Two blog entries at Poynter Online point to the new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reporting that 44 percent of Internet users have created content online. It’s one of the themes of my forthcoming book, so I’ll quote them extensively here.
In Convergence Chaser, a friend, Howard Finberg, cites the OJR article I wrote,
What Is Participatory Journalism?, and We Media report that I contributed to, and he highlights some key activities of online users in the Pew study, to wit:
– 21% of Internet users say they have posted photographs to Web sites.
– 20% say they have allowed others to download music or video files from their computers.
– 17% have posted written material on Web sites.
– 13% maintain their own Web sites.
– 10% have posted comments to an online newsgroup. A small fraction of them have posted files to a newsgroup such as video, audio, or photo files.
– 8% have contributed material to Web sites run by their businesses.
– 7% have contributed material to Web sites run by organizations to which they belong such as church or professional groups.
– 7% have Web cams running on their computers that allow other Internet users to see live pictures of them and their surroundings.
– 6% have posted artwork on Web sites.
– 5% have contributed audio files to Web sites.
– 4% have contributed material to Web sites created for their families.
– 3% have contributed video files to Web sites.
– 2% maintain Web diaries or weblogs
Pew also found that 11 percent of Internet users have read the blogs of other Internet users and about a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog.
Meantime, at E-Media Tidbits, Monique Van Dusseldorp writes that manufacturers are urging consumers to start becoming producers:
In the latest issue of Trendwatching.com, special attention is given to “Generation C.” As author Reinier Evers puts it, the Generation C phenomenon captures the tsunami of consumer-generated “content” that is building on the web, adding terabytes of new text, images, audio, and video on an ongoing basis. (That Internet and mobile-phone users are actively sharing more and more content was also made clear in the latest Pew report, mentioned on this weblog yesterday.)
What is new is that manufacturers of content-creating tools are no longer asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, and passively consume, but rather are urging them to create, to produce, and to participate. Trendwatching has started to collect advertisements illustrating this new agenda. Mobile operators are especially active in an attempt to increase revenues per user. One of the more interesting new services unveiled at the 3GSM conference in Cannes last week was mobile operator Orange’s plan to offer customers of its soon to be launched 3G service the ability to file the next generation of blogs — video diaries. Whereas Trendwatching.com points out that “Generation C is and will continue to create heaps and heaps of crap which, at best, will be appreciated only by inner-circle friends and family,” it won’t be long before some of these companies finally realize where the real new-media industry will be: in families and friends charging each other for access to their own creations.
I can’t wait for video blogging to take off in a big way.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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