Robert Scoble in his May 13, 2007 We Need Better Statistics post does a nice job of starting off a discussion of the problems currently experienced by anyone who tries to make sense of web usage statistics.
All in Demographics
The Revolution Will Be Online, Not Televised
Last week in Social Media, Demographics, and Antiwar Demonstrations I commented on how the demographics of large protest demonstrations seemed to be changing due to availability of electronic alternatives for organizing and conducting protests.
I heard a snippet of a news report this morning commenting on the apparent difference in ages between anti-war demonstrators today and anti-war demonstrators during the Vietnam War era. The comment I think I heard was that today's demonstrators tend to be much older and grayer.
Jeremiah Owyang has a good rundown of current discussions among PR and media luminaries about whether social media are "adopted" or not.
My initial response: "So, what else is new?"
Who Is Writing and Reading Online Tech Magazines?
Dian Schaffhauser’s post If I Were Editor… in Sourcingmag.com’s Blogosphere takes online magazines (such as eWeek, InformationWeek, InfoWorld, and CIO) to task for an interesting reason:
I learned basic data analysis techniques by studying the relationship between demographics and political opinion poll responses. As an undergraduate in a graduate Political Science course at Ohio State University I used 80 column punch cards (send me an email if you don't know what that means) to instruct an IBM mainframe computer to crosstabulate age, sex, income, and race data with voting behavior and political opinions.
Now you can do the same stuff online with little more than an Internet connection and a browser.
Tom Mohr in Winning Online - a Manifesto provides a sobering view of the challenges newspapers face in adjusting to a Web 2.0 world where online advertising revenue today still accounts for less than 6% of total annual newspaper advertising revenue -- and total advertising revenue is declining.
I received the following email from fellow blogger Chris Law (1000 Flowers Bloom) in response to my article Web 2.0 and Maintaining the Integrity of Online Intellectual Property:
I really like your article. One thing that I think is very much related is what happens if it’s not a document? What if it’s say the classified listings on my site that are then being mashed up with a Google Map?
I haven’t really decided how “revolutionary” web 2.0 applications are. One school of thought is that web 2.0 applications like blogs, podcasts, and wikis are “just another set of channels” to be considered in the overall mix of ways to manage communications with one’s target markets and customers. There’s another school of thought, though, that suggests that the interactivity and social networking aspects of Web 2.0 are finamentally changing the balance of power and influence in the marketplace in a profound way. I come down somewhere in the middle.