Web

Search Engines Challenge Email As Most Popular Web Activity
Using search engines has become the second most popular activity for Web users, according to new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The figures put search engines second only to email as the numero uno Net application, with reading the news registering as the third most popular Web activity.
The research reveals that an average 41 per cent of Web-connected Americans use search engines on a typical day, a sharp 55 percent rise from the middle of 2004.
In numbers, this equates to a jump from 38 million daily search engine users in June 2004 to around 59 million users in September, 2005.
As expected, email remains the Web’s major attraction, with 52 per cent of Americans checking mail on any given day, up 45 per cent from June last year.
The Pew project looked into the demographics of Web users and discovered that those spending the most time on search engines tended to be in their 30s and well-off.
‘Gen X’ surfers (29-40 year olds, not the Billy Idol-fronted band) were online the most (51 per cent), followed by ‘Gen Y’ users (18-28 year olds), ‘Older Baby Boomers’ (51-59 yrs old), ‘Younger Baby Boomers’ (41-50), ‘Matures’ (60-69) and, finally ‘After work’ (70+). We wonder who makes up these daft categories?
The report commented, “Those who use search engines on an average day tend to be heavy Internet users. They are much more likely to have broadband connections than dial-up connections; to log on to the Internet several times a day; and to have spent considerable time online during the day.”
With Google recently claiming to have trebled its index of 8bn pages and Yahoo! claiming 19.2bn pages, it’s not surprising that the search engines are getting a hammering.
What is interesting, however, is the rise in people searching using ‘local’ qualifiers, like postcodes or addresses, to narrow down their search results.
Google still rules supreme as the king of the Web search tools, registering 43.7 per cent of local searches, with Yahoo! lording it over Internet Yellow Page search sites (where users type in data such as location and business type) with 27.6 per cent of searches.
Pew Internet & American Life Project report [PDF]
22 November, 2005
Royal Mail: Internet Fuels Growth Of Paper Catalogues
The Internet was supposed to herald in an age of paperless offices, online browsing and tree-untroubling electronic mail, but it seems that when it comes to flogging goods, the trusty old print catalogue still rules the roost.
According to new research from the Royal Mail, online retailers will be looking to stuff your letterbox full of paper catalogues before Christmas in an attempt to drive up sales over the festive season.
In a survey conducted by the Royal Mail, more than 20 online traders – including big names like John Lewis Direct and Firebox.com – were asked about their marketing strategies.
The survey found that old fashioned catalogues remain one of the most effective promotional channels for generating online orders, with 60% of survey respondents currently licking stamps on catalogues and brochures to be sent to customers in an attempt to increase online sales.
Of course, the Royal Mail has something of a vested interest in promoting these figures, but we have to admit that we always prefer to flick through a glossy print catalogue than stare at a screen. And, of course, it’s a bit trickier to take a laptop to the loo for a bit of furtive, at-work browsing for gifts.
The Royal Mail also found that some 36% of consumers agreed that having an online catalogue makes them more likely to purchase something from a retailer’s website.
Additionally, the survey revealed that 55% of retailers planned to follow the annoying trend set by High Street stores and “extend” the Christmas buying period by encouraging consumers to buy earlier (If only we could “extend” the Christmas holiday period too).
Record earnings are predicted for online retailers this year, with UK shoppers leading their European counterparts when it comes to online shopping.
Around 80% of consumers are expected to buy at least a quarter of their Christmas purchases online this year – up a mighty 15% over last year.
Royal Mail
22 November, 2005
Teenage Internet Addiction
We’re really pleased to have Lawrence Dudley writing for us.
Digital-Lifestyles thinks that all too often articles about teenagers are written by people old enough to be their parents. What teenagers are thinking isn’t represented.
Lawrence will give you a point of view that you won’t find in other publications. You see Lawrence _is_ a teenager.
There’s a Trust Issue Here
With the Digital world coming ever closer to reality, there is a danger of the two merging. The upshot of this is a danger that people become so involved with the Digital world, that they lose a grasp of reality. In short, they become addicted.
