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Robin Hamman pointed me to some interesting research into global adoption of online “Social Media” by a PR firm, Universal McCann. On the good side, the research is longitudinal (this is the third wave of research, which started in 2006). It also covers Internet users in 29 countries - more breadth than most studies. But it also clearly needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The methodology is not clear but it looks like people were recruited to fill out online surveys of their usage (how were they found? To what extent were they self-selected?). They also chose a rather special target group - people who use the internet every day or every other day and are between 16 and 54 years old - a group they call the “active Internet universe”.

Having selected this unusually “net savvy” group they then find, unsurprisingly, a higher rate of adoption of social media/web 2.0 applications than the phone and face to face interview-based surveys I am familiar with. For example, 25.3% of the McCann UK sample had (at some point) started their own weblog - this compares to the Oxford Internet Institute’s 2007 figure of 9% of Internet users having maintained their own weblog in the last year. And while it is interesting to know that 70.3% of the Chinese “active Internet universe” had started a blog at some point you have to bear in mind (as they themselves point out) that “emerging Internet markets tend to have a demographical profile that fits the early adopter” (on slide 22 you see that in China only 6.4% of all 16-54 year olds fit their “active Internet universe” profile).

Given the limitations of the data outlined, it is hard to justify the kind of sweeping statements that are then made about the significance of social media eg “Over time, all users increase the regularity of usage. Eventually everybody will be an active user, as they have been with television.” (slide 7) or “The blogosphere is now so large it is an accurate barometer of consumer opinion” (slide 33). But if you avoid the hype you may be able to find some info-nuggets…

Why do smart people make irrational decisions every day? Why do we repeatedly make the same mistakes when we make our selections? How do our expectations influence our actual opinions and decisions? The answers, as revealed by behavioural economist Professor Dan Ariely of MIT, will surprise you.

The audio and slides are available here. To subscribe to the LSE’s podcasts or download individual lectures by other speakers go here.

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I saw a new link labelled “share your story” under my name in Twitter. I thought “hmmm - is Twitter trying to get into the blogging arena with a space for longer-form entries or is it trying to set up a profile page for each user?” So I click on it and I find they want my age, gender and location and why I use Twitter. It’s a marketing survey! Not what I think of as “my story” - guess my interest in digital storytelling skews my perspective on such matters…

Ofcom (2008) “Social Networking: A Quantitative and Qualitative Research Report into Attitudes, Behaviours and Use”

As well as the new UK survey and qualitative information it provides, it contains a review of the literature on the social networking focused on potential harms co-authored by Sonia Livingstone and Andrea Milwood Hargrave with myself contributing. We would be interested to hear any reactions.

The charitable organization MySociety which builds civic websites in the UK has launched its first campaign - Free Our Bills. It’s a rather wonkish one but well worth supporting. Basically they are putting pressure on parliament to improve the way it publishes legislation online to make it easier for independent groups like them to parse the data and pull out key parts of the text (see their detailed description of the changes sought if you are interested).

Alvi, I., et al. (2007) “Meeting Their Potential: The Role of Education and Technology in Overcoming Disadvantage and Disaffection in Young People” - the 125 page report is free to download from BECTA, which sponsored it - co-authors from Media@LSE include Sonia Livingstone, Ellen Helsper and myself. Comments would be welcome.

LJ provides one of the most flexible and powerful toolsets for protecting weblog users’ privacy available today. Unfortunately, I just discovered that only paid LJ accounts have the ability to change the privacy levels of several posts at once. Surely a tool mainly useful to help users protect their privacy when they miscalculate their exposure shouldn’t be made into an added-cost ‘extra’?

