Alex at Read/WriteWeb offers a summary of what RSS offers - and more importantly currently lacks - that can be understood even by non-techies (ok, not complete non-techies). He poses the core question of whether RSS could become the common format for a semantic web. If anyone knows the answer…please do tell.
Congrats to Matthew and his gang for pulling off a second Blogging4Business conference. Written up here by Richard Wray (and in copious detail over at Cybersoc)
On a connected point - I stumbled across this white paper from Lewis Pr on business blogging the other day. A bit late I know. And guess what - it didn’t suck. Lots of nice diagrams to pinch. Written up on their blog here. (and yes, I’m sure pretty much everywhere else - but I just haven’t noticed.)
Following hot on the heels of the online ad figures, comes the latest broadband stats from Ofcom - and the headline is that more than half of UK adults live in households with a broadband connection.
Some other bits of interest from the full report (.pdf here)
* 51% of adults with broadband had accessed online video clips, 26% doing it weekly.
* The rate of growth is (unsurprisingly slowing down) - there were 3.2m net additions in 2006 vs 3.8m in 2005.
* BT with 24% market share, took 29% of net additions in 2006 despite the ‘free broadband’ frenzy.
* The top 10% of users download almost twice as much content per month as the other 90% put together (40.7GB vs 21.2GB)
* (Only) one in five consumers take broadband as part of a bundle.
* People are switching - 27% of residential internet users in Q3 had said they had switched, with 11% saying they had switched in the last year.
And on the wireless internet
* 31% of adults have internet enabled phones, half of them use them go to online.
* Only 6% of adults have a data card, only 5% a mobile enabled PDA.
* Most common internet activity on a mobile phone is ‘news, weather, sports headlines’
And on Wi-fi
* By Sept 2006, there were 12,000 commercial public hotspots - a 32% y-o-y increase
* Over 60% of commercial hotspots are in cafes, bars or restaurants
* Only 34% of adults who own a wi-fi enabled laptop use a wi-fi hotspot
Sitting through two sets of pitches five years apart for the Guardian and Guardian Unlimted’s ad agency, you become aware all too quickly of just how few decent ideas there are out there. One agency a few years ago proved the point to us of how similar newspaper TV ads were by running two of our rivals ads back to back - but with the soundtracks switched. No-one noticed.
Anyway - obviously I’m biased, but after the rather pedestrian ‘We’ve got a big website according to some spurious stats’ claim from the Telegraph; and Times Online’s ‘Here’s a witty quote from our content’ (the oldest trick in the book - and I felt a real missed opportunity to get across the idea that their website was ‘new and improved), I think the Guardian’s work stands up rather well - and its also a great case history for outdoor media. The pic above is at my local station - deep in enemy territory for the Guardian..I’m sure I’ve seen a few more copies on the train since we started.
But in case you’ve miseed it - my favourite is this ad - which I think is visually striking and captures the times and the Guardian’s tone of voice perfectly.
I’m finding myself rather fond of the very un-hyped, Google Notebook as a sort of private mini-del.icio.us (handy to have separate note books for home, and stuff I might get round to blogging about etc).
NewTeeVee picks up on some research by Millward Brown which shows that recall of ads shown in TV programmes online is much higher than when shown on a TV or through a DVR. This sounds rather exciting, until you read the final bit of the release.
All platforms tested had positive impact, but the results show a higher level of engagement among the online viewers — leading to increased communications awareness, brand favorability and consideration. This is supported by the fact that online viewers were 53 percent more likely to pay attention to the ads during commercial breaks versus live TV viewers. Time-shifted viewers were 30 percent less likely to pay attention to the ads than live TV viewers. The study also shows that ad recall was four times higher among viewers of the online format versus recall of live or time-shifted viewers. This in large part reflects that the online ad format shows the same ad (and only that ad) three to six times during the course of a program. Ads on network TV are shown once, within a pod of several commercials, and there are several commercial pods during a single program.
OK - so much higher recall because, errr..they saw the ad three to six times! Amazing. Who would have thought it. Oh, well - at least it wasn’t lower recall.
If you work for an AOP member company, you can download the Digital Life research we did at the end of last year. To be honest, it’s more an compilation of publicly available information, rather than original data - but it’s been put together really well, and provides a great snapshot of the Uk digital media landscape.