Internet addiction disorder is already a widely recognised addiction and those most likely to become addicted to the Internet are teenagers. This is partly because of the anonymity and therefore reputation-less nature of the Internet, allowing them to be whoever they want to be, and partly because teens just have so much more time on their hands than their grown-up counterparts. This together, results in a vast amount of Internet use.
What can responsible parents do when their teenager refuses to turn off the computer or refuses to go to school because they’ve been up too late playing online?
There are two approaches: The first is to talk to the child in question about the problem. While this will work with the majority of responsible teenagers, there will always be a minority who won’t listen. The other approach is using parental control software which can do a variety of things including limit the amount of time that a user is allowed to spend on the Internet. Trouble with any sort of software solution is, of course, that it can easily hacked or broken. Very often the teenager has a much better knowledge of the computer than the parent has.
A company called Woog Labs (yes, really) have unveiled a product that is designed to be hack-proof and will apparently work for any operating system.
Trouble with it is that A) It requires an adaptor to be used with any video cable other than VGA (mine’s DVI), and B) It only works with PS/2 Keyboards… PS/2?!
This makes their claim that it works with any operating system a bit hard to swallow: I’m sure that theoretically, this device will work on Mac OS X. However, to my knowledge there has NEVER been a Mac shipped with a PS/2 port. Makes it a bit useless really…
I can see that there is probably a market for a device like this, but what’s really needed is for someone to educate parents on their responsibilities. Surely it should be up to the parents to teach the kids what’s right and what’s wrong? If they don’t, then what are the kids going to do when they grow older? When they are forced to look after themselves? Digital nannying should only go so far in my opinion.
18 November, 2005
Shoreditch Digital Bridge: Linking Residents
A project starting early next year in East London hopes to bridge the digital divide by broadband-enabling a number of housing estates.
The first stage of the Shoreditch Digital Bridge (SDB) will link-up 1,000 tenants of the Haberdasher and Charles Square Estates, Shoreditch before rolling out to the remaining 20,000 residents. Video Networks, who are best known for the broadband and IPTV service Homechoice, will be providing the connectivity.
Shoreditch/Old Street/Hoxton is a highly mixed area. It’s probably best known as a hip and cool area, mocked by some, celebrated by others and the source of the now-self parody Hoxton Fin haircut (pictured below). The flip side is deprivation. The apparent contrast makes sense. Artists moved into the area _because_ it was run down and the space they needed to paint in was cheap to rent, then over a ten year period it changed into a ‘destination.’
Happily, this project is focused on the original residents, not the ones who live in the £1/2m flats – sorry, apartments.
The functions available to the residents will be wide and ambitious.
The Education Channel will provide online learning, allowing students to submit homework assignments and work with virtual tutors. When this was used in Kingston upon Hull by KIT working with Kingswood school, it was a huge success.
One key part of closing the digital divide is the provision of a PC on TV, which will be operated adding a wireless keyboard using software such as Citrix. When we spoke to Homechoice about it, they told us this will be able to used with their current Set Top Box.
Interestingly, residents will be able to watch the CCTV cameras around the area – something that for years ‘the powers that be’ have said would never occur.
Additional services include a Health channel allowing patients to book GP appointments, provide virtual consultations and on-line health and diagnosis information; a Consumer Channel, allowing on-line group buying of common services such as gas, electricity and mobile phone tariffs; and an Employment Channel, providing on-line NVQ courses, local jobs Websites and virtual interview mentoring.
Satellite companies have for a long time had problems providing services to built up urban areas. Providing TV services over a broadband connection has for a long time made sense. The icing on the cake will be the Homechoice IPTV and broadband service, available at an additional charge.
We hope the SDB project will build on succeeded and lessons learned of previous pioneering work will be integrated.
