Muriel K. Wells writes: “It was my belief that it was not hair color, size, age, or any other discernible physical feature that students remembered about reference librarians. What they remembered were the warm genuine smiles and expressions of true interest as their queries were answered. They remembered the probing, helpful questions which aided in narrowing their searches, as well as how much effort was spent toward a successful search. But I decided to observe further to see if my supposition was correct.”
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Published by rwatstein July 12th, 2008
in demographics and broadband.
Three-quarters of Aussies will have broadband by 2011. So what are they doing with all that bandwidth? A minority of respondents said they used the Internet for various e-commerce activities, including purchasing airline tickets (44%), booking hotel and travel arrangements (37%) and auctions (37%). Activities related to research and information are especially popular in Australia, with 62% of respondents reporting they used the Internet for maps and directions and 59% for directories (yellow and white pages).
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Only one in every 200 American librarians is a black man, according to U.S. Census statistics. That remarkable scarcity was a topic of discussion at the American Librarian Association’s annual meeting in Anaheim, California. Julius Jefferson, a researcher at the Library of Congress who is chairing a panel on the topic entitled An Endangered Species: The Black Male Librarian, recently told NPR that African-American men are not discouraged from becoming librarians; it is just not a common occurrence.
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Published by rwatstein June 29th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
Nearly a quarter of the world’s population – roughly 1.4 billion people – will use the Internet on a regular basis in 2008. This number is expected to surpass 1.9 billion unique users, or 30 percent of the world’s population, in 2012, according to IDC’s Digital Marketplace Model and Forecast. “The Internet will have added its second billion users over a span of about eight years, a testament to both its universal appeal and its availability,” said John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC. “In this time, the Internet has also become more deeply integrated into the fabric of many users’ personal and professional lives, enabling them to work, play, and socialize anytime from anywhere. These trends will accelerate as the number of mobile users continues to soar and the Internet becomes truly ubiquitous.”
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Published by rwatstein June 21st, 2008
in demographics and social networking.
Less than one-quarter of US Internet users ages 40 and over use social networking Web sites, according to the JWT BOOM/ThirdAge “Boomers, Healthcare and Interactive Media” study conducted last month. The JWT BOOM/Third Age figures on social networking usage by those 40 and older generally agree with a study by ExactTarget conducted last month. Instead of using one large category of older Internet users, ExactTarget divided users who were ages 35 and older into 10-year increments, with 65 and over being the oldest cohort. Although 39% of 35 to 44 year-olds used social networks, use fell sharply with age: Only 13% of 55 to 64 year-olds were social networkers, and only 4% of those ages 65 and older. In comparison, three-quarters of Internet users ages 15 to 24 use social networking sites.
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in demographics and social networking.
A new study across a wide range of social networks sheds more insight into the ways men and women approach these service. As it turns out, women are more likely to be in it for the socializing, while men are more likely to use these sites for business. Social web search company Rapleaf performed a study of over 30 million users across sites like Bebo, Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, LiveJournal, MySpace, Flickr, and more. Each user included in the study had at least one friend on one of these services, and Rapleaf broke its results down according to the number of connections users had: “Social Networkers” have 1-100 friends, “Connectors” have 100-1,000 friends, “Super Connectors” have 1,000-10,000 friends, and “Uber Connectors” have 10,000 friends or more.
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Close to half of all people in the UK will be members of a social networking site within four years, a new report indicates. The study found that the UK has the highest number of users in Europe who are members of sites such as MySpace and Facebook. At least 9.6 million people in the UK use these sites and that is expected to increase to 27.1 million by 2012. The report by Datamonitor, an independent market analyst, predicts that the UK will see healthy growth in numbers in Europe over the next five years. The growth is not only being driven by the young, but increasingly, older people are showing interest in social networking.
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in demographics and research.
US Hispanic-American Internet users are more likely to spend time online than watching TV, according to a February 2008 comScore Media Metrix survey conducted on behalf of Terra Networks USA. While 50% of the Hispanic-American Internet users surveyed said they spent at least one hour per day watching television, 56% said they spend at least one hour per day online.
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The Library of Congress is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, members of Congress use the library for research, but next to them, in the Main Reading Room, are the Americans who elected them. Anyone 18 or older with a Library of Congress library card can use any of the 22 reading rooms and access its 650 miles of bookshelves.
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Published by rwatstein May 26th, 2008
in demographics, education and copyright.
A spike in notices of alleged copyright violations on campuses prompts speculation that record companies are targeting future, not actual, breaches.
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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008
in demographics, education and economics.
A teacher tries to shush her young students, telling them to be “as quiet as a mouse.” The familiar idiom sounds harmless, but it might carry a different meaning for children whose families can’t afford garbage service. Their home could be plagued with rats. If they live in a shelter, with disruptive bed checks throughout the night, children often come to school sleep-deprived. Uncertain of where they’ll be living the next week and traumatized by aspects of homelessness, impoverished students and their parents might view education strikingly different than middle-class families.
