Archive for the ‘Reports’ Category

A new report by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) releases figures for Internet usage on a state-by-state basis which are based on the Census Bureau’s October 2007 Current Population Survey. The report gives total numbers for the US and then also divides households into tables based on characteristics such as rural, urban, and principal city.

via Pew Internet & American Life Project

The ALA has published the 2008 State of America’s Libraries report. Here are their key findings:

• Americans check out over 2 billion items annually from public libraries.
• The average user checks out over 7 books/year.
• The average taxpayer bill for public library services - $31/year.
• Public libraries are engines of economic growth, contributing to local development through programming in early literacy, employment services and small-business development.
• Libraries provide excellent ROI, positively impact the local economy, and contribute to neighborhood quality of life.
• School library media centers help students learn more and score higher on standardized tests, but their funding continues to lag.
• Teens are regular users of public library services.
• Almost all of the nation’s public libraries offer YA programs & over half employ at least one full-time staff equivalent in this area.
• Computer and on-line games have become part of the mix at many public libraries, and some use gaming to attract new patrons.
• Spanish is the top-priority language to which libraries devote non-English language services and programs.
• Most libraries serving non-English speakers are in communities with fewer than 100,000 residents.
• Ebooks continued to emerge as a regular feature of libraries of all types.
• Library supporters won an important victory in 2007 when the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered to re-open many of the libraries it had closed in the past year.
• College and research libraries continue to find innovative new ways to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the academy.
• Libraries and librarians of all stripes continue to stand up for the First Amendment rights of all Americans, responding in public discourse and in court to unconstitutional snooping and aspiring book-banners. The right to read — freely and in private — remains a core value of the profession.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Sara de Freitas writes a chapter for Volume 3 of the Becta research report, Emerging Technologies for Learning, discussing educational trends, issues, and potential uses of virtual worlds. Other interesting research from this volume includes:

• Growing up with Google - what it means to education, Diana Oblinger, EDUCAUSE
• Mobile, wireless, connected - information clouds and learning, by Mark van’t Hooft, Kent State University
• Location-based and context-aware education - prospects and perils by Adam Greenfield, NYU
• ‘If it quacks like a duck…’ - developments in search technologies by Emma Tonkin, UKOLN
• Interactive displays and next generation interfaces by Michael Haller, Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences

The folks at ReadWriteWeb monitored over 37,000 tweets, or short messages posted to the microblogging application Twitter, to find the most popular ways that people are interacting with the service. They compared these results with the analysis they did last November in their article How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients. Here are their top twenty ways that people use Twitter, with the number of tweets each method accounted for in parentheses:

1. Web 56% (20734)
2. IM 8% (2975)
3. Twhirl 7% (2754)
4. Twitterrific 7% (2462)
5. TXT 5% (1683)
6. Twit 3% (1182)
7. TwitterFox 2% (1114)
8. movatwitter 2% (718)
9. P3:PeraPeraPrv 1% (459)
10. Netvibes 1% (266)
11. TwitBin 1% (260)
12. Twitter Tools 1% (222)
13. TwitterPod 0% (159)
14. TwitterIrcGateway 0% (152)
15. Snitter 0% (147)
16. BeTwittered 0% (106)
17. Tweetr 0% (95)
18. NatsuLion 0% (84)
19. Facebook 0% (79)
20. PocketTweets 0% (70)

According to a comScore Video Metrix report, nearly 141 million U.S. Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos online during the month of December 2007. The report measured actual video viewing, rather than simply website visitation. Google websites ranked highest for the most videos viewed with their YouTube property accounting for 97% of those viewers.

via WebbAlert

A recent report from eMarketer suggests that there is significant growth potential in podcasting. According to their predictions, the audience of 18.5 million podcast listeners in 2007 is set to increase by 251% to 65 million in 2012.

via TechCrunch

comScore Widget Metrix has measured and ranked the top ten most engaging Facebook Applications among US users, based on figures from November 2007. The measurement criteria for this ranking requires that Facebook users actively engage with the applications, not just view them. This analysis revealed that in November 2007, over 20 million Facebook users (61% of the Facebook audience) engaged with a Facebook App. Here are the top ten:

1. Top Friends (Slide)
2. Movies (Flixster)
3. SuperPoke! (Slide)
4. Compare People
5. iLike
6. Super Wall (RockYou!)
7. Likeness (RockYou!)
8. Quizzes
9. FunWall (Slide)
10. Graffiti

The video game industry experienced an exceptional growth rate in 2007, increasing revenues by over 28% and outpacing both music and movies. Console games reigned over their PC counterparts, pulling in nearly 70% of total sales with the the Nintendo Wii console the clear frontrunner.