I came across a great piece of research six years ago - interviews and focus groups in the UK with general public, ethnic minorities and people disadvantaged by disability or homelessness looking at their attitudes towards e-democracy proposals and what might encourage them to participate. It was commissioned by the Office of the e-Envoy and published online on edemocracy.gov.uk - a website to support consultation on edemocracy proposals. Alas, first that website and then the e-Envoy’s office were closed, and the archive of the e-Envoy’s site didn’t include this document anywhere. So in the interests of science (and with the permission of the report’s original authors, Creative Research) I have hosted the report myself. So if you’re interested in e-democracy, check out:
Creative Research (2002) “E-Democracy: Report of Research Findings” Office of the e-Envoy, London. http://davidbrake.org/ukedemocsresearch.pdf

It’s dismaying to me to see that even in a country with a healthy budget for and interest in egovernment, valuable information (paid for by the taxpayers!) can disappear from view after just six years…

Respected researchers at the Crimes against Children Research Center have released an excellent new paper debunking myths about the use of the Internet to get underage sex. Much of the information contained in the press release and the paper has been published before but it bears repeating.

Most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who are open about their interest in sex. The offenders use instant messages, e-mail and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with their victims. In most of the cases, the victims are aware that they are talking online with adults.

A majority of the offenders are charged with crimes such as statutory rape, that involve non-forcible sexual activity with adolescent victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults.

What is new (at least to me) is their assertion that:

adolescents’ use of popular social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook do not appear to increase their risk of being victimized by online predators. Rather, it is risky online interactions such as talking online about sex to unknown people that increases vulnerability

The paper is freely downloadable:
Online “Predators” and Their Victims: Myths, Realities, and Implications for Prevention and Treatment, by Janis Wolak, PhD, David Finkelhor, PhD and Kimberley J. Mitchell, PhD Crimes Against Children Center at the University of New Hampshire and Michelle L. Ybarra, PhD, Internet Solutions for Kids, Inc., in American Psychologist, Vol. 63, No.2 .

I am discussing different motives for starting and continuing blogging. Some are what I call ‘intrinsic’ - ‘I like writing, blogging is writing, therefore I blog’. Some are ‘extrinsic’ - ‘I blog because I want to raise my profile and improve sales of my book’. But there are some that are harder to fit. Like habit - ‘I blog now because it’s something I have gotten used to doing every day’. Or ‘I got started blogging because I read about it in a newspaper article and it seemed interesting’. Or ‘I had to have a blog to read my friends’ comments and once the space was there I couldn’t resist filling it.’ Is there a good way of grouping these alongside my other categories?

I have a very similar problem with the way that I look at what my sample of bloggers expect of their readers. Some are blogging to specific readers - eg friends and family (they don’t much care what they get back from them). I have called these monological blogs. Some are in a dialogue with readers they feel they know (dialogical), and some to or with readers they don’t really know (”telelogic” - because this is the kind of communication that CMC particularly enables.

So far so good - but what about those who blog and who like the idea of having an audience but aren’t thinking of anyone in particular as readers and don’t particularly need to hear back - eg “I blog because I like to write”? Or - in the extreme case - people who blog but though their blogs are open to the world they think of them as only for themselves? So far I am calling these “a-communicative” uses but that term doesn’t seem quite right to me.

My instinct is that there is a single term that spans these two cases, but I would be interested in hearing suggestions for terms for either case or both.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School’s 10th Anniversary Conference

THE FUTURE OF THE INTERNET

May 15-16, 2008

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

http://www.berkmanat10.org

ABOUT

======

The Berkman@10 conference celebrates the Berkman Center’s ten years of researching and pioneering development in cyberspace.

The promise of cyberspace is just as great as it was ten years ago, if not greater. Some of the challenges we face in studying it, and in building out into it, have changed; others persist. Through this conference, we hope to share and deepen knowledge about future challenges and opportunities on the internet and investigate how best to approach the next decade online.

The two-day conference will include talks from leaders in our fields as well as more intimate conversations covering the most compelling debates about the future of the internet, from security to politics, from identity to democracy, from education to innovation - and much more.

Academic researchers, policy experts, lawyers, entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and anyone concerned about the future of the internet are invited to join us.

REGISTER

========

Register now by visiting the Berkman@10 website: http://www.berkmanat10.org.

