Archive for the ‘Reports’ Category

The Pew Internet and American Life Center has issued a new report on Who’s Using Twitter, Radhika Marya at Mashable provides some quick analysis of the report. According to their study 6% of the entire U.S. adult population uses Twitter. Here are the major findings:

• 72% of Twitter users say they post updates about their personal life, activities or interests.
• 62% post work-related updates.
• 55% use Twitter to share links to news stories.
• 53% use the service to retweet others’ material.
• 40% use the service to share photos with others, while 28% use it to share videos.
• 24% tweet their location.

Amy Porterfield at the Social Media Examiner lists 8 Social Media Trends Impacting Businesses. Based on a study by SmartBrief and Summus Limited that surveyed 6,000 participants across a variety of industries, this post smmarizes eight prevalent trends that give insight into the social media behaviors, beliefs and challenges of the majority of businesses today. Here are the top 3:

• #1: Companies Are Still New to Social Media
• #2: Businesses Focus in on the “Big 5″
• #3: The 2-Year Confidence Mark

Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg of the University of Washington present the report Truth Be Told: How College Students Evaluate and Use Information in the Digital Age. This is “A report about college students and their information-seeking strategies and research difficulties, including findings from 8,353 survey respondents from college students on 25 campuses distributed across the U.S. in spring of 2010, as part of Project Information Literacy.”

Key findings:

• Students in the sample took little at face value and reported they were frequent evaluators of information culled from the Web and to a lesser extent, the campus library. More often than anything else, respondents considered whether information was up-todate and current when evaluating Web content (77%) and library materials (67%) for course work.
• Evaluating information was often a collaborative process—almost two-thirds of the respondents (61%) reportedly turned to friends and/or family members when they needed help and advice with sorting through and evaluating information for personal use.
• Nearly half of the students in the sample (49%) frequently asked instructors for assistance with assessing the quality of sources for course work—far fewer asked librarians (11%) for assistance.
• For over three-fourths (84%) of the students surveyed, the most difficult step of the course-related research process was getting started. Defining a topic (66%), narrowing it down (62%), and filtering through irrelevant results (61%) frequently hampered students in the sample, too. Follow-up interviews suggest students lacked the research acumen for framing an inquiry in the digital age where information abounds and intellectual discovery was paradoxically overwhelming for them.

Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra presented the annual State of The Blogosphere presentation at the ad:tech conference last week. The findings of the report are based on a survey of 7,200 bloggers.

Some key takeaways:

• Self-employed bloggers now account for 21% of those surveyed, compared to 9% last year.
• But only 11% say their primary income comes from blogging.
• Hobbyists still make up the bulk of bloggers at 65%, but that is down from 72% last year
• Corporate bloggers now make up 4% of the total, up from 1% last year.
• Two thirds are male
• They use many types of social media (LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg), but when it comes to driving traffic back to their blogs only two social media services really count: Facebook and Twitter
• Tablets and smartphones are impacting impacting blogging styles for 39% of bloggers
• Of those, 70% are writing shorter posts, 50% are posting photos from their smartphones, and 15% are using less Flash
• When writing about brands or products, 71% will only write about brands they approve of.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Educause announces the annual ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2010. Here’s a brief description of the study which is based on a survey of 36,950 freshmen and seniors at 100 four-year institutions and students at 27 two-year institutions:

“Since 2004, the annual ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology has sought to shed light on how information technology affects the college experience. We ask students about the technology they own and how they use it in and out of their academic world. We gather information about how skilled students believe they are with technologies; how they perceive technology is affecting their learning experience; and their preferences for IT in courses.”

via Resource Shelf

The Blog Herald has issued The State of the Blogosphere 2010, with some interesting stats in the form of an infographic. They report that there are currently 146,628,598 blogs online today.

A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study based on a telephone survey of 2,252 U.S. adults age 18 and older, conducted by Princeton Survey Research International, has found that 35% of U.S. adults have software applications or “apps” on their phones, yet only 24% of adults use those apps.