“The video game industry set the pace over all others in 2007, with record-breaking sales, off-the-charts consumer demand, and innovation reaching from galactic exploration to guitar simulation,” said ESA CEO and president Michael D. Gallagher. “On average, an astonishing 9 games were sold every second of every day of the year.”

via Webb Alert

The University of London’s LASSIE project (Libraries and Social Software in Education), has produced a case study report on Libraries and Facebook. The report provides an overview of Facebook, a brief literature review, details the project’s use of the Facebook social network, discusses Facebook groups, applications, and pages of interest to libraries, and recommends best practices for using Facebook as a librarian.

The OEDb has compiled a report ordering the top 41 accredited online colleges in their OEDb’s Online College Rankings 2008. These rankings which include national, online-only undergraduate colleges which offer degrees are the first of their kind and attempt to provide a quatitative view of this Web-based academic landscape. The rankings aggregate data gathered according to eight different metrics — acceptance rate, financial aid, graduation rate, peer Web citations, retention rate, scholarly citations, student-faculty ratio, and years accredited. Overall rankings are provided as well as a breakdown according to metric.

[Disclosure: iLibrarian is owned and operated by OEDb.]

A new report from Pew Internet & American Life Project titled Increased use of video-sharing sites has found that 48% of Internet users have visited a video-sharing website such as YouTube. This is an increase from the 33% of users in December 2006. The study also found that visitor traffic on video-sharing websites on a typical day has doubled over the last year.

A new report is available from the Pew Internet and American Life Project titled Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. The report reveals some interesting statistics:

• 47% of Internet users have searched for information about themselves online.
• 60% of Internet users are not concerned about how much information is available about them on the Web.
• 61% of Internet users do not feel the need to limit the amount of information about themselves online.

The technology research analysts at the Gartner Group have issued a new press release discussing the latest driving force in Web consumption and influence - Generation V. Generation V is the Generation Virtual - and it includes all those people who spend their time interacting, shopping, socializing, and creating online.

Much like in traditional Third Places, the Web equalizes distinctions between generations, backgrounds, and professions, and allows people the freedom to act and interact in a leveled environment.

“An 11-year old individual can be the leading “go to” person for advice on how to upgrade/hack a digital video recorder…An unpopular office worker can be a highly revered, accomplished 40th-level half-elf in World of Warcraft.”

So, instead of targeting or marketing to a particular demographic group such as Gen X or Y, etc. - Gartner suggests that marketers should approach this new group whose behaviors, attitudes, and interests have blended and treat them as one group - Virtuals. Marketers should then focus on collecting data surrounding the multiple online personas that people create and the behaviors associated with them to glean valuable marketing information.

“By 2015, more money will be spent marketing and selling to multiple anonymous online personas than marketing and selling offline.”

The Gartner report raises an interesting point which is that the real identity of individuals may never be known, however, a wealth of intimate information about their online persona’s interests, habits and attitudes can still be collected and used for marketing to them.

Here are some of their tips on marketing to Gen V:

• Companies should organize their products and services around multiple online personas.
• Sell to the persona, not the person. A persona will show you how it wants to be treated.
• Create virtual environments as a way to orchestrate customer exploration toward purchases.
• Shift Investment from known customers to unknown ones. Focus on the influencers within the meritocracy.
• Develop and retain or outsource new skills to attract, connect, contribute and gain insight from Generation V and its virtual environment

via Web Worker Daily

Click for full image.

Steven Bell discusses OCLC’s latest survey report Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World in his post Takes More Than Blogs And Wikis To Build The Socially Networked Academic Library. The report calls for the creation of library social networks which enable user-generated content, although the majority of people surveyed felt that libraries should not be buildng such websites. Steven brings up some interesting challenges such as - what would the rationale be for our user community to participate in a socially networked library? And would we want to leverage the book brand that the public identifies us with, or attempt to establish a new one?

Lee Rainie’s keynote presentation 2.0 and the Internet World from Internet Librarian is available for download from the Pew Internet & American Life website. It’s chock full of Web 2.0 usage statistics as well as some very interesting profiles of different people who use technology.