The Shoreditch Trust
Shoreditch Digital Bridge
Hoxton Fin image courtesy of LondonCircus
Charles Square Image courtesy of Hackney Council
14 November, 2005
John Lennon: All Digital Release Soon
The whole of John Lennon’s solo catalogue will be made available digitally, for the first time, on 5th December – Oooo, just in time for xmas.
Working Class Hero, the latest greatest hits album, is already available for digital download. This album is described as ‘definitive’, but it strikes us that many greatest hits albums are spoken about in these glowing terms.
Some Lennon tracks will also be available for mobile download in the coming weeks.
Pricing has not been discussed, but we hope they won’t be as inflated as the recently announced Rolling Stones album. It’s coming out on SanDisks TrustedFlash and was priced at just short of £40.
Yoko Ono, John Lennon’s wife, told of her views on if John would have been an Internet fan, “New technology is something he always embraced and this is something he would have loved. I always say that he would have been very excited by all the opportunities offered by the development of new means of communication.”
We’ve spoken to someone very close to the main rightsholders of The Beatles work and were told they had, about a year ago, been very close to signing a digital distribution deal. This fell apart over the amount of money being put on the table – and their view is “What’s the rush?”
If this John Lennon deal moves The Beatles any closer to releasing their tracks on digital formats is unclear, but many Beatles fans will have their fingers crossed.
John Lennon
11 November, 2005
Is Mobile TV Currently Just A Big ‘Love In’?
The BBC needs to move fast to create suitable partnerships to be able to ride the new wave of ‘TV on the go’. That’s my conclusion after attending a recent IIC event last week (that’s the International Institute Of Communications to you). There I can reveal I was drawn into what felt very much like a mobile content ‘love fest’.
Representatives from a diverse group of media industries including MTV and BT were prophesizing mobile TV is the saviour of TV. Trials in Europe have indicated that across the continent viewers can’t get enough of TV on a tiny little display on their phones and this isn’t just the ‘bite sized’ mobile episodes that commentators had been predicting. It appears that mobile TV is able to actually increase the number of hours that viewers consume, which many thought had peaked.
With this new form of TV, it is said ‘you no longer need to be a couch potato, you can be a potato anywhere’ so expect many hours of work to be lost to must watch TV phenomena like ‘I’m a celebrity’ and ‘Big Brother’.
Channel 4 New Media has recently announced the launch of a mobile TV channel dedicated to Channel 4 content on mobile phones. Sky is planning a 19 channel launch in conjunction with Vodaphone and an ITV mobile service has been announced.
The mobile manufactures need to provide the right interface with an easy to navigate EPG and the content needs to be held securely on the device it’s downloaded to minimise the potential for sharing.
All the big players have a keen interest in the success, from the handset makers, the telcos and of course, the content owners who will expect to negotiate a premium for their programming. The players are going to have to effectively perform a ‘land-grab’ to make sure that an ‘ipod’ like solution does not steal their planned-for bonanza.
Where though does a Public Service Broadcaster fit into this increasingly monetized market? The BBC has been looking at DAB technology providing ultra local TV, but this is unlikely to the drive young affluent consumers who are the usual early adopters of new gizmos.
We are consistantly drawn back to the same conclusion with Mobile TV. This content may be offered; handset makers can produce the equipment; consumers may dabble with it if it costs them nothing.
The still unanswered question is, will the consumer put their collective hands in their collective pockets to pay for it?
8 November, 2005
Nokia 770 Internet Tablet Ships
We first reported the news of the existence of the Nokia 770 back in May 2005, when Janne Jormalainen, Vice President of Convergence Products, Multimedia at Nokia showed it to a slightly stunned crowd at LinuxWorld Summit in New York. Now it’s shipping.
At the time, we enthused – naturally. How else could we react to a WiFi-powered Web browsing tablet with a 65k colour screen, that gives 3 days of browsing or 7 days of standby? We saw it as the TV watching buddy that we’ve always wanted. We could finally dump the laptop, removing its leg-heating characteristics at the same time.
