Ahhh so is this where augmented reality will take us in the next decade? Hopefully not, but I can see what Keiichi Matsuda was thinking when creating this amazing video, with the blend between architecture, augmented reality and consumerism combining to create a pretty hectic (or is that enhanced?) kind of life. Hmmm.
This would be in direct comparison to Nokia’s Augmented Hyper Reality Demo released late last year where the combination of Augmented reality will supposedly simplify and energize life.
My take; this is still a decade off before it will have the supported hardware / apps to be remotely feasible. You just never know what’s around the corner, but it probably won’t be this!?
There are so many floating around, lots of them contradictory, that i thought rather than add to the view points out there (i'm more of a everything is so possible i'll just take it as it comes along sort of a guy i guess), i'd just share the most interesting and concise i've read so far:
Nothing earth shattering (not many changes are these days. Seems we live in incremental times), but just some solid ideas on where things may be headed.
Traditionally, political participation has always been highly correlated with income and education. According to a new report (PDF), this is still holds true for those who participate in political activities online. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, online users with a higher income are still far more likely to participate in political activities online than those with lower incomes. At the same time, though, the Pew study also sees some hints that new forms of civic engagement through social media services could soon change this pattern.
According to this report, 31% of all users on social networking sites engage in some activity "with a civic or political focus." Pew defines this category very broadly, though, and includes relatively simple activities like 'friending' a political candidate as an "activity with political focus." In total, about 10% of all internet users have used social networks for this kind of political activity.
A far more interesting statistic is that 15% of all Internet users have left comments on websites about political or social issues, or posted images or written blog posts related to politics or social issues. What is even more interesting, though not surprising, is that young adults between 18 and 29 are far more likely to use social networks as a venue for political and civic engagement than older users. These younger users who engage in political activity online are also far more likely to participate in politics offline.
Social Media Might Level the Playing Field
Social media is mostly the domain of younger Internet users and while young adults (18-24) are, as a group, less interested in political activities online, they are far more likely than any other group to use blogs and social networking sites to engage in political discussions. About 34% of young adults make political use of social networking sites and 34% post political material on the Internet.
Users under 35 represent 72% of those users who make political use of social networks. In addition, the income and education gap for those who engage in political activities on social networks is far less pronounced when compared to those who use other forums.
Will These Trends Continue?
What will be interesting to watch, the Pew study points out, is how these younger users will use these existing networks as they get older. It will also be interesting to see if these developments will mean that socio-economic status will become less of an indicator of civic engagement, or if these new technologies will create new barriers of entry for those with a lower income and education level.
Given that the US just experienced a highly contested election cycle and is in the middle of a heated debate about health care right now, we have to wonder, though, if these numbers will continue to hold true over the next few years or if they were just a blip on the radar.
In 2019, when you look back at the social media landscape ten years earlier, you might laugh at how hard you had to work. You had to type things into forms (ha! remember those?), type URLs in the address bar (how archaic!), and put up with irritating communications about irrelevant products. Social media in the future will be effortless and everywhere. Here’s a look at some of the new technologies in store for us over the next 10 years that will make our social (media) lives easier.
1. The Arduino – One Tough Little Italian
Arduino is a small circuit board commonly used to prototype electronics. Its low cost and ease of implementation has meant that this little device is now leading a hobbyist revolution in connecting real life objects to social networks, like Twitter (). It has allowed one man to create a device attached to a chair that tweets at the presence of noxious natural gasses (ahem), another uses Arduino to monitor when his cats are inside the house or out, and a small bakery and cafe in East London is now able to tweet what’s fresh from their oven. This may all seem like pretty pointless stuff, but the pointlessness is the point.
The revolution of objects notifying human beings of their state (e.g., The Internet of Things) isn’t happening in the R&D labs of large multinational conglomerates, it’s happening in the spare rooms, garages and bedrooms of developers. The printing press, possibly one of the first inventions to aid information sharing, was invented by Johannes Gutenberg with investment intended for an altogether different enterprise: polished metal mirrors intended to capture holy light from religious relics, presumably to sell to hapless tourists. In other words, what might seem like silly tinkering today, might be a key contributor to our future world.
2. RFID Tags & Transponders
While Arduino will help household items become involved in our social media world, transponders such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags are truly breathing life into our objects.
