I was really impressed this morning when I noticed that one of my favoroite bloggers -- Loic Le Meur -- had a nice summary of the Future of the Internet II Report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Loic, by the way, is the number one blogger in France.

Turns out that the Pew had a nice summary of the report, complete with byte-size bullet points. In essence, they did the bloggers' work by making it easy for anyone to quote the report succinctly. The PR world has done this type of thing of years, and it works nicely. I've known a couple of reports who made decent livings by rewriting press releases.  As best as I can tell from Technorati, some 71 blogs have quoted the report.

The moral of the story--make it easy for people to use your stuff.

So here's the summary, and let's just say that at least 72 blogs have quoted the report:

• A low-cost global network will be thriving and creating new opportunities in a “flattening” world.
• Humans will remain in charge of technology, even as more activity is automated and “smart agents” proliferate. However, a significant 42% of survey respondents were pessimistic about humans’ ability to control the technology in the future. This significant majority agreed that dangers and dependencies will grow beyond our ability to stay in charge of technology. This was one of the major surprises in the survey.
• Virtual reality will be compelling enough to enhance worker productivity and also spawn new addiction problems.
• Tech “refuseniks” will emerge as a cultural group characterized by their choice to live off the network. Some will do this as a benign way to limit information overload, while others will commit acts of violence and terror against technology-inspired change.
• People will wittingly and unwittingly disclose more about themselves, gaining some benefits in the process even as they lose some privacy.
• English will be a universal language of global communications, but other languages will not be displaced. Indeed, many felt other languages such as Mandarin, would grow in prominence.

 Dare Obasjano has an excellent trip report  on a talk given by Danah Boyd at  the recent ETech conference. Boyd is a social researcher at Yahoo. She talked about the difficulty in taking Web services global across ethnic and cultural lines. In particular, I liked the section on why some services succeed:

ETech 2006 Trip Report: G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide

Craig's List, Flickr and MySpace are examples of a new generation of successful social software. All three services have the following basic characteristics

• Passionate designers and users: The creators of the services are passionate about the service they've created and use it themselves. All three services were seeded by friends and family of the founder(s) who became the foundation of a strong base of passionate users.

• Public Personalities: Tom (MySpace), Stewart (Flickr) and Craig (Craig's List) put a human face on the service by directly interacting with users either in support roles or to give updates on the status of the service.

• Integrated feedback loop: Changes to the sites are driven by customer demand which is often given directly to the people building the products

Just posted on my New Media blog why I think Live.com is the newspaper of the future.

[Via Read/WriteWeb]

Latest SNS Numbers - MySpace Streaks Ahead:

A USA Today article reveals that MySpace has now reached 47.3 million members. The Blog Herald also reports that MySpace "is growing by an amazing 160,000 new users a day, according to MediaPost".

USA Today gives a rundown of numbers for SNS sites, c/o comScore Media Metrix. They note that "in the past year, the number of visitors to MySpace (from homes, workplaces and colleges) has skyrocketed, making it the Web’s top social networking site":

MySpace.com
Nov. 2004: 4.9 million
Nov. 2005: 26.7 million

Facebook.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 11.1 million

Xanga.com
Nov. 2004: 5.8 million
Nov. 2005: 7.9 million

Bebo.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 1.5 million

Friendster.com
Nov. 2004: 966,000
Nov. 2005: 1.5 million

Tribe Networks Inc.
Nov. 2004: 62,000
Nov. 2005: 515,000

Linkedin.com
Nov. 2004: 123,000
Nov. 2005: 354,188

Orkut.com
Nov. 2004: N/A
Nov. 2005: 83,000

Source: comScore Media Metrix, a division of comScore Networks, Inc.

For some reason, USA Today didn't include LiveJournal in their chart. According to official stats, LiveJournal currently has 9 million user accounts - but only a little under 2 million are "active". That would put LJ at number 3 or 4 in the above chart.

The demographics of SNS sites are interesting. LiveJournal users are skewed to 16-20 years and are 2/3 female. MySpace is said to be mostly < 22 yrs and general consensus is that it's a younger user base than LJ.

All of these SNS services have a very young user base, so in many ways it's a battle for the hearts and minds of Generation Y and beyond. MySpace may be winning in numbers, but recent controversy shows they can't get complacent.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - New Year Resolutions.

I’ve had the pleasure of shooting the breeze with Dare on a couple of occasions. He is really a bright guy. I really like is second resolution—Write more articles.

Writing is such hard work and takes so long to do. But he’s got a lot of great insight to share with others.

