Pew Internet has released a new report “The State of Online Video”

OVERVIEW

Seven in ten adult internet users (69%) have used the internet to watch or download video. That represents 52% of all adults in the United States.

Driven by the popularity of online video among 18-29 year-olds, there have been dramatic increases since 2007 in the number of American adults watching:

• Comedy or humorous videos, rising in viewership from 31% of adult internet users in 2007 to 50% of adult internet users in the current survey
• Educational videos, rising in viewership from 22% to 38% of adult internet users
• Movies or TV show videos, rising in viewership from 16% to 32% of adult internet users
• Political videos, rising in viewership from 15% to 30% of adult internet users

On the other side of the camera, video creation has now become a notable feature of online life. One in seven adult internet users (14%) have uploaded a video to the internet, almost double the 8% who were uploading video in 2007. Home video is far and away the most popular content posted online, shared by 62% of video uploaders. And uploaders are just as likely to share video on social networking sites like Facebook (52% do this) as they are on more specialized video-sharing sites like YouTube (49% do this).

Yet, while video-sharing is growing in popularity, adult internet users have mixed feelings about how broadly they want to share their own creations. While 31% of uploaders say they “always” place restrictions on who can access their videos, 50% say they “never” restrict access. The remaining 19% fall somewhere in the middle. And while there is almost universal appreciation for the ease with which video-sharing sites allow uploaders to share video with family and friends, a considerable number (35%) also feel they should be more careful about what they post.

Download or read the full report here

The Pew Internet study finds the link between young adults, reputation management and social media.

• More than half (57%) of adult internet users say they have used a search engine to look up their name and see what information was available about them online, up from 47% who did so in 2006.
• Young adults, far from being indifferent about their digital footprints, are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. For example, more than two-thirds (71%) of social networking users ages 18-29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online.
• Reputation management has now become a defining feature of online life for many internet users, especially the young. While some internet users are careful to project themselves online in a way that suits specific audiences, other internet users embrace an open approach to sharing information about themselves and do not take steps to restrict what they share.
• “Search engines and social media sites now play a central role in building one’s identity online,” said Mary Madden, Senior Research Specialist and lead author of the report, “Many users are learning and refining their approach as they go–changing privacy settings on profiles, customizing who can see certain updates and deleting unwanted information about them that appears online.”
• When compared with older users, young adults are more likely to restrict what they share and whom they share it with. “Contrary to the popular perception that younger users embrace a laissez-faire attitude about their online reputations, young adults are often more vigilant than older adults when it comes to managing their online identities,” said Madden.

For more read the full report or download

SmartMob reports : A study from the International Center for Media & the Public Agenda (ICMPA) at the University of Maryland, concludes that most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world.

Researchers asked 200 students at the College Park campus to give up all media for 24 hours. After their 24 hours of abstinence, the students were then asked to blog on private class websites about their experiences: to report their successes and admit to any failures. The 200 students wrote more than 110,000 words: in aggregate, about the same number of words as a 400-page novel.

“Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort,” wrote one student. “When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable.”

The study is available online at http://www.withoutmedia.wordpress.com

Amanda Lenhart, Rich Ling, Scott Campbell, Kristen Purcell on Pew Internet have published a new report Teens & Mobile Phones. You can view the report online or download the pdf.

Overview; Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months, from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008 to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And it’s not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day.
Text messaging has become the primary way that teens reach their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling as the go-to daily communication tool for this age group. However, voice calling is still the preferred mode for reaching parents for most teens.

Image Credit: http://www.pewinternet.org/

Logically and traditionally, before contributing new knowledge the contributor must attain the requisite background knowledge through schooling, training, practice and experience. Given the limited time in the connected world, ease of contribution and with the new speed of contribution – individuals often choose either to focus on few areas, where they build deep expertise, or to delve less deeply and distribute their attention and efforts across several areas.

In the paper – Individual focus and knowledge contribution First Monday [Online], Volume 15 Number 3 (21 February 2010) – the authors Lada A. Adamic, Xiao Wei, Jiang Yang, Sean Gerrish, Kevin K. Nam and Gavin S. Clarkson have tried measuring the relationship between the narrowness of focus and the quality of contribution across a range of both traditional and recent knowledge sharing media, including scholarly articles, patents, Wikipedia, and online question and answer forums. Across all systems, it was observed that a small but significant positive correlation exists between focus and quality.

Woods Institute for the Environment informs about the Stanford University study, a working paper which documents how climate change skeptics can affect Americans’ thinking about climate change. A synopsis of the study can be found here, including videos used in the study that feature interviews of mainstream and skeptical scientists discussing global warming issues.

News media coverage of global warming has often offered "balanced" accounts, quoting mainstream scientists and skeptics in the same story. Balanced accounts might be considered admirable efforts to abide by the journalistic norms of objectivity and fairness. However, critics have noted that balanced reporting of this particular issue actually conveys a misleading portrait of the science of climate change, since scientists endorsing the mainstream view appear to outnumber skeptics. Our study explored the impact of including skeptical voices in news media coverage. In particular, we explored whether adding a skeptic to a story about a mainstream scientist’s views or findings would reduce the number of people who perceive agreement among scientific experts on this issue and think global warming is a serious problem.

On social networks like Facebook even if you have kept your profile very very private, people can just look at your friends list and get lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn allow people to see your pic and friends list as part of the open access for visitors. In a study “You Are Who You Know:Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks” [PDF], conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems an algorithm was tested that could accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users by simply looking at their friend lists. The results show that certain user attributes can be inferred with high accuracy when given information on as little as 20% of the users.

[ Via Erik Hayden on Miller McCune and also cross-posted on Slashdot]