For a number of years RFID tags have been used in passports, ID cards, travel cards and credit cards as a means to identify us when scanned, and they are used commercially for inventory tracking. Brands including Abercrombie & Fitch, Levis and Kleenex have experimented with RFID tags to track their inventory at an item-level. Transponders can be made as small as a grain of sand and can be produced very cheaply. So it is widely thought that they may one day be installed in everything from a packet of biscuits to a pair of underpants.
But RFID tags have potentially valuable real-world applications. It may be possible, for example, to create a very cheap device which sits in your trash can or recycling box and monitors the contents by scanning RFID tags as stuff is thrown in. You might ask why anyone would want to do this with their garbage, but there is a lot of valuable data to be had in what is, in essence, scrobbling for your trash. Your trash is a goldmine of consumption data in the same way that your search data or browsing history is, and could be used to track brand loyalty and consumption habits.
And mobile phone manufacturers, particularly Nokia, are currently experimenting with consumer devices that act as readers and scanners, meaning that your mobile device might be able to do things like exchange information with other phones by bringing them near to one another, or gather information directly from products and find out instantly if anyone in your network has purchased the item in the past. Within the context of mobile phones, this technology is generally referred to as NFC (Near-Field Communication).
Of course, just because we could do this, doesn’t necessarily mean we would, or should. There are clear privacy implications involved that might make the idea of monitoring consumption via your trash or tracking your underpants dead on arrival. Privacy advocates such as CASPIAN are highly motivated to prevent this from happening — the notion that RFIDs could be on our person without us knowing is akin to web sites sharing knowledge about us without our consent. The anti-RFID site spychips.org has more information about the privacy concerns of the technology.
3. Geomagnetic Sensors in Mobile Devices
The compass is hardly new — it’s been around for thousands of years — but Yamaha has created a tiny 2mm x 2mm chip intended for use in mobile phones as a compass. When used in conjunction with GPS, AGPS or Wi-Fi triangulation and an accelerometer a compass heading could be extremely useful to give more granular positioning data to mobile applications.
Some older phones used to come equipped with these compasses, and though they have been phased out in recent years, they’re starting to make a comeback. Apple Insider suggests that the next generation of iPhone hardware will contain a “Magnetometer,” the feature already exists in the HTC Dream (the T-Mobile G1), though it is currently used for very little.
But the real world applications are many. For example, let’s say that you’ve just come out of a subway at a roundabout, and the first thing you do is take out your GPS-enabled phone’s mapping application to see where you need to walk to get to your friends waiting for you at a bar. In order to orientate yourself correctly, you’ll need to find street names. But if you happen to be in London, where I live, you know that street names are rarely in convenient places, they’re usually hidden behind trees and other signs (where’s the fun otherwise?). So a compass heading is a perfect way to let you know which direction you roughly need to walk in. Likewise, if you want to scan an area at a certain location for a great place to eat, your device is going to need a heading in order to overlay information over the top of your screen.
Imagine you’re on your way to a conference and you have a couple of hours to kill so you park yourself in the corner of a local bar to catch up on Mashable (). You’ve barely begun reading when an attractive girl or guy catches your eye. You’re transfixed, your heart starts to race — you’re in love. But being the shy type you can’t just go over and introduce yourself, so instead you do a quick scan of the room with your cell phone to pick up any latent metadata. Unfortunately, a social network profile pops up informing you that the object of your affection is in a relationship. Your initial excitement rapidly dissipates and you get on with your reading.
That scenario is pretty far-fetched, but it’s one potential promise of Biometric Face Recognition technology that is already used by police and security services to help identify known criminals. 3 years ago Google acquired Neven Vision, a company that provides such technology. Google reported that it is using this technology in its Picasa product to help keep your personal photos organized without you needing to do any of the actual organizing. I have literally thousands of pictures of my children and family on my computer at home. It would take me days to go through and tag each one so that I could search them more easily in the future. But at some point, Picasa might be able to tag everything for me automatically by recognizing faces and objects in my photos.
That’s still not quite to the level of our hypothetical, but Tochindot’s Sekai Camera and Wikitude are making in-roads into rich and immersive ambient metadata, too. Their current goals revolve around tagging inanimate objects, but someday biometric face recognition could be used to attach metadata to real people.
