Another fantastic blog I’ve been reading voraciously is Creating Passionate Users. There is some great reading here particularly on usability but also on creating stimulating creative work environments.
Month: October 2006
A lot of blogosphere energy has been spent discussing the recent figures from ComScore in the USA about a rapid aging of the average MySpace user.
Boyd and Stutzman have been doing some digging and comparing the result to their own research which problematises the apparent age rise. As they point out, there is a vast difference between visitors (content readers) and users (content creators/social networking participants)
[ComSpace] have found that the unique VISITORS have gotten older. This is _not_ the same thing as USERS. A year ago, most adults hadn’t heard about MySpace. The moral panic has made it such that many US adults have now heard of it. This means that they _visit_ the site. Do they all have accounts? Probably not. Furthermore, MySpace has attracted numerous bands in the last year. If you Google most bands, their MySpace page is either first or second; you can visit these without an account. People of all ages look for bands through search.
Categories
ABC’s Digital Futures Blog
Apologies for the lack of recent updates. Plenty to hopefully come this week.
A local blog worth reading is from ABC Digital Futures. The ABC is our national public broadcaster, and they are in the process of migrating from from a old world media organisation to one that hopefully fully embraces the opportunities of the new digital media world. I’ve spoken quite a bit about the rather unique position organisations like the ABC are in and that they have the ability to leverage their position much in the way that the BBC has done seemingly so effectively.
The ABC Digital Futures blog follows and reports on an internal conference held at the ABC and covers many of the same issues and fields that are effecting museums and galleries particularly as we (the museums and galleries) start to operate in the digital realm more like niche media organisations ourselves.
Fred Stutzman with an excellent post on monetising social networks.
Obviously whilst there are problems with old advertising and economic models being applied directly to social networking applications, there are many new opportunities here – MySpace branching out into selling songs is a good way of them utilising content, for example.
This is timely given the warnings over advertising.
Our first attempt at a social networking application was in 2001 when we built the now defunct Soundbyte. Soundbyte was a site for students and teenagers to create and share music that they had made in class. The revenue model was based on the site acting as an attractor for physical visitation to the museum’s Soundhouse lab – where visitors can learn computer music production. The site was quite successful although hampered by government limitations – its greatest success was in greatly increasing the profile of the Soundhouse lab.
10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website is essential reading.