Well today, Nokia are announcing its actual availability and they’ve expanded its capabilities to enable Web browsing using Bluetooth via your mobile.
We were naturally straight on the phone to Nokia, lining up our review copy. We’d been aware of a version floating around for a while, but knew the release of software it had on it really didn’t cut the mustard. Soon, dear reader our impression of it will be revealed.
For Linux hackers everywhere, there’s the great excitement that the 770 will be running Debian Linux, with the new platform – derived from the Linux GNOME UI – going under the name “maemo”. Development on maemo has continued since May and the end of October saw the release of maemo 1.1 Release Candidate 5. They’ve even given it the fancy new name of Nokia Internet Tablet 2005, if you please.
Nokia are actively encouraging ‘Hackers’ to produce software for it. They’ve even got a maemo WiKi (shock, horror).
VoIP was hinted at back in May. It’s now been confirmed by our old mate Janne Jormalainen, “During the first half of year 2006 we will launch the next operating system upgrade to support more presence based functionalities such as VoIP and Instant Messaging.”
For once with a technology product, Europe will be seeing this little beauty first, with the US having to wait a whole week longer. Prices appear to have shifted a little, upwards sadly, to €350 ($412, £240).
Nokia 770
7 November, 2005
One In Five Americans Has Never Been Online
A new study has revealed that one in five Americans is without home Internet access and have never been online, potentially hindering their access to crucial information and services.
The survey by the non-profit Pew Internet & American Life Project has highlighted the existence of a digital divide running along lines of age, race and income.
American wrinklies are lagging far behind in Internet adoption, with only 26 percent of folks 65 and older going online, compared with 67 percent of the 50 to 64 group.
One in five American adults (22 percent) remain completely untouched by the Internet and have never been online or received an email – roughly the same percentage of the population as in 2002.
Not surprisingly, the study also found that people with lower incomes and less education also registered lower percentages of Internet adoption.
Although around 70 percent of white Americans use the Internet, only 57 percent of African-Americans are online, with an emerging divide among those who have high-speed “broadband” Internet access and those on cranky old dial up.
The Pew study found that the majority of those using broadband are affluent and well-educated and that 66 percent of households earning $75,000 (~£42,260, ~€61,825) or more annually have a high-speed broadband Internet service at home.
This compares to just 21 percent of households on low incomes ($30,000 a year, ~£16,900, ~€24,730) possessing a high-speed Internet service.
Broadband makes it easier for surfers to whiz around the Web and download music, view videos, enjoy free VoIP calls and access online services and important information on topics like health and finance.
The differences are similar between those who have college degrees and those who have high-school degrees with Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew project, commenting, “What’s starting to emerge … is an elite group of people who are pulling away with what they can do online.”
Fox added that businesses and governments should not forget the needs of the unconnected population and ensure that offline sources for health and government material is made available.
The study estimated that 53 percent of Internet users now have a high-speed connection at home, up from 21 percent in 2004, while a separate report last week by Nielsen/NetRatings, estimated that around 42 percent of the US population has broadband Internet service, up from 36 percent in January.
Pew Internet & American Life Project
7 October, 2005
Blinkx Builds Free Online Video Library
Search company Blinkx have launched a free service that lets amateurs and pro filmmakers upload and store their video files to a searchable online library.
The service, called My Blinkx.tv, will make filmmakers’ work available for viewing to Web searchers via a clever conversion process.
Videos submitted to the library are automatically converted into Flash format, with speech soundtracks transcribed and indexed.
Metadata, such as creation date, length, title, owner’s name along with any other relevant information, will also embedded into the content.
Once indexed, uploaded videos can be retrieved and viewed by visitors to My Blinkx.tv via keyword searches.
Users of the Blinkx.tv service will also be able to create custom channels, based on a specific search term.
Blinkx founder Suranga Chandratillake explained that users could, for example, create a channel for all video results from a My Blinkx.tv search for the term, “Hurricane Katrina.”