5. OpenID, OAuth, and the Identity Graph
Having to remember passwords for multiple accounts can be frustrating, and answering the same questions over and over on registration forms becomes tedious. Ten years from now, filling out our information once and then easily transferring it from place to place might be commonplace.
OpenID is an open authentication protocol that lets users use a single set of login credentials for every site they visit. It’s already in use at hundreds of smaller websites and large sites like Facebook () are starting to accept OpenID accounts. Once you’ve authenticated, a second open protocol called OAuth will help you share data about yourself with other sites you use. OAuth lets your grant authorization to sites to collect data from other places you participate online, which ultimately could eliminate the need to fill in redundant information about your profile and who your friends are at each new site you use. And companies like Cliqset and DandyID are creating platforms that will allow you to share your entire identity graph information from your profile to your contacts to your lifestream.
Together, these technologies could essentially eliminate the need to fill out forms and register for sites all together.
6. Mind Reading
My favorite scene from Back to The Future 2 is one in which Marty visits a 1980s-theme cafe where he sees some kids looking at his old favorite arcade game. Marty tells them he’s a “crack shot” but when he demonstrates the interface, the kids complain, “You have to use your hands!? That’s like a baby’s toy.” Classic.
But the idea of being able to control an interface without the use of your fine motor skills has massive implications for human computer interaction. Consider the ability to tweet what you’re thinking without having to pull your phone out of your pocket, type your message and hit send. Imagine being able to think ‘Facebook’ and your screen presents you with an overview of your friend’s activity stream. This method of interaction is at a very experimental stage but there areproofs-of-concept that exist. Most of this kind of innovation is currently intended to help people with limited motor skills, and not lazy social media addicts, however.
7. Natural Language Processing
Like Optical Pattern Recognition, Natural Language Processing (NLP) seeks to automatically categorize and understand that which humans understand with ease. By doing so, computers will be able to understand the requests and needs of their human users far better. Of course, talented programmers can already tell their computer to do things with ease, but the rest of us would benefit from applications that understand our curious ways of speaking.
Firefox’s Ubiquity is one project that’s attempting to change the way we interact with the web by allowing people to use natural language commands. Further, in the future, applications might exist that could analyze your tweets or comments with NLP, and suggest people or brands for you to follow.
The Future
Many of the technologies explored in this post are in their infancy, but they could have a profound effect on how we use the Internet and social media in the future. If you know of any other technologies that you feel might advance the future social media landscape please mention them in the comments.
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at UK Integrated Agency JPMH where he helps brands such as BlackBerry, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, and Hasbro get the most from digital media. You can follow Mike on Twitter.
There are days when it feels like iPhone apps are the new microsites -- every campaign has to have one. And on the surface it seems the numbers stack up just right: a healthy range of demographics, 50K apps, one billion downloads, 40 million devices (source), all going strong. But before you pitch an app to the next client, consider these usage stats from Pinch Media's deck on Slideshare (February 2009) and Greystripe’s Q109 Consumer Insights Report (April 2009, pdf):
-- Minutes per use: 9.6 (Greystripe) -- Uses per user: 19.9 (Greystripe) -- Only 20% of users return to use the app after the first day (Pinch Media) -- After a month, this number drops to 5% (Pinch Media) -- "39% of iPhone users cited weather-related apps as one of the three kinds of applications they use most frequently (Compete via MediaPost, April 2009)
Last week we discussed some of the new trends we're seeing on the Web in 2009: open data, structured data, apps that filter content effectively, real-time, personalization, mobile (especially location-based), and Internet of Things (the Web in real-world objects). We asked for your thoughts on these trends, along with your suggestions on what we should add. Also we were interested to know what products you've seen this year that are doing something new and 'beyond Web 2.0'. In this post we look at some of your responses, to try to define further what defines this current era of the Web.
So What Else is New?
Other than the trends we've already listed, what else did our readers identify as new this year?
Babak Samii pointed out that in 2009 there has been an increase in "real, defined business models that can actually generate revenue." MacStories agreed, noting that we'll see many innovations in revenue models as a result.
Aaron Fulkerson of Mindtouch commented that "Web Oriented Architectures are redefining ROI and TCO for enterprises." I had to google the second acronym (shows how long I've been out of the corporate world - it means "Total Cost of Ownership"). Aaron is right that enterprises are taking the Web seriously now for business apps - the slow rise in popularity of Google Apps in enterprises is evidence of this.