ADMISSION FEES:

===============

–$500 corporate/for-profit

–$300 non-profit/government/academic

–$100 student (with valid student ID)

Scholarships are offered on a limited basis. Media passes are available.

The program fee encompasses breakfast and lunch on both days, a cocktail event on May 15, and all conference materials.

INQUIRIES AND MORE INFORMATION

================================

Please direct any questions or media inquiries to Catherine Bracy (cbracy@cyber.law.harvard.edu) or Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.law.harvard.edu).

If you would like to continue to receive information about the conference, please opt in here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lists/subscribe/berkmanat10

To register, or for more information, visit: http://www.berkmanat10.org. Seating is limited.

To learn more about the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, please visit our homepage at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

A US university just released a survey which indicates (among other things) that Fox News was considered the most trusted TV news organization for accurate reporting - and by a large margin (27% chose it, vs 14.6% who chose CNN). Without wishing to get into an argument about whether this reflects the facts, I find it interesting that a station which is pretty clear about having a point of view is trusted more than stations which claim (rightly or wrongly) to be “neutral”. I think that the media ethic in the UK where (among the print media at least) most publications have an overt political ‘lean’ is in some ways more healthy than the US where points of view have to appear objective. At least if a point of view is up front you can ‘correct’ for it when assessing it. But it seems from this survey that viewers may not be looking for balance.

A friend of mine, Robin Hamman who looks after the BBC’s blog trials recently brought to my attention this study of the expressed political views of BBC Facebook users which was put out by conservativehome - an independent right wing UK website - back in October and was picked up by the Daily Mail.

The study (whose figures I have updated here using the same Facebook ad tool that conservativehome used) showed that of the 11,040 BBC staff registered on the site, 1420 staff put themselves in the “liberal” or “very liberal” category, compared with just 120 who labelled themselves “conservative” or “very conservative”. 420 regard themselves as “moderate” (the rest did not specify their political views). This compares to roughly 160k liberals and 56k conservative Facebookers in London and 847k liberals vs 233k conservatives in Facebook across the UK. (For the curious - there are < 20 self-confessed liberals working for Fox News in the US on Facebook compared with 40 conservatives and an equal number of moderates).

Of course this is somewhat embarrassing for the BBC as it provides further ammunition for those who would accuse it of liberal bias. The sample is a self-selecting sample from a self-selecting sample however, therefore no more than suggestive - and of course it includes large numbers of staff not involved in politically-sensitive work.

I find it interesting to note that the information provided probably included a large number of people who specified that their profiles (including their political allegiances) should be private. The privacy does not, however, protect users from being aggregated in order to be sold to - it is Facebook's ad sales tool that enables anyone to 'mine' Facebook to find out the expressed interests, ages and - yes - political affiliations of its users, grouped by organization. As this example shows, even aggregate data can be harmful to an organization when made widely available.

I also note that it is possible to attempt to advertise to Facebook users as young as 13 - and the ad sales tool says nothing about relevant regulations.

I just know there must be something out there in the HCI literature on how computer users are influenced by things like the size and position of buttons, or (of specific interest to me) by the size of text entry boxes. If you have a text entry box 6 lines long on a page and an otherwise identical page but with a 12 line long text entry box wouldn’t you expect the person writing in the bigger box to write more? (Even though in both cases the writer can in principle write as long as they like, with the text box developing scroll bars if they reach the end of the box)? I know that there is an interesting literature on the effect of defaults - I am hoping there is some similar research on this topic.

If you happen to know of evidence for this (or someone else at least asserting the same) either in the academic literature (preferably) or in the practitioner literature please comment…

The BBC has launched BBC Memoryshare
“A living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day.” They suggest that what is provided “may be used as a source of programme content for the BBC.”

It seems YouTube viewers watch more anti-immunisation videos than ones promoting immunisation, and public service videos on the subject were among the most low-rated. It seems Gresham’s Law can be applied to information on the Internet as well - bad (but interesting) information can drive out good.

Ironically, the JAMA study referenced is itself subscription only!

