however, is a possible forerunner for our future: instant messaging and text messages are consistently being chosen by teens over email. According to the study, they view email as "something you use to talk to “old people,” institutions, or to send complex instructions to large groups." I wouldn't be surprised to see more people adopting this stance, particularly with all the junk in our inboxes these days.

Link via Ypulse.

Awareness of Net Terms

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released new research on the Public Awareness of Internet terms. As you'd expect, a large number of respondents weren't familiar with the terms "podcasting" and "RSS feeds." The study also touches on terms like "adware", "spyware" and "phishing."

Measuring Word of Mouth

WOMMA has released a "terminology framework" for measuring word of mouth. According to the WOMMA site, the document "provides the units and nomenclature that media companies, word of mouth marketing services firms, and brand marketers can use to plan, price, buy, and measure word of mouth marketing campaigns."

The pdf is available for download here.

Blogging With Jupiter

As a part of JupiterResearch’s blogging efforts, they’ve once again invited a few bloggers to take a look at some pieces of research and blog about them. David Schatsky was kind enough to invite me to blog about some JupiterResearch I found particularly interesting.

The research report is by analyst David Daniels and is entitled: “RSS and E-mail Marketing: Exploring Viability of RSS to Supplement E-Mail Marketing.” While the report is only available to JupiterResearch clients, you can check out a concept report here.

It’s an interesting piece of research that surveys the current landscape of RSS use by marketers and specifically, what the outlook is for marketers using RSS feeds as an alternative to e-mail marketing.

Instead of rehashing the findings of this report, I’d like to focus on looking at the underlying idea, that newsletter content should be published in RSS feeds as an alternative to e-mail marketing. Is this the way things should happen?

As a part of JupiterResearch’s blogging efforts, they’ve once again invited a few bloggers to take a look at some pieces of research and blog about them. David Schatsky was kind enough to invite me to blog about some JupiterResearch I found particularly interesting.

The research report is by analyst David Daniels and is entitled: “RSS and E-mail Marketing: Exploring Viability of RSS to Supplement E-Mail Marketing.” While the report is only available to JupiterResearch clients, you can check out a concept report here.

It’s an interesting piece of research that surveys the current landscape of RSS use by marketers and specifically, what the outlook is for marketers using RSS feeds as an alternative to e-mail marketing.

Instead of rehashing the findings of this report, I’d like to focus on looking at the underlying idea, that newsletter content should be published in RSS feeds as an alternative to e-mail marketing. Is this the way things should happen?

I’ve heard this idea mentioned several times, that RSS can replace e-mail marketing. And it makes sense to think about RSS in this way. Newsletter content is mostly text and images, which can be easily mirrored in an RSS feed. The advantages of using RSS instead of e-mail are as follows:

• RSS can be deployed at a lower cost
• RSS doesn’t have barriers that e-mail does, such as spam filters

It’s important to note that these are benefits to marketers, not to consumers. So what’s the benefit to consumers?

The main benefit consumers have seen in RSS feeds is that they easily let consumers know when there’s updated content. This is why news sites and blogs have been the primary creators of RSS feeds. But RSS feeds wouldn’t really provide any advantage over e-mail delivery. Seeing new content in an RSS feed reader is as easy as seeing a new e-mail in your inbox. And newsletter content isn’t updated daily.

Ok, so I could also argue that newsletter content delivered in RSS feeds means less clutter in my inbox, but this doesn’t hold up either. The amount of clutter would remain unchanged, as consumers would have a cluttered RSS reader replacing a cluttered e-mail inbox.

There may not be much benefit to consumers at all in having newsletter content in RSS feeds. In fact, RSS may actually create a major disadvantage from the user perspective. The JupiterResearch report points out that RSS “does not offer the targeting and personalization capabilities of e-mail.” As we know, many marketers use dynamically created content to keep their newsletters personalized, targeted and relevant to the consumer. It’s possible that these type of newsletters, in RSS format, would actually be less relevant to consumers than if they were delivered via e-mail. Let’s not forget that this is a disadvantage to marketers as well, since performance can suffer when content is less targeted.