Willi commented that there is a "new lightweight" about the current Web. "There is a new granularity, atomicity and a kind of chemistry," he remarked. He noted the way that people can "jump in Twitter from persons to hashtags to new interesting persons and their social bubble in real-time." As examples, he pointed to products like Evernote (a note-taking app - our most recent review) and Mir:ror (we reviewed Mir:ror earlier today - it's an Internet-enabled device which enables you to create actions on your computer via everyday objects such as coffee mugs and books). Willi noted that while they may appear to be relatively trivial products, "new use patterns and user benefits emerge" out of them.
Open Data... Except Export
Not everyone in our previous post agreed with the initial set of trends. RWW commenter William claimed that 'open data' is a misnomer, because users mostly cannot export their data from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Friendfeed, Google, et al. We wouldn't go as far as William and label this "web 1.9.8.4.", however it's fair to say that - as far as users go - the promise of open data far outweighs the reality.
Having said that, the other meaning of 'open data' is that it's open for developers to build on top of. The plethora of Twitter apps built on top of Twitter's API is evidence enough of this. While Jason Barone called this "a one-way stream back to their closed system, in the form of an API," it's better than what we had before - which was fewer APIs and not many Linked Data sets (see the Linked Data graph from just 2 years ago, in this recent post). So overall we're encouraged that API data - or even better, Linked Data sets - will enable more and better connected web apps. This makes for a richer ecosystem of Web apps and social connections, which is a very good thing.
But point taken William and Jason, today for users the idea of 'open data' is half-realized at best. It won't be truly open until we have data portability - when you own your identity and content on the Web.
Real-time in the Real World
So far much of the focus on real-time as a new(ish) trend on the Web has focused on trendy apps such as Twitter and FriendFeed. However, Andria Krewson pointed out in the comments to our last post that real-time will spread much further than the early adopters:
"Real-time is huge. Many companies are built on timed data dumps, with the timing affecting workflow and cash flow, but the always-on generation will soon pressure businesses to provide real-time online information. Banks that don't post real balances in a timely way, or insurance companies that take weeks or months to process paperwork, or government agencies that don't provide timely transparent data will face pressures from millennials demanding faster, more accurate information."
On this note, a commenter called Joe remarked that we may be mis-using the term 'real-time.' "For the record," said Joe, "none of those sites you mentioned are doing REAL real-time, they are simply doing interval-based polling for new data on the server." Joe advised us to check out http://obama.collecta.com to see a good example of pushing to the browser using long-polling, not interval polling. We did indeed check that out, and wrote up our findings. While we were impressed that the search results were all less than a minute old, we're not convinced that just more speed means a better form of real-time than Twitter or FriendFeed. Time will tell.
Note: for a very mathematical explanation of why Twitter isn't really real-time, read this comment by Falafulu Fisi (made on a recent RWW post).
Conclusion
Well, there is no conclusion because the Web is an evolving beast. We're excited to see open data becoming more prevalant, even if it hasn't fully opened up yet. We're excited to see real-time making such an impact this year. We're excited about mobile and Internet of Things. There is a lot of innovation happening this year, which is pleasing to see.
Once again we invite you to list in the comments any other trends you're noticing - and just as importantly, what products you're seeing that exemplify these trends.
Here's the original 5-minute presentation which kicked this series off:
Last week we discussed how the current era of the Web is evolving. One of the concepts we noted was Linked Data, an idea whose time has come in 2009. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, gave a must-view talk at the TED Conference earlier this year, evangelizing Linked Data. He said that Linked Data was a sea change akin to the invention of the WWW itself. We've gone from a Web of documents, via the WWW, to a Web of data. Berners-Lee is now on a crusade for everyone from government departments, to individuals, to open up their data and put it on the Web - so that others can link to it and use it. In this post we give a high-level overview of Linked Data. Read on to stop and smell the roses.
A great place to start to understand Linked Data is Sir Tim's TED talk, embedded below. It's just over 15 minutes and highly recommended if you want to grok where the Web is headed. The slides are also available.
Linked Data: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Linked Data is an official W3C project. An independent community page for Linked Data describes it as "using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods."
