“Nielsen//NetRatings… announced today that the number of active broadband users from home increased 28% year-over-year, from 74.3 million in February 2005 to 95.5 million in February 2006. Broadband composition among the U.S. active online population has seen vigorous growth during the past three years, increasing at least ten percentage points annually and hitting an all-time high of 68% for active Internet users in February 2006.” [via RAIN]
Tag Archives: Early Net Culture
Rural broadband on the rise
“Rural Americans are less likely to log on to the internet at home with high-speed internet connections than people living in other parts of the country. By the end of 2005, 24% of adult rural Americans went online at home with high-speed internet connections compared with 39% of adults in urban and suburban areas.”
— Pew Internet & American Life Project of high-speed Internet access in rural America
Value of New Media vs. Old Media
Jeff Jarvis on the the Rockeboom ad auction:
And here we have in a microcosm the explanation of why media is so horribly out of sync today: The public is valuing new media much more than the old, but the advertisers still value the old. Most every newspaper and in many cases TV networks and magazines have much larger audiences online, but the revenue for their old media properties remains much higher because the advertisers and agencies still value the old and the safe. They want metrics. They want control. They want guarantees. This, in turn, makes big publishers and producers play it safe because they don’t want to mess with the cash cow. And that means that advertisers miss the opportunity to reach a larger, younger, smarter audience in the new medium, which is — supposedly — what they’re dying to do. And that means that big media companies now face competition from a thousand Rocketbooms and a million Gawkers.
And if you are in the media/advertising business and you’ve never heard of Rocketboom or Gawker… you’re probably already screwed. Tick, tock…tick, tock.
Guy Kawasaki’s tips for effective email
- Attach files infrequently. How often do you get an email that says, “Please read the attached letter.”? Then you open the attachment, and it’s a dumb-shitcake Word document with a three paragraph message that could have easily been copied and pasted into the email.
- Never forward something that you think is funny. The odds are that by the time you’ve received it, your recipient already has too, so what is intended as funny is now tedious.
May I add one of my own? When you send an all-company email, please put the recipients in the BCC field so we don’t have to scroll through 300 names. And please, try to resist the impulse to reply-to-all with something witty like, “I couldn’t agree more.” The reply-to-all button should automatically include something along the lines of “This is a Reply-to-All from a Clueless Ass-Clown” …right at the top of the message.
Five hours a week listening to radio
“Online users spend as much time surfing the web as they do watching TV, and they spend far more time at it than they spend with other media, says a new study from Jupiter Research. The report was based on a survey of just under 3,000 regular online users, defined as people who go online at least once a month from home, work or school. It found that on average online users are now spending about 14 hours a week surfing the internet, which is equal to the amount of time that they spend watching TV. By comparison, on average each week they spend one hour reading magazines, two hours perusing newspapers and five hours tuning into the radio. In fact, they spend more time online than they do with all those other media combined.” [Heidi Dawley, Media Life]
Sounds like 30 minutes of radio listening (on average) on the way to and from work each weekday. Compared to a couple of hours online every day.
High speed Internet access
A co-worker recently announced that he could finally get high-speed Internet access (Sprint ADSL) at his appartment. The speed/price package was much better than mine, so I called the Sprint folks. Now, I’m probably jinxing myself with this post but I can’t resist.
I’m currently paying $60 per month for 1.5M download/256k upload. Beginning tomorrow, that goes up to 3M down/??? upload, for the same price (thanks to some kind of rebate). Still not up there with cable speeds but a long way from the 2400 baud dial-ups of yesteryear. I’ll let you know if access seems twice as fast.
Unbundled Media
“The natural ability of the Internet to distribute unbundled media is disrupting broadcasting’s basic business, and that will accelerate in 2006.” (The Unbundled Awakening by Terry Heaton)
After reading this excellent piece, I can’t get the idea of “unbundled media” out of my head. Like all broadcast media, radio stations offer a bundle of content/programming. Music, weather, sports, news, etc. We bundle it all together in something we call a format and deliver it to the audience (in a very linear manner).
I remember getting calls from frustrated listeners demanding to know when I was going to give the school closing report (I had just given it 2 minutes earlier but they had missed it.) They couldn’t get it when they wanted it because it had to be bundled up with other content/programming.
For the past 20+ years I have worked for a company that supplies content/programming to radio stations and for most of that time, a big part of my job was to insure that our “stuff” made it into the bundle.
And now the unbundling has begun. iTunes has just about any song I might want to hear. Weather.com has my forecast. Cancellations.com (or my school’s website) has the cancellations. Same for school lunch menus.