While there may not be many advantages to consumers to get newsletter content in RSS, I think it’s important to remember that the technology is in a relative infancy when it comes to marketing. Marketers and consumers alike are finding new ways to use RSS feeds. We can see that when we look at recent innovations such as podcasting. And as consumer adoption of RSS grows, both groups may find advantages we haven’t even thought of yet. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic above, and thanks again to David Schatsky at JupiterResearch for letting us bloggers participate in these discussions. If you haven’t checked out the JupiterResearch analyst blogs, you should.

The Open Media 100

The Always On Network has published an annual list it describes as the top 100 "power list of bloggers, social networkers, tool smiths, and investors leading the Open Media Revolution." The list was created by a combination of blogger nominations, surveys and Technorati data. In addition to the top 100, they've included 50 honorable mentions.

JupiterResearch Podcasting

JupiterResearch adds podcasting to an already impressive group of analyst blogs with JupiterResearch "Conversations."  One of the first podcasts, entitled "Blogs and Brands", is worth checking out... although the quality of sound leaves a little to be desired.

Link via B.L. Ochman.

Microsoft Hawking R&D Work

Microsoft has started an IP Ventures site, offering licensing opportunities for various research technologies of theirs.  There are some pretty interesting things up there, like WiFi Positioning, Face Detection and Tracking, and yeah, some other stuff.  The price for licensing?  Aha.  Product roylaties or a share in the company.

I'd be surprised if they went through with it, but Microsoft would get a lot of cool points for this if they released all this code as open source.  Even if it was a non-commercial license.

Link to Yahoo! story.

Pew: Podcasting Catches On

The Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new report entitled "Podcasting Catches On." According to the report, more than 6 million Americans have listened to podcasts.

The only thing I'd love to see clarified is something that stuck in my mind... Why the attachment to the portable audio player? You don't need to have a portable audio player to listen to podcasts. I rarely put any podcasts on my iPod.

I'd love to see some statistics about how many podcast listeners actually listen to them on portable audio players, and how many just listen on their computers.

Link via Micro Persuasion.

Yahoo! Buzz Game

Yahoo! Research Labs has launched a "Tech Buzz Game" that, according to the site, is a "fantasy prediction market for high-tech products, concepts, and trends."

The goal is to pick products, concepts and trends that you believe will increase in future popularity. This popularity is measured by Yahoo! search data.

Link via John Battelle.

Blog for Jupiter Research

Jupiter Research was one of the first Analyst firms to start blogging, and I'm a regular reader of all their analyst blogs. In a move to further leverage the power of the blogosphere, Jupiter Research is going to allow some bloggers full access to their paid reports, so they can offer a differing opinion and blog about it. Bloggers will not be able to republish reports, but basically take a look and offer some analysis of the reports Jupiter has created.

This might be a great way for Jupiter to sell more reports. You can see the open call for bloggers, along with details, on Jupiter Analyst David Schatsky's blog.

Dueling Blog Surveys?

Blogads has just released its second annual blog reader survey, and the overriding sentiment that many are taking out of it is the following: Blog readers are influencers.

How does the study determine this? Well, it asked the standard questions that many PR folks ask. Blogads says that "To qualify as an official "influential," RoperASW, the leading firm consulting in the field, you have to answer 3 of those questions (excluding a petition) in the affirmative."

Looks like blog readers have a "disproportionate" amount of these influencers.

Interestingly enough, the Gallup organization has just released an article (must have paid access) entitled: Blogs Not Yet in the Media Big Leagues. They give the following summary:

"The apparent effect that blogging is having within media and political circles is far ahead of its direct impact on the American public. Relatively few Americans are generally familiar with the phenomenon, and fewer still are reading blogs with any frequency. Even among the most blog-conscious demographic -- 18- to 29-year-olds -- frequent blog reading is the exception."

Why the different conclusions?

Links via PSFK, MarketingVOX.

Eyetracking for Search

Seth Godin posts about the results of a new eyetracking study on Google search results from Enquiro. It basically reinforces what we've known, that top organic rankings are key. What's more, though, this study shows that being above the fold and in organic rankings is the absolute best scenario.

I wonder if being above the fold on the second page of search results (11-14) is better than being below the fold on the first (1-3)?

Original link via Search Engine Watch.

New Pew Report: Search

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a new report on search engine users, with some interesting results. One interesting finding from the report:

"Only 38% of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored” results and unpaid results. And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not."