Tim Berners-Lee described Linked Data as a grassroots movement in his TED presentation. The above image shows you how many participating data sets there are now (it'll have increased even more since then, as that was a March 2009 snapshot). Linked Data is ramping up fast. To give you an idea of how much it's grown over the past two years alone, here is a snapshot of the data sets that were available in May 2007:
Linked Data in a Nutshell
In a W3C memo that Berners-Lee published in July 2007, he described four principles of Linked Data. The Wikipedia paraphrased it as follows:
Use URIs to identify things that you expose to the Web as resources.
Use HTTP URIs so that people can locate and look up (dereference) these things.
Provide useful information about the resource when its URI is dereferenced.
Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data as a means of improving information discovery on the Web.
Even that paraphrasing is a bit technical, but we can sum it up like so: Linked Data allows you to discover, connect to, describe, and re-use all kinds of data. It is to data what the World Wide Web was to documents back in the 90's.
On ReadWriteWeb we've discussed Linked Data a number of times. Alexander Korth wrote a good high level intro last month. He noted that Linked Data builds on and interconnects existing ontologies such as WordNet, FOAF, and SKOS. He went on to explain that the data sets grant access to their knowledge bases and link to items in other data sets:
"The project follows basic design principles of the World Wide Web: simplicity, tolerance, modular design, and decentralization. The LOD [Linking Open Data] project currently counts more than 2 billion RDF triples, which is a lot of knowledge. (A triple is a piece of information that consists of a subject, predicate, and object to express a particular subject's property or relationship to another subject.) Also, the number of participating data sets is rapidly growing. The data sets currently can be accessed in heterogeneous ways; for example, through a semantic web browser or by being crawled by a semantic search engine."
Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom
If there's one idea we want to leave you with about Linked Data, it's that the data is there to be used. Linked Data enables data to be opened up and connected so that people can build interesting new things from it. At TED, Berners-Lee described Linked Data as boxes of data that - when connected via open standards - enable things to sprout from it.
Slide from Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk in Feb 09
Linked Data is one of the most important trends of the Web circa 2009 and we'll be blogging more about it in the coming months. Let us know in the comments if there's something specific you'd like us to explore in the Linked Data world.
One of the most complex features of Twitter for new users to understand is the hashtag, a topic with a hash symbol (”#”) at the start to identify it. Twitter hashtags like #followfriday help spread information on Twitter while also helping to organize it.
The hashtag is a favorite tool of conferences and event organizers, but it’s also a way for Twitter users to organize themselves: if everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes easier to find that topic in search, and more likely the topic will appear in Twitter’s Trending Topics.
So how do you disseminate and make sense of all this hashtag madness? By going through the art of the hashtag step-by-step, of course. This short guide details how to identify, track, use, and organize hashtags in an efficient and useful way. Just be sure not to flaunt your new hashtag wisdom.
Have a tip to share on hashtags or a unique way you utilize them? Be sure to share with everyone in the comments.
1. Identifying hashtags
For new Twitter users, and even we veterans, figuring out what a specific hashtag is being used for can be a major chore. When a hashtag starts to trend, it gets even more difficult to parse the information stream.
So what’s the most efficient way to figure out those nasty hashtags? Luckily, there a few great tools that can assist in hashtag enlightenment:
What the Trend?: This useful little service makes it really easy to learn about trending hashtags. When something starts trending, What the Trend? will provide a quick blurb on what’s going on.
Twubs: Twubs, which we recently reviewed, uses a wiki system to help disseminate information on a hashtag. It aggregates tweets and imports pictures to help illuminate the topics being discussed.
Hashtags.org: While not the best at helping you understand the meaning behind a tag, Hashtags.org is good at showing you its use over time and recent tweets, which oftentimes is enough to figure out the meaning behind the tag.
Tagalus: Tagalus is a simple dictionary for hashtags. It’s very easy to find information on thousands of hashtags as defined by other users. You can also define a hashtag by tweeting tagalus.
2. Tracking hashtags
What’s buzzing on Twitter right now? If you’re a tech journalist, marketing professional, or just a person interested in trends, there are many useful tools and techniques to keep up with the Twitter conversation via hashtags.
If you’re trying to track tweets from a hashtag in real-time, Monitter and Twitterfall are good choices. Once again, Hashtags.org provides graphs and hour-by-hour information on top hashtags.
One last tip: if you need to track a less popular Twitter hashtag, try setting up a Twilert to get a daily email of the use of a specific hashtag.
