von Roland Hachmann | Feb. 11, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Finally, finally, there are some numbers on the nationalities of Second Life residents. OK, you might argue, they’re all Second Life citizens – true. But nevertheless it was interesting for me as an advertising person to know who actually visits this virtual space.
Now Reuters writes about the latest statistics.And it seems like Europe is well represented – something I never thought:
Europeans make up the largest block of Second Life residents with more than 54 percent of active users in January ahead of North America’s 34.5 percent, according to new Linden Lab data.
Interestingly enough it was especially the French who boosted the european numbers – mainly due to the fact that during their presidential elections in January both parties got actively involved in this virtual world – opening up offices and such.
France has the second-highest number of users after the virtual world became a battleground for the country’s presidential election. Although French residents had long been a part of Second Life, thousands more joined Second Life in January as demonstrators picketed the virtual offices of Jean Marie Le Pen’s far-right National Front party. Socialist candidate Ségolène Royal also established a Second Life presence.
Here is the complete overview:
Active residents by country
- United States 31.19%
- France 12.73%
- Germany 10.46%
- United Kingdom 8.09%
- Netherlands 6.55%
- Spain 3.83%
- Brazil 3.77%
- Canada 3.30%
- Belgium 2.63%
- Italy 1.93%
The numbers add up to round about 85% – which means that 15% are spread out over the remaining +/-150 nations worldwide. And I guess that China makes up a large part of that 15% – even though I would have expected them within this list…
The average resident is 33 years old, and:
58.9 percent of residents declared themselves as men when they registered, compared with 55.5 percent a year earlier.
I like the way that is put: „declared themselves as men“. But it’s true. On the web, you never know – and in Second Life this is just as well the case…
One more link: these news were posted within the Reuters Second Life News Center Website. (I just want to keep track of this link for myself…)
von Roland Hachmann | Feb. 1, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Seems like there is no age limit for any web2.0 application. We were already amazed with geriatric1927, who started fiddling with a webcam and quickly gathered a huge crowd of fans.
As of August 16, 2006, geriatric1927 was the most subscribed user on YouTube. His rise to the #1 position took place in just over a week.
Not quite as „multimedia“, but a little older instead, is Don. He blogs on his blog „Don to Earth“ and with 93 years old, he is probably one of the oldest, if not THE oldest blogger on earth.
I am certain, that in 40-50 years time, there will be millions of 80+ year old webusers blogging and youtubing away (if blogs and youtube then still exist). But at the moment this is an amazing step by these two guys. If I look at my grand dad, who has trouble understanding the concept of any modern digital device, I cannot imagine him writing a blog. (He does own and use a cell phone, though).
At the same time, I am curious (as I already wrote earlier on), how much (personal) content will float around a most probably gigantic social web. There might be 80+ year old bloggers who have an archive of 40+ years of blog posts…
von Roland Hachmann | Jan. 30, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News
It’s this blogs 2nd Birthday today. Yes, Web Jungle is two years old. I am rather excited about this, as it doesn’t appear to me as if I have been working&writing on blogs for so long. I can still remember having started on the old blogger.com space: http://jungleweb.blogspot.com/
Then, when I noticed I would indeed continue with blogging, I moved everything to my own domain with a much more flexible blogging software. So I moved to web-jungle.com and wordpress. Now this again is even more than a year old.
I have blogged with wordpress since September 2005. Since then I have abandoned the blogspot location. Interesting, that my content is still there – talking about digital trash!
Looking around, I notice that some blogs are already a few years old (but still only up to 6-7 years at the most!!), and I wonder, if blogs will, from now on, continue to be part of some peoples lives? Will I still blog in 5, 10 or 20 years time? How big would my archive of information be? What wealth of information and links would it provide?
What wealth of information and links would generally exist in 30 years, if bloggers and content-/link-platforms continue they way they manage content these days?
All these are faszinating thoughts, theoretical in nature, as we’re all going to experience the effects of the web at the same time, with lot’s of people putting out theories, with only a few really succeeding in implementing good platforms and everybody learning and adapting as they go along.
I already enjoy the ride, how about yourself?
von Roland Hachmann | Jan. 28, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing
Here is a curious initiative: Sweden to set up embassy in Second Life
Sweden is to become the first country to establish diplomatic representation in the virtual reality world of Second Life, officials said on Friday.
„We are planning to establish a Swedish embassy in Second Life primarily as an information portal for Sweden,“ Swedish Institute (SI) director Olle Wästberg told AFP.
They won’t issue visa, instead they will tell people how the obtain visa for Sweden in the real world. And they want to inform people of how nice and beautiful Sweden is… This sounds more like a regular tourist information to me, than an embassy. But nevermind – I like Sweden and I hope this helps.
von Roland Hachmann | Jan. 27, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing
Nicholas Carr has an interesting post titled: Honey, I shrunk the culture
In this post, he goes on about the fact that the new possibilities to deliver and consume content – i.e. through wikis, blogs, youtube-style videos, etc. – we all receive micro-chunked particles of information that increases our propensity to turn into ADD victims. That might be useful for managing that information but it also means, that our attention decreasingly focuses on longform content:
Many of man’s greatest works demand and deserve extended, steady attention. They can’t be boiled down. They can’t be snippetized, widgetized, or otherwise turned into bite-sized morsels. You can’t compress culture into a Zip file.And that’s the danger here. The new medium doesn’t just promote the proliferation of small pieces; it devalues the long form. In fact, it doesn’t even make room for big, extended works. It’s actively biased against them, technologically and economically.
Scary, if we loose the ability to focus on longform content in the future! But at the same time I think you need to differentiate between types of content. I don’t need the news in longform content, as long as the main facts are delivered. Many articles I read in newspapers in the past focused too much on storytelling for news where I was only interested in the main facts.
But: sometimes storytelling is important. Either because there are news that I want to have some background information on (and while newspapers and magazines are generally prognosed to face a difficult future, I still think this deliverance of background information is a good niche for them, when trying to compete with online media). Or, because we are really interested in the story, the athmosphere and the characters, much more than pure facts and the plot (i.e. facts).
I don’t think, for example, that it would delight many people, to read the last Harry Potter through a number of interlinked microchunks on the internet. We want that book, and we will take our time to read it, the more pages, the better!
von Roland Hachmann | Jan. 23, 2007 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing
Ok, there goes the weekend. Guess I’ll be pretty busy – I just found out that you can watch all the videos of the “Digital Life Design†Day on the DLD 07 Media Website. See Marissa Mayer of Google speak about the billion dollar bubble or John Naisbitt about “Mind Set!â€, probably based on his new book. Or Luc Besson, Craig Newmark, David Sifry, Arianna Huffington. See? Guess you’ll be busy, too. 
Wo ich sonst so bin...