Interactive

I don’t know, maybe it’s the time of year. Or perhaps it’s all the back-to-school ads. It could be because I am a new mom. Whatever the case may be, I have kids on my mind. If you’ve followed my writings you know I have a strong affinity to the tween (8 – 12 years old) and teen market on many levels: safety, privacy, ethnography, etc.

This digital generation fascinates me. Want to know where to download music, find cool apparel, watch movies and clips, change expressions, personalize your IMs, emails, blogs, anything… just ask a tween or teen. Sure they may give you the eyes-rolling-in-the-back-of the-head look, but, hey, go directly to the source.

According to a recent Synovate/Marketing Daily survey, 8 out of 10 Americans know what a blog is and almost half have visited blogs.

Five years ago, online content generated by individual web ‘surfers’ was seen as something done by the technically gifted – far-removed from mainstream online activity. Keeping a ‘blog’ was akin to being a computer coder, with the real benefits of the Internet being easy access to ‘official’ news sources and as an e-commerce portal. In recent years, we’ve seen an incredible boom in user-generated content. Wikipedia – for example – is a vast online encyclopedia written by thousands of global users. Even more recently, ‘social networking’ portals have become some of the most popular sites on the web, offering users a chance to connect with peers worldwide.

Internet users are spending nearly half their online time visiting content, a 37% increase in share of time from four years ago, according to the Online Publishers Association (OPA). The OPA announced a four-year analysis of its Internet Activity Index (IAI), a monthly gauge of the time being spent with e-commerce, communications, content and search.

The average Chinese young person has 37 online friends he or she has never met, Indian youth are most likely to see mobile phones as a status symbol, while one in three UK and US teenagers say they can’t live without their games console.

Globally, the average young person connected to digital technology has 94 phone numbers in his or her mobile phone, 78 people on a messenger buddy list and 86 people in his or her social networking community. Yet despite their technological immersion, digi-kids are not geeks — 59% of 8-14 year-old kids still prefer their TV to their PCs and only 20% of 14-24 year-old young people globally admitted to being “interested” in technology. They are, however, expert multi-taskers and able to filter different channels of information.

The ritual is familiar to those who follow communications policy: Every six months, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) releases its rankings of per capita broadband adoption rates. Every six months, the United States sees its ranking uncomfortably in the middle of the pack.

JupiterResearch has found the worldwide online population will increase from 1.1 billion users in 2006 to 1.5 billion in 2011, representing 22 percent of the overall worldwide population in that year. Outlined in a new report “Worldwide Online Population Forecast, 2006 to 2011: Emerging Economies Catalyze Future Growth,” Brazil, Russia, India, and China will provide impetus for future growth of the online population.

The telecom and Internet industries are colliding head-on in competition for control of the consumer mobile search business.

An estimated 81 million people, or 63% of the 129 million people who access the Internet over broadband in the U.S., watch broadband video at home or at work, according to new research conducted by The Nielsen Company for The Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM). This number increased from 70 million in September 2006 to 81 million in March 2007, a jump of 16% in just six months.

With more than 230 million mobile phone subscribers in the U.S., many companies are finding success using SMS as a key vehicle in reaching specific target audiences to increase subscriptions and gain revenue. According to mBlox, the world’s largest mobile transaction network, SMS is increasingly being used to deliver messages and content to a variety of booming mobile niche market segments.