Yes, the “Man dies having sex with horse” story was the top performer, so to speak, on the Seattle Times Web site. Peter M. Zollman nails this one in his analysis of the story:

There's a serious point here, folks. I think one reason newspapers in the United States are seeing such a steady decline in circulation can be summed up in one word: "Boring." Because they're monopolies, lots of U.S. daily newspapers are flat out snoozers. Entry continued...

One thing the Web lets us do is track the popularity of content and gives us an approximate amount of time readers spent on the story. No more guessing what people really want. From what I’ve seen in Web statistics, readers want useful information that impacts their lives, or they want something highly entertaining and different. A steady diet of people having sex with horses would get boring pretty quickly.

[Via Poynter E-Media Tidbits]

A columnist suggests that reporters should take the year off and let bloggers gather the news. Great idea, but what would happen if no one noticed? Being a former labor reporter who witnessed many strikes, I would suggest not entering a strike that can’t be won.

A Tucson Weekly columnist put forth the half-joking suggestion that real journalists should take a year off and give bloggers nothing to borrow, as I'm doing here.

The Wall Street Journal’s law page staff are blogging. The Law Page will be updated throughout the day by the Journal’s legal reporters. This is a fantastic way of getting important information out to readers who are highly interested in this content.

WSJ.com Introduces a Page And Blog on Law and Business

To Our Readers:

Whether the story is a surprise merger, a push for new hedge-fund rules or an intellectual-property dispute over the latest gadget, The Wall Street Journal Online is known for its authoritative and comprehensive coverage of the biggest news of the day. But behind most of these important business stories is an equally compelling law story – about attorneys, their clients and their strategies.

Today, WSJ.com introduces its new Law Page, covering law, business and the business of law. We will be writing about news, trends and buzz for lawyers at firms and in-house law departments, as well as the business people who work with them.

Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute has some interesting advice on how some newspapers could have minimized the damage they caused by inaccurately reporting in their early editions that the 12 West Virginia miners had been found alive.

He says the papers could have urged readers to check their Web sites for the most up-to-date information. He also says they could have sent out e-mail corrections to subscribers.

It’s interesting that many newspapers haven’t learned to connect the Web to their print editions. The marketing world tries to connect print advertising to the Web as much as possible. It doesn’t always work well as traffic generated by ads is usually low, but most advertisers do make the effort.

Coal Miners Story: A Partial Solution for Print:

My local daily newspaper this morning had the story of "12 West Virginia miners found alive," just as did most morning newspapers in the U.S. (To see this morning's U.S. newspaper front pages, hurry over to the Newseum's front-pages feature.) Of course, it didn't turn out that way in the end; the real facts of 12 deaths emerged in the middle of the night, well after most press runs.

Now, hindsight is 20/20, as the cliche goes. But here's what I think newspaper front-page editors should have done last night: Published an info box accompanying the story pointing people (...)

Entry continued...

Interesting posting from Poynter that a monthly business magazine has created a daily online publication. I wonder if the online publication can generate enough useful information to keep readers coming back to the site on a regular basis?  

Since one of my early jobs in journalism was as managing editor of Colorado Business magazine (now Colorado Biz), I'm intrigued by its online revamping as announced in the January 2006 issue. As explained by editor Robert Schwab in his monthly print-edition column, the magazine has hired a new online editor, Keith DuBay, who is spearheading a major website redesign, due out soon.

The important piece of this is that DuBay is being charged with taking the monthly magazine into daily business coverage territory. Colorado Biz Today is meant as "a daily online measure of statewide business news, with (...)

Entry continued...

Moved to The New Media Blog.

Interesting analysis by Krk McElhearn on why online newspapers fall short. But I think he misses a key point of where the online media goes wrong -- online readers have very different expectations. They want useful information and they want it fast. Computers are not optimal devices for reading. Usability guru Jacob Neilsen maintains that people read about 25-30% slower on a computer. Moreover, his studies show that online readers are task driven. They go to Web to find out specific information and then move on. Newspapers and other printed publications are optimal for readers with time, lots of time.

It's always interesting (and refreshing) to read opinions about online news sites from people outside the industry. Yesterday, I stumbled across Kirk McElhearn's article, "Why Haven't Online Newspapers Gotten It Right?" McElhearn focuses mainly on problems of news-site presentation. The article is worth a quick read. My favorite quote:

"As newspapers dumb down their presentation in order to fight the clickitis of modern readers, they do themselves a disservice, and end up killing off many of their potential readers. In addition, they fill their pages with annoying flashing, moving ads, which will scare off ever more readers, at least (...)Entry continued...

