the future of media

this past tuesday i had the opportunity to join some of top media and content names in san francisco for a conference on the future of media that was held concurrently with a similar gathering in sydney, australia.  while troubles with the audio/video link  between the two sites showed why those media aren't quite yet ready blow text out of the water,  the content of the meeting was tremendous.

in the room in san francisco were chris anderson (wired magazine), john hagel (author), moira gunn (technation), ray kotcher (global ceo of ketchum pr), craig newmark (craigslist), mike linksvayer (cto, creative commons), andy halliday (ceo, ourstory), and david sifry (ceo technorati)

because there was so much covered, I'll share some in a couple of posts here and some in a couple of posts over at learning circuits blog. 

the organizing group, future exploration network, put together a rather interesting report on the current state of media and indicators of what the future may hold.  While some were of interest purely to media types (ie, advertising revenues) some were natural cross overs to learning and knowledge management concerns.

the report was published unders a creative commons attribution, share-alike license.  so please note that the following diagrams were created by the future exploration network.  this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-sharealike 2.5 license.

a chart from the report that i found interesting broke down the types of content created by americans and australians on the internet.   about 1/3 of all adult  americans and australians have contributed content to the web in one or more ways.  i think it's interesting to note that only 8% of american adults have created and posted a blog.  has the blogosphere, at least in america reached it's peak?  if you analyze the statistics, this means that almost 1 in 10 americans are initiating the blogosphere, another 2 are commenting on blogs and another 2-4 are reading what the others are writing.  seems, if anything, it's still author heavy.  the last bar seems low when you look at sites like flickr, photobucket, and youtube.  but then again, this data is a bit dated (at least last year)

another of the interesting sets of data was demographic data regarding the age of those who have created content on the web through blog, wikis, their own website or by posting music, photos, and video to sites like flickr or youtube. The common folklore is that the blogosphere is just teenage girls writing their diaries.  well, while 42% of people 18-29 have contributed content to the web, 18% of people 65+ have also contributed content!  With the US baby boomers getting older, you can imagine that number will go up.

finally here is a bit of a shocker. if, a week ago, someone had asked me how much i would be willing to bet that my answer to the question of what was the dominant language in the blogosphere was correct, i would have put a large sum on my guess of english.  i'd be a much poorer man today if I had done that today.  turns out more blog posts (37%) are written in japanese than either english (31%) or chinese (17%).  with the almost assured explosion of chinese to come, how long will it be before english is in the number three position?

see also:

do you trust me? on Learning Circuits Blog for a summary of the theme regarding trust that arose in the conversations at the conference.

technorati tags:future exploration network, mass media, blogs, internet content

Blogged with Flock

Comments

[Jim Belshaw]

Dave, I found the US/Australia chart very interesting.

The first two bars, posted a blog and added information to own web site has the US in front.

The second two, added information to a work or group web site or blog and shared on the internet created content, had Australia in front.

If I read the chart correctly,the US is in front on do your own thing, Australia appears to be in front in contribute to someone else's thing.

The age thing is interesting. I think that there are in fact three quite different age groups. I might do a post on this on my personal blog,cross-reference back to you.

[dave lee]

jim: i realy hadn't looked at the US/Australian split from a character standpoint, but you're dead on in that analysis. That rugged individualism of the US vs. a more collaborative character of you Australians fits with my experience.

[Nbkvqhn]

http://messexxx.info x