Although not terribly complicated, hashtags have some unwritten rules. The primarily one to remember: don’t overuse them. If every one of your tweets IS a hashtag, you dilute the usefulness of them by fragmenting the conversation. In addition, many people will shy away from you because it seems spammy.
Another simple tip: give your hashtag context. Most people won’t actually know what your hashtag means, so give a quick explanation in one of your tweets or, if you’re making a hashtag, make it very apparent what it’s talking about.
Finally, if you’re looking to create a hashtag, be sure that it adds value for yourself and your followers. The best way to utilize them is when you need to organize information. Conferences, major events, and even reminders (i.e. #todo) can help organize specific tweets and make life easier on you and your followers.
The Twitter Fan Wiki also has some interesting reading material on hashtags if you’re looking to further your hashtag education.
4. Organizing hashtags
When I speak of organizing hashtags, I’m talking about conferences and events, which rely on the hashtag system more than almost any other entity. It’s become standard to track the conversation regarding speakers and afterparties via a hashtag.
If you’re about to put on an event or are looking to take your event to a new level, here are some useful tips for hashtag organization:
- Choose a single hashtag early: This may seem simple, but it is vital to get right. Choose a simple hashtag that represents your event or brand. If your event is the Business of the Calling Ducks conference, don’t use #businessofthecallingducks as your tag. How about #bizducks instead?
- Remind attendees of the hashtag constantly: On your website, on your Twitter feed, at the opening remarks, and throughout the day, make a friendly reminder about your hashtag and that you can track the conversation through it.
- Provide a website widget: For anyone who isn’t using or knowledgeable with Twitter, provide an easy conversation tracker tool on your website. You can make one via Widgetbox or Tweetgrid.
Wikirank does for Wikipedia () what sites like Compete do for websites. It’s a nifty analytics tool that tracks trending topics on the world’s largest online encyclopedia, displays the 10 most read articles in the last 30 days, and gives users the ability to compare stats for up to four different topics.
Wikirank uses the actual usage data from Wikipedia servers to give visitors a better global or custom view of what’s happening across the information hub. Cooler features include the ability to graphically compare impressions on four different articles, embed graphs, view Wikipedia entries, and quickly search for related content on Google News, Twitter (), or The New York Times.
We really like Wikirank’s trending topics on the home page. Topics are ranked by percent change and certainly provide a great graphical view of major fluctuations in page views. Plus, the most read topics in the past 30 days give us an awesome glimpse at what’s hot over a longer duration.
We love the tool and can’t wait to use it to start comparing pop culture and Web trends, especially since Wikipedia has 10 million plus articles and is most likely one of the first places mainstream audiences go for information on the Web. What do you think of Wikirank? Tell us in the comments.
Razorfish just released the results of a study done in partnership with Cafe Mom that examined how Mom's live in a digital world. Digital Mom consists of two companion studies. The first study, conducted by Razorfish focuses on how digital moms are adopting social and emerging technologies. The second study, prepared by CafeMom--the largest social networking site for moms-- concentrates on the role that social media play in helping to inform purchase decisions, among other key trends.
1,500 "digital moms"--defined as women with at least one child under 18 in the home who have engaged with two or more emerging technologies and who have researched, sought advice or purchased a product online in the last three months. Results confirm digital moms have moved beyond email and search, and are now active users of Web 2.0 technologies. The majority of moms are using social networks (65%) and text messaging (56%). More than half of these moms are also gamers, with 52% of them playing games online or via a console.
Some of the Key Findings include:
Moms with children 12 and older are motivated to adopt new technologies to stay in tune with their children. Of those who use social networks and blogs, almost half (47% and 40%, respectively) monitor their children. Likewise, digital moms of children 12 and older, versus moms with children under 12, are more likely to watch online video, (40% vs. 34%), game (57% vs. 51%), read online consumer reviews (38% vs. 30%), and watch or listen to podcasts (13% vs. 9%); This trend can be explained by different leisure time patterns among women with older children and a compelling interest in understanding their teenage children's digital lives.
The gap is closing between TV and digital channels in terms of creating awareness and affecting product decisions, and social influence channels are increasingly important. Although TV still has the most impact on creating initial awareness for a product (31%), social influence channels such as online consumer reviews, blogs, social network sites and RSS are highly influential in the learning/researching stage (29%).
