Monthly Archives: September 2008

China has more internet users than any other country

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253 million at the latest count, according to the government agency China Internet Network Information Centre.   Impressively, 214 million of those are broadband users – but the biggest growth is mobile phone access.   Apparently, the “Great Firewall of China” is still blocking or rendering unusable large numbers of sites, so any strategy looking to address China needs to have local hosting!

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Posted in Statistics, Web

Exploring the news, visually

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I’ve said on here before that not enough visualisation is being used, so it’s great to find new ideas – even if they’re not totally useable/useful. DoodleBuzz is one such example, you could call it the Zen of news exploration. Even after 5 minutes of doodling, I have relatively little idea of what’s going on. But I do feel a lot calmer.

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Posted in data mining, visualization

“Dude”

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Given that I use this as a demonstration of an effective, viral-style ad quite a bit, I thought it was about time I posted it here.   At 2.2m views, and 2,500 comments (as well as a bunch of either copy, copycat or homage videos with strong incremental viewing) it’s a resounding example of YouTube appeal, and all upside for Budweiser (who manfully held back from using many branded bottles in the commercial, adding to its appeal probably).   More than that, hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs have done what I’m doing – giving it even more exposure.

Now there’s viral value.

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Posted in marketing, Social Media Marketing

5 minutes of zero gravity

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I just went to an event with Dick Powell from product design agency Seymour Powell talking about all aspects of design and creativity as part of DesignLondon.  It was good material about some of their now iconic designs for kettles, toasters, toilets and the like. 

The fact that he could have given (and probably did give) the same presentation 10 years ago sums up the bascis that are true of the design process - just the products change a bit.   To demonstrate that, he ended his talk with this video for Virgin’s upcoming space travel programme (Seymour Powell designed the interior of the space craft).  Yes, that’s space craft – launching in 2010, at Virgin Galactic, bookable right now.  Get a taste of what your $200,000 dollars will buy you :

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Posted in Space

13 hours every minute…

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… is how much video is uploaded to Google’s Youtube, according to their official blog post today.  And that’s an “exponentially growing” statistic they believe.   That’s 18720 hours a day, or 780 days every day.  Still with me?   It’s a lot. 

Of course, there will be a long tail of this stuff which is never seen by more than the person who created it, and at the top end there will be a small percentage that are viewed a lot.  Sure enough, a wildcard type search (searching for “*”, if that’s valid) turns up the top video with 101 million views (a music video, like a lot in the top results of that list)…  Wikipedia’s got some notes on the “heavy tail” distribution, which I’m guessing is what this is.

The important take out is that very quickly (by which I mean already) there’s too much content on Youtube for one person to make sense of.  And therefore ways of pre-selecting, filtering and locating stuff of interest – like in every area online now – are needed, beyond just search…

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Posted in Statistics, Video