“An apps culture is clearly emerging among some cell phone users, particularly men and young adults,” said Kristen Purcell, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Internet Project. “Still, it is clear that this is the early stage of adoption when many cell owners do not know what their phone can do. The apps market seems somewhat ahead of a majority of adult cell phone users.”

Cameron Chapman at Six Revisions offers 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies. Each one of these recommendations comes with data and reports to back them up, here are his top five:

1. Forget the “Three-Click Rule”
2. Enable Content Skimming By Using an F-Shaped Pattern
3. Don’t Make Users Wait: Speed Up Your Website
4. Make Your Content Easily Readable
5. Don’t Worry About “The Fold” and Vertical Scrolling

Ekaterina Walter at Mashable has put together A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights. The recently released Facebook Insights dashboard allows Page owners to access detailed analytics on user demographics, “Likes,” shares, and reshares. Check out this quick guide to find your way around these helpful stats.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has published the IFLA World Report 2010, a “biennial report series that reports on the state of the world in terms of freedom of access to information, freedom of expresion and related issues”. You can view the report through an interactive map interface by clicking on countries, a question-oriented interface, or you can click right into a .pdf of the Analysis and Conclusions section of the report.

via Librarians Matter

Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove reports on a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study which concludes that Gen Y Will Not Grow Out of Social Networking.

“By 2020, members of Generation Y (today’s ‘digital natives’) will continue to be ambient broadcasters who disclose a great deal of personal information in order to stay connected and take advantage of social, economic, and political opportunities. Even as they mature, have families, and take on more significant responsibilities, their enthusiasm for widespread information sharing will carry forward.”

Josh Hadro at Library Journal wraps up the recent The Future is Mobile symposium which featured three keynote speakers from the business world and a Bullpen panel of eight librarians and vendor representatives.

“Video chat, video voice mail, and real-time media sharing are destined for contextually aware smartphones, the device of choice for the next generation. But are libraries ready? In an effort to help libraries reach mobile users and keep track of mobile innovation, Library Journal and OCLC co-sponsored “The Future is Mobile, an online symposium.”

Brenna Ehrlich at Mashable discusses a new Neilsen study which shows that the world’s Web users spend 22% of their time engaged with social media in How the World Is Spending Its Time Online. Here are a few other highlights from the report:

• Three quarters of Internet users worldwide visit a social network or blog when they go online — that’s a 24% increase over last year.
• Joe Average (the international version) spends 66% more time on these sites than he did a year ago — for example, your average user spent 6 hours on these sites in April 2010, while last year he spent 3 hours, 31 minutes.
• Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia make an appearance among the world’s most popular brands.

Be sure and check out the full article for more!

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project has just published a new report on Reputation Management and Social Media. Not only have online reputation management activities increased, but young adults are the most vigilant in several areas including changing privacy settings, removing their names from photos, deleting unwanted comments, and taking steps to limit personal information about themselves. Some other key findings include:

• Online reputation-monitoring via search engines has increased – 57% of adult internet users now use search engines to find information about themselves online, up from 47% in 2006.
• Activities tied to maintaining an online identity have grown as people post information on profiles and other virtual spaces – 46% of online adults have created their own profile on a social networking site, up from just 20% in 2006.
• Monitoring the digital footprints of others has also become much more common—46% of internet users search online to find information about people from their past, up from 36% in 2006. Likewise, 38%% have sought information about their friends, up from 26% in 2006

.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Sharon A. Weiner, Professor and W. Wayne Booker Chair in Information Literacy at Purdue University writes for Educause Quarterly about Information Literacy: A Neglected Core Competency. In her article she discusses the recent report from the researchers at the Information School at the University of Washington titled Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age, and offers these takeaways:

• College students think of information seeking as a rote process and tend to use the same small set of information resources no matter their question.
• Information literacy is essential for lifelong learning and empowers individuals and societies.
• Our educational system should expose students to information literacy from elementary school through postsecondary education so that it is a habit of mind they can call upon throughout their lives.
• Collaborative efforts between faculty, librarians, technology professionals, and others can develop students who graduate with information literacy competency.