Moms' interests are broad; some interests change by life stage, and some do not. More moms show interest in clothing/fashion and food than in parenting information, with the exception of moms with children under six.
Take a look at the report which is freely available here and let me know what you think. Needless to say, Mom's are an important audience for any marketer and their use of digital technologies is changing at a rapid pace. It's no surprise that word of mouth and social influence marketing play a large role in their worlds. The study was led by Terri Walters who's our VP of Emerging Media and a partner in crime for all things Social Influence Marketing too.
And here an overview from Adage:
Technology No Longer Just Kid Stuff. Plugged-In Parents Still Spy on Their Children, but Most Take to Texting, Social Networking to Feed Their Own Interests by Beth Snyder Bulik. Published:February 02, 2009
YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) -- Everyone knows a mom who's joined Facebook to check out what her newly off-to-college daughter is posting (Please friend me. Or else. Love, Mom). Or the business-traveler dad who plays games with his tween son to stay connected while away.
But guess what: Parents aren't online just for the kids. Today's digital moms and dads are texting each other and hooking up with their own friends on social networks. Blending parenting and technology isn't easy, however -- 70% of moms say they have it tougher than moms did 20 or 30 years ago. Razorfish surveyed 1,500 online moms to find out what the 27 million digital moms are doing, and CafeMom surveyed 1,700 members to understand the different types of moms and what marketers can do to engage them.
First of all, "moms use [digital media] for themselves primarily and secondarily for their kids," said Terri Walter, VP of emerging media, Razorfish. They're most interested in fashion and food, regardless of age and their use of online video, blogs and DVRs have become mainstream, in the 29% to 36% range, while podcasting, RSS feeds and mobile-web browsing remain niche channels, used by 10% to 21% of respondents.
They learn about new products from TV, friends and magazines, followed by e-mail, websites, podcasts, search engines and mobile-web browsing. Among mobile-internet users, web browsing was almost as important a new-product source as search engines in brokerage, telecommunications, electronics and cars.
Moms are also watching out for their kids online (or, as the kids might put it, spying). Moms with children 12 and older are more likely to watch online videos and play games -- and are more likely to be doing it because they're monitoring their children. Almost half of the social-network users monitor their children's behavior online; and 40% of blog readers mind their children's blogging habits.
CafeMom identified five segments of digital moms; and three additional psychographic profiles below are from a survey and profile analysis of digital parents by Mindset Media. Take a quiz from Ad Age and Cafe Mom to find out what type of linked-in parent you are.
SELF-EXPRESSER
These 30-something, outgoing women make up 40% of CafeMoms and are eager to connect with other moms. A self-expresser typically has a preschooler at home and is thinking about more children. Her favorite online discussion topics are parenting and shopping, although she still consults her "in-person" friends first. She gathers information and responds to online polls and most likely has at least some college education.
UTILITY MOM
The "veteran mom" denoted by this moniker defines 26% of CafeMoms. She has the most children of the five segments and is usually in her mid- to late 30s with tween-age kids. She spends the most time online, although she is relatively introverted, using social networks mostly to stay in touch with people she already knows. She shares the least number of photos with others, but likes to play games and puzzles.
GROUPSTER
This 30-ish mom is likely to have young, school-age children and makes up 12% of those studied. She's an active online participant, often joining and starting groups, blogging, and asking and answering questions. She is the most influenced by brand sponsorships on social networks but often gets more friend requests than she sends out. She uses private messaging more often than the other segments and is less likely to share photos or answer polls.
INFOSEEKER
Another 12% of the CafeMoms fell into this group, the youngest segment. The Infoseeker is typically a woman in her late 20s with a baby and maybe a toddler, and while she is most likely of all the segments to stay at home, she is also the most educated. She is not very social or engaged online, and instead prefers to go straight for the parenting information she needs. The infoseeker likes reading blogs and looking at other moms' pictures and will even willingly upload her own baby's photos.
HYPERCONNECTOR
The smallest segment of the CafeMom sample is also the most digital. The hyperconnector, in her 40s, has finished looking for parenting advice, for the most part, and is more likely to be looking for online friends to chat with and compare shopping notes. She uses social networking to check up on her teen children online. She blogs and uses personal messaging, and is most likely to respond to open-ended questions and comment on others' posts.