Facebook recently introduced “Pages” as an alternative to “profiles” for brands, companies and other collective entities to use. This fills a gap but alas their implementation is problematic. Just as you can only be a “friend” of a person (via their profile) on Facebook, the only relationship you can have with a “page” is to be a “fan” of it. I might want to register that I use, am part of or am interested in a company or organization with a page but that doesn’t make me a “fan”.

I suspect that Facebook did this so that brands like Nike would not have to deal with millions of people saying they were “enemies of” the page. Hopefully the API will enable third parties to make this kind of thing possible.

It is also worth noting that while they have announced to everyone that companies will be making “pages”, they don’t mention in that context that any individual or organization, non-profit as well as profit-making can make pages (you have to look in their “help” under “business solutions” - tellingly - to find the link).

The National Endowment for the Arts just published an interesting new study and review of the literature on literacy in the US but it retains a rather exclusive definition of reading (it’s fiction, poetry and drama, in book form) - so web surfing and magazine reading don’t count. It suggests that regular leisure readers are better employed and more skilled at reading (well duh!) I don’t know how they disentangled number of books in the home and leisure reading from social class though - I read somewhere that number of books in the home actually works reasonably well as a proxy for social class.

I would have thought that the increasing amount of leisure web browsing and online writing young people are doing would be beneficial to reading skills. Well, the report is 98 pages long so maybe I’ve missed the part where they tackle this…

I presume that it is only consistent with my having done a first degree in English and being a PhD student now that do a fair amount of leisure reading myself…

Here is a set of handy book-related links I have collected.

The past two days I spent at MIT’s CMS’s conference ‘The Future of Entertainment 2′ bringing together top notch mobile, internet and entertainment professionals (MTV Networks, Yahoo!, TBS) to discuss where the entertainment industry is headed.

Transmedia is a hot topic - the development of content that can be delivered on many mediums is being used by both television shows and advertisers. Henry Jenkins discussed interactive television not just as clicking a button to be taken into an interactive on-screen experience, but instead as any form of interaction with a television show in the physical world, e.g. CSI’s involvement in Second Life.

I was especially impressed with the mobile media panel: Marc Davis, Yahoo!, Bob Schukai, Turner Broadcasting, Alice Kim, MTV Networks, Anmol Madan, MIT Media Lab

Alice Kim:
- How do we get compensated?
- How do we stay relevant to our userbase, which is very forward looking?

Marc Davis:
- In the next few years, 4 billion people with cell phones and wireless connections to each other
- Realtime sharing of video from billions of geolocated phones live
Anmol Madan:
- Computation models on how people share things in media
- Ultimate goal is to make all phone interfaces socially aware

Bob Schukai:
- 90% of our research is outside the US.
- The US is behind on mobile and broadband. Way behind
- We can learn a lot from other geographies

Also, ran into some familiar faces such as Laurie Baird (Turner) who introduced me to great other Turner folks, Todd Cunningham (MTV) and Jing Wang (MIT). Ended up at GamBit which is MIT’s terrific new research initiative to conduct digital games research. Oh, and heard a lot of FCC bashing… we may want to look into that a bit more…
All in all 2 great days!

(You can find detailed session reports here)

Some new research I just heard about has set out to answer once and for all a key question for Web 2.0 fans and Wikipedia fans in particular. Are Wikipedia entries predominantly written by a small elite (as one of the founders, Jimmy Wales, has maintained) or are they written at least originally by a fairly broad spectrum of users (and then edited into shape by those elites, as Aaron Swartz maintains). Priedhorsky et al have introduced an additional lens through which to analyse the significance of contributors - who writes the words that get read the most on Wikipedia? It turns out (startlingly) that .1% of contributors produce nearly half the value as measured by number of words read. Of course one could poke holes in this metric of measurement as well - does the value of Wikipedia rest primarily on its ability to tell millions of people about Harry Potter (the third most popular page at the moment) or on its breadth? Nonetheless an interesting new data point to think about…

David Brake