My Blinkx.tv service would then continue to add new videos matching the search terms in the background, so that returning users would be presented with up-to-date listings.
The system relies on cookies but Chandratillake said that the company would consider using a more reliable logging in system if there’s enough demand for it.
Users will also be able to access their channels without visiting My Blinkx.tv by setting up a “smart folder” on their PCs.
This will be automatically populated in the background with videos that match a chosen search term, encouraging users to have the occasional rummage around in their smart folder to see what new videos have been added.
Chandratillake said that Blinkx will initially only feature non-commercial videos – mainly from grassroots groups, individuals and amateur video bloggers – but the company plans to cut deals with commercial video producers keen to include their videos in the service.
The service is free for visitors viewing videos, but Blinkx may introduce the option of charging for video views, with revenue split between Blinkx and the content owners.
The company may also consider raising revenue though video advertising.
According to Chandratillake, My Blinkx.tv already features user-generated video from 3,500 to 4,000 sources, with the service competing with video search services from Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. Notably, none of these services currently offer My Blinkx.tv’s automatic, continuous streaming video.
Blinkx
4 October, 2005
Pixel Ads; gWiFi; WoW Plague – Teenage Tech News Review
Neat Idea!
A UK student has thought up a unique way of financing his way through university: Selling online advertising space. That on its own isn’t unique, but the twist he has applied to it is: He is selling it by the pixel on his “Million Dollar Homepage”.
This guy is getting so much media attention as a result of the novelty value of his site that a lot of companies are getting interested in buying pixels from him. The going rate is $1/pixel, and there are 1,000,000 up for grabs… I wonder if he can make it to a million bucks?
This revenue concept started me thinking about what I could do to finance my way through University… I have just under 3 years to come up with something, and it better be good! It seems that finding a niche in the market for something unique and not actually that useful, and then attracting a load of media attention to give it artificial value is a good way of making cash on the Internet. Look out for me following suit in a few year’s time!
They’ve done it again
Done what? I hear you ask. Google have launched a Beta version of their Wi-Fi service following a host of rumours since an article mentioning a possible Google Wi-Fi appeared in Business 2.0 back in August.
The service is only available in selected parts of San Francisco Bay (well two locations) for now, but knowing Google I am sure that it will spread relatively quickly.
Part of the evidence is a new product, for free download, that basically works as a VPN client and encrypts all data sent over the Google Wi-Fi hotspots to secure it. Only downside with this is that this application could cause privacy concerns, as Google will apparently record data about people’s Web-browsing habits. Still, it has to be paid for somehow and recording the sites people visit fits in with their analysis of the Web so as to aid its online advertising business, Ad-sense. A link to Google’s FAQ about their Secure Access product can be found here.
From the point of view of a teenager like me, this sort of service is very good: I don’t personally mind giving up a small amount of my privacy to be able to use a service that I could no way afford if it wasn’t free. Hell, at 16 I’m not even legally allowed a credit card with which to pay for commercial Wi-Fi services!
As regular readers, Mike caught this story earlier on in the week.
It’s like the Middle Ages all over again!
This story is quite apt as I am currently suffering from the current real-life equivalent of the virtual plague documented by The Register. Yes, that’s right, I’ve caught the flu :-(
Anyway, according to The Register, World of Warcraft, a popular massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG), has been hit by a plague. Blizzard, the company behind the hugely succesful game, introduced a new god character to their game called Hakkar. What’s special about him is that he carries some sort of disease, similar to HIV, that spreads to some of the people that he attacks. These people then spread the disease further and further, which has resulted in a large quantity of the World of Warcraft servers becoming infected by it.
It’s a new concept and just brings us even closer to where we start blurring the line between reality and virtual reality. It also shows that virtual reality can have all the nasties that the real world does too.
Anyway, I am off to bed, forget World of Warcraft, I’m ill and need to go to school tomorrow. Just hope I don’t spread the “plague”>
23 September, 2005