[Via Poynter E-Media Tidbits]

We've launched the U.S. Congress Votes Database, which lets you browse every vote in the U.S. Congress since 1991. One of the site's features is an RSS feed for every active member of Congress, updated each time he or she votes. There's also a feed of the latest votes.

See the RSS page for full information about the feeds.

Of course, this data is open to remixing, so, if you're a developer/tinkerer, feel free to download feeds and come up with something interesting. In fact, a couple of people have already done so:

• Garrick Van Buren put together MNRep - How Minnesota’s Congressional Representatives Voted.
• A fellow named Jacob in Illinois put together a small aggregation of how his representatives are voting.

Please let us know if you create a mashup, so we can spotlight it here. Also get in touch if you think of any other related RSS feeds we can offer. E-mail me at adrian.holovaty (at) wpni (dot) com.

read more | 3 readsPublic Workers Used in News Promos by kpaul.mallasch (Advertising | Network | PR/Marketing | Television) Anne Blythe at...

You may be surprised at the latter choice - Microsoft a Web company? But in 2005 Microsoft has embraced the Web as a development platform in a big way... This was followed by The Live Era announcements - Windows Live and Office Live. Their catchphrase was 'software as a service' and the release of so-called leaked documents by Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie confirmed that Microsoft is meeting the Web challenge head-on.

Best Web LittleCo of 2005: 37Signals

As I mentioned above, last year I gave this to Ludicorp - the then independent company that created Flickr (now of course owned by Yahoo). There are a lot of 'smaller' companies that continue to battle away in the shadow of the big companies - not all of them trying to cash out to the bigcos either. Ones that spring to my mind are Feedburner, Technorati, Feedster, 43Things.com, Topix.net, Findory, Odeo, Broadband Mechanics, WebJay, Jotspot, Six Apart, PubSub, Rojo, Newsgator, MySpace, Facebook, Gawker, zvents, Flock, Blogbridge, Chandler, Firefox, Adaptive Path, Spanning Partners, SocialText... I could go on all night and I apologize to those I missed mentioning. 

But the one LittleCo that really stood out in the Web world in 2005, based on the buzz it created for itself and its almost slavish 'less is more' design philosophy, was 37Signals. Their flagship product is Basecamp, a web-based project management product. Their other claim to fame is Ruby on Rails, an open source web development framework created by 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson. Ruby on Rails got rave reviews from developers throughout 2005 and at one point it seemed like every 'cool' Web startup was using Rails!

The other thing I have to admire about 37Signals is the community of people they've created around their products and philosophies, centered at the Signal vs Noise weblog. The number of comments they get on that weblog is phenomenal. Love 'em or hate 'em, 37Signals shows that a little Web company can still have a big impact.

This is something to really watch that citizen's media guru Dan Gillmour is undertaking. I have many reservations about the citizen's media concept, but I'm extremely happy someone is giving it a shot. It's the only way we'll find out what works and doesn't work.

Dan Gillmour's blog

Some news:

Starting in 2006, I'll be putting together a nonprofit Center for Citizen Media. The goals are to study, encourage and help enable the emergent grassroots media sphere, with a major focus on citizen journalism.

I'm thrilled and honored that the center will be affiliated with two superb universities in a bi-coastal partnership.

• Here on the Pacific Rim, where I live, the center will collaborate with the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. As an I.F. Stone Teaching Fellow, I'll do a class next fall, and my principal physical office will be at Berkeley as well.
• Our Atlantic-facing partner is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School, where I'll be a Research Fellow. I'll visit there regularly -- at least once a month -- to work with other fellows, faculty and students.

We also plan to sponsor regular gatherings at both locations (and, I hope, elsewhere in my travels) for people interested in citizen journalism.

Why do this? We need a thriving media and journalism ecosystem. We need what big institutions do so well, but we also need the bottom-up -- or, more accurately, edge-in -- knowledge and ideas of what I've called the "former audience" that has become a vital part of the system. I'm also anxious to see that it's done honorably and in a way that helps foster a truly informed citizenry. I think I can help.

This is a nonpartisan initative. I aim to help anyone, regardless of political views, who has a constructive project and who is interested in expanding the reach of citizen media in an principled way.

The center will live virtually at citmedia.org. I'll be posting more details there in the relatively near future.

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen estimates the Web now has 1 billion users. Some 36 percent of the users are from Asia compared to 23 percent in North America.

One Billion Internet Users (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox).

Summary:
The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.

I'd like some way to confirm this, but if it's true, as has been claimed by the company, that MySpace has 10% of all available advertising inventory on the Web, then Murdoch got a deal at $600 million or so. The web is surely worth more than ten times that number...and MySpace is a very, very desired demographic by marketers.