And RSS means I won’t even have to go searching for all this. It will come to me. Wherever I am.
It seems pretty clear that most people don’t want their media bundled. They like to choose. A bit of a sticky wicket for businesses dependent on being part of the bundle. Is the value shifting from being able to bundle (TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, etc)… to creating the content that was once part of that bundle?
Media Maturity
Jon Fine (BusinessWeek online) on mature media:
“You can’t imagine letting people leave comments about you for everyone to see. You can’t imagine rank amateurs’ content being more attractive than that produced by a Mature Medium. (You silently scream: “It took me decades to get where I am!”) You can’t see that News Corp. and Suzuki have calculated — zenlike — that the only way to maintain control is to give it up. That they realize media go both ways now. That they can’t hide behind their accustomed walls. To do so may protect your flank, but at the risk of closing yourself off to the Next Big Thing.”
I am making a concerted effort to not talk about “all of this,” because it is simply impossible to grok what’s happening if you are not participating in it. Non-bloggers can’t see the attraction, let alone the implications. Those who aren’t listening to podcasts, can’t understand why anyone would or how it might impact their business. Like they say in the hospital movies, “I’m afraid all we can do now is try to keep him comfortable.”
Nursing home bloggers
A couple of years ago I wondered if they have Internet access in nursing homes. I thought it made sense back then but now it seems…inevitable. I’m sure there must be nursing homes with net access for residents. But are there people living in nursing homes who are blogging? If so, (and there must be) it would seem to raise some interesting issues.
Most of Barb’s clients are individuals or corporations in the area of “long term care.” And she’s something of an expert in this area, but she really didn’t have ready answers to my questions. Good lawyers seldom do.
Here’s a scenerio: I’m 75 years old and still have most of my marbles but my kids don’t think I should be living alone so we all agree I should move into Sunnyvale Estates where I can get the day-to-day care I need. I have my own room and my one phone-line. Every day I flip open my Thinkpad, log in to my Typepad account, and blog away.
Let’s say I notice a little whiff scotch on the breath of the aide that brings me my lunch (luke-warm hotdog cut into tiny, no-choke bites…and apple sauce). I report it to the administration but they don’t do anything, so I blog it. A reporter for the New York Times happens to be researching a story on nursing homes and finds my blog. (Sound of shit hitting the adult diaper).
Or maybe I’m bed-fast for a while and I start getting a bed sore. So I take a photo with my little digital camera and post it to my blog. Hello!
My question to Barb was: Could the nursing home administration keep me from blogging. Did I give up my first-amendment rights when I moved in? Certainly the other residents have a right to privacy and I couldn’t/shouldn’t violate that with my blogging. But let’s say I stuck pretty much with my life and care in the facility. Can the nursing home stop me? And on what grounds?
I can’t believe this hasn’t come up yet. A Technorati search on “nursing home” lists 53,000+ posts. Looks like there are lots of posts about family members who are in nursing homes but (the few I scanned) didn’t appear to be written by a resident.
One might argue that by the time someone has to move to a nursing home, they are no longer capable of maintaining a blog. I spent a good deal of time in an excellent facility where my father spent the last few years of his life. And many of the residents probably could not have handled the logistics of blogging, even if they knew what it was.
But that was then and this is now. When we boomers move to Sunnyvale, we’re damn sure gonna want net access and we’ll have it with high-speed, state-of-the-art mobile phones. And a few million of us will be bloggers. An enlightened administrator would get out in front of this. Hell, blogging might be better for the residents than bingo. And it might offer other benefits. Why not encourage it. Might even be a good idea to have the Sunnyvale Estates Blog so you can engage in the conversation swirling around you.
[When I moved from Blogger to Typepad, I lost the link to the excellent cartoon site from which image above was linked. If anyone can provide the url, I’d like to add it here.]
Update: Found this AP story over at MSNBC: “Web savvy seniors embrace blogs”
Ford squeezes office into truck
Ford Motor unveiled a mobile office designed for the new F-Series truck that includes a touch-screen computer, printer, wireless broadband access and Global Positioning System. Ford, which introduced its mobile office at last week’s Specialty Equipment Market Association show in Las Vegas, is targeting general contractors but the first thing I thought of was farmers and ranchers. [C|net]
When we first started repurposing content from our farm network for the web, everyone said, “Farmers don’t have access to the Internet.” When we started streaming our audio reports, they pointed out, “Farmers are on very slow dial-ups and can’t access rich media.”
I’m no visionary. I just pull my head out of my ass a couple of times a day and take a look around. If your pick-up is your office, this is gonna make sense to a lot of farmers.