Weekend reading - October 10
Bloggers do it daily (or sometimes weekly). If you’re reading this, you read blogs or at least this blog [and we thank you for doing so, by the way]. We think blogging is important to the industry, so much so that we recommend blogging strategies to clients, write weekly posts for this blog, and even write our own personal blogs during the off hours.
Technorati has just released a new report, 2008 State of the Blogosphere Report, which offers compelling research that blogging isn’t going away. According to the report, “bloggers collectively create nearly one million blog posts each day.”
What really interested us about the research is that blogs have hit the mainstream, and now have representation in top-10 website lists across all key categories. Bloggers are important to watch, Technorati says, because they are often the first ones to use new web applications and are highly influential in speeding adoption. We totally agree with that. Here are some more blogger facts:
- Bloggers spend twice as much time online as US adults age 18-49, and spend only one-third as much time watching TV.
- Bloggers participate in an average of five Web 2.0 activities, such as RSS and Twitter, while they are online.
- Men and women are equally likely to blog about products or services.
- Though the subjects that bloggers cover run the gamut, the most popular are personal/lifestyle topics and technology. Posting product brand reviews is one of the most prevalent activities that cuts across topics.
Are you frustrated with news sites on your iPhone? Apparently a lot of people are. Keynote Systems announced the results of its first ever “Keynote WebEffective for iPhone” study of actual user satisfaction of mobile Web sites. The study found that more than 75 participants were tasked with finding an entertainment news story, reading a news article, and searching for a story on a specific topic then sending it to a friend. And here’s the feedback they got:
- Satisfaction rates were low for both Yahoo! (51 percent) and Fox News (64 percent) mobile Web sites and less than half of users found the sites to be appealing.
- Only four percent of users tapped into advertising; nearly a quarter noticed advertising but did not click through.
- While Fox News users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be better than a computer experience, Yahoo! users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be much worse than a computer experience.
- Expected user frustrations included site errors, cluttered pages, poor site speed as well as excessive scrolling.
So, who’s at fault here? The iPhone itself or the mobile application developers not designing user-friendly interfaces?
You like it, you buy it. We wrote about YouTube’s new metrics tool last week and now we’ve learned they have more up their sleeves. If you’ve ever viewed a video on YouTube with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from other users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. According to YouTube’s blog, now there’s a way to not only get that information but also purchase the song.
According to YouTube, click-to-buy links are “non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features.” YouTube has started embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore on videos from Electronic Arts.
Is Twitter a legit way to post and track outbound messaging? Maybe, if it’s done right. Here’s one way to do it right: a new tool from Twittertise lets marketers [or publishers] schedule Twitter messages for publication at a specific time. According to Twittertise, it also lets companies schedule and track the effectiveness of their communications on Twitter.
Tweets, say the company, sent via Twittertise are infinitely trackable: you know how many clicks you got and from what sources.
Gather round the mobile for the new episode of The Office. If you read our post earlier in the week, watching TV in living rooms might be a quaint pastime from the olden days. Here’s more proof: a new report from Juniper Research says consumer spending on mobile broadcast TV will reach $2.7 billion by 2013. The increasing availability of mobile handsets capable of receiving free-to-air analogue and digital terrestrial TV signals will adversely impact the prospects for dedicated mobile broadcast TV networks.
Other findings from the report include:
- In terms of end-user revenues, the U.S. will be the largest single market for mobile broadcast TV services in 2013, followed by South Korea and China.
- MediaFLO services are likely to be deployed in parts of Asia and in the UK by the end of 2010.
Show of hands: who actually watches broadcast TV on their mobiles? Tell us your experiences.