RESPONSIBLE RECYCLERS
Thorough, detail-oriented parents are 24% more likely than other parents to allow their children unrestricted internet access, according to Mindset Media's recent study of 10,000 parents with children under the age of 18. Indeed, the people who consider themselves most accountable are also among the most permissive when it comes to the web. "Maybe it's the expectation that their children will be as responsible as they are in the medium," said Mindset Chief Operating Officer Sarah Welch. Highly responsible people also index high for recycling and use of skin-care products.
SOCIALLY LIBERAL ORGANIC EATERS
Parents who rank low as being dogmatic are most likely to allow their children unrestricted digital and media access. In fact, these non-dogmatics, described as "socially liberal types who disdain so-called moral authorities, especially the conservative kind," are 39% more likely to never restrict internet access, 30% more likely to allow unlimited video games and 40% more likely to give no restrictions on music.
PUGNACIOUS TRUCKERS
So who won't let their kids online? Pugnacious parents, or those unafraid to tell others what they think. They value honesty and bluntness and are 30% more likely to cut the web cord. They also overindex as truck and BMW owners, which makes sense as they tend to be "own-the-road" types, Ms. Welch said.
Notes: 1. ComScore audience measurement data report n media usage, visitor demographics, and online buying power for home, work, and university audiences across U.S. and worldwide Internet auciences. 2. Data excludes blogging sites. **MyLife used to be known as Reunion.com
But now there are reports that show an even deeper acceptance of Facebook, of it penetrating new areas of society. Last week the New York Times showed how one rather unexpected group seems to be surfacing on Facebook: Cosa Nostra. The Mafia.
In recent weeks it seems that the Italian authorities have begun investigating groups on Facebook that are discussing the Mafia, and in particular Mafia bosses including Salvatore Riina, the ‘boss of bosses’, who was arrested in 1993 after more than two decades on the run. They think that those joining these groups may have more than just a passing interest in the Mafia, may be more than just fans. They think that the membership of these groups may include some Mafia members themselves.
It’s not a surprise that people would use Facebook to start groups about the Mafia and Mafia leaders - we know that social networks are a great place to find people with other interests. I’m sure there are many online communities devoted to the Mafia as we know that niche groups benefit from online communities. What may seem more surprising is that members of the Mafia are willing to identify themselves by joining such groups. We’ve written before about how you need to be careful what you say in Facebook. You also need to be careful what you do.
Social networks can seem like very private spaces - you build networks of friends and share things with them. Most people know that their actions may also seen by the rest of the members of the site, but sometimes it’s easy to forget that. When you and your friends are discussing something in a group you can forget that anybody else can see this. Including the Italian Police.
So I’m not surprised the Mafia are on Facebook, and for me that’s a real sign of mass adoption and acceptance of this social networks as a tool. People are using it for their own particular purposes, to connect with friends or to express their support or solidarity for a cause. One of the problems we are going to have to accept and then deal with as social media tools grow in popularity is that people will use them for things that we didn’t necessarily intend them to be used for in the first place. Facebook was originally a way for college friends to stay in touch. It may now be being used by criminal gangs to, at the very least, express their support or solidarity for a cause.
How we deal with this matters. The change in usage is a powerful form of innovation, really it is co-creation with users of the site finding the ways it can best support them. This will mean that new uses will develop with every new user that joins. Some will gain mass popularity and others will be restricted to just one or two users. You can control what is discussed in groups or on profiles by enforcing the terms and conditions of the site, but with a membership as vast as Facebook this will only get more difficult to do. But there is always another way of looking at a situation.
So the Mafia is on Facebook. Perhaps this is a good thing after all. Rather than tapping phones or reading emails, the Italian Police had a ready-made list of people to watch and conversations to follow. They just need to join the same groups and see who their new friends are.
A far more interesting statistic is that 15% of all Internet users have left comments on websites about political or social issues, or posted images or written blog posts related to politics or social issues. What is even more interesting, though not surprising, is that young adults between 18 and 29 are far more likely to use social networks as a venue for political and civic engagement than older users. These younger users who engage in political activity online are also far more likely to participate in politics offline. 
Mike Laurie works as a Digital Planner at 
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But now there are reports that show an even deeper acceptance of Facebook, of it penetrating new areas of society. Last week the