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US Internet users ages 10 to 15 flocked to social networks last year as if getting a MySpace account would increase their allowances. Harris Interactive said in its April 2008 issue of Youth Trends that more than half of US girls ages 13 to 15 used social networking Web sites in 2007, roughly the same as in 2006. Social networking jumped among other boys and girls surveyed: more than twice as many children ages 10 to 12 reported using social networking sites in 2007 as did in 2006.
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Published by rwatstein May 4th, 2008
in demographics, internet and research.
Most Internet users worldwide use the Web primarily for e-mail and search, according to a global survey conducted by Gartner during the fourth quarter of 2007. Online banking is the third most popular use of the Internet (except in emerging markets), while sharing photos, videos and files is the fourth.
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Nearly all US teens ages 12 to 17 use the Internet, according to a September-November 2007 Pew Internet & American Life study. The 94% of teen respondents who reported accessing the Internet are doing so frequently. Two-thirds of teenage Internet users (63%) reported going online daily, while 35% use the Internet multiple times per day.
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In this technologically savvy society, students seem to be relying more on electronic resources and less on books when it comes to research. According to circulation statistics, from July 2006 to June 2007, University of Rhode Island students and faculty members checked out 53,227 books. Twenty years ago, students alone checked out more than twice that amount. In fact, students were checking out more and more books each decade until the mid-1990s when the use of the Internet became more widespread. The decrease, according to David Maslyn, dean of University Libraries, can be attributed to the convenience and wide scope of electronic resources available. URI subscribes to more than 100 electronic databases that allow students access to almost unlimited topics.
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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008
in demographics and web sites.
The market share of U.S. visits to a custom category of Question and Answer websites has increased 118 percent for the week ending Mar. 15, 2008, compared to the same week in 2007, Hitwise reported. Over the past two years, U.S. visits to this category have increased 889 percent comparing Feb. 2008 versus Feb. 2006. The most visited website within the Questions and Answers category last week was Yahoo! Answers (answers.yahoo.com), which received 74.05 percent of the market share of U.S. visits. Wiki.Answers.com was the second most visited website receiving 18.35 percent of visits, followed by Answerbag.com, which received 4.42 percent of visits. WikiAnswers, launched in June 2007 has seen U.S. visits increase 125 percent comparing the week ending Jun. 9, 2007versus Mar. 15, 2008.
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Published by rwatstein April 27th, 2008
in mobile/cell phones and demographics.
The number of people without traditional landline phones is increasing, as a growing number of U.S. adults use only mobile phones, a market research firm said Friday. In a survey conducted in the fourth quarter of last year, Harris Interactive found that about one in seven adults only uses a cell phone, up from roughly one in 10 in 2006. The percentage of adults with landline phones has dropped slightly to 79% from 81%.
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Published by rwatstein April 6th, 2008
in demographics and technology.
Nine out of 10 US households surveyed have a television in the living room, and nearly two-thirds of those living rooms also have PCs, according to JupiterResearch’s recent “Digital Home: Moving Beyond the Concept of the Three Screens to Uncover New Revenue Opportunities” report. JupiterResearch also found that 22% of homes have three or more PCs.
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Published by rwatstein April 6th, 2008
in demographics and technology.
Female US Internet users are now leading males in the use of social networking, DVRs, online network TV shows, and PC gaming, according to Solutions Research Group. Based on surveys conducted in February 2008 and between October 2006 and November 2007, more women than men—42% of online women versus 41% of online men—had visited a social networking site in the past month.
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Yahoo employees tend to land at rival Google for their next job. The median age for Facebook employees is 27. And Hewlett-Packard draws as many graduates from India’s Bangalore University as it does from California’s San Jose State and Stanford. In a new feature introduced last week, LinkedIn, the Mountain View, Calif., professional social networking site, has produced 160,000 corporate profiles, from Microsoft Corp. to Apple Inc., detailing information such as common career paths, top schools and popular employees for each company.
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in demographics, MySpace and Wikipedia.
When we think of social networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook, which have created a phenomenon of sorts over the years, we think their traditional competitors have no chance against them. With the younger generation finding its identity in these web 2.0 applications, one can easily think that they define and shape the thoughts of the users in every way. Not necessarily; the youngsters still prefer to use Wikipedia over MySpace when they want to search about their favorite music or band. While the artists and the bands think that a major share of their online popularity should be attributed to MySpace, there is another traditional web site, which is providing great services, probably even a tad better than that of MySpace.
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in demographics, children, internet and MySpace.
A generation of children are effectively being “raised online”, spending most of their free time on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, a report warns today. It says that many under-16s spend more than 20 hours a week glued to the internet, three times higher than official estimates. With millions left to surf the web on their own, 57 per cent of children have seen online pornography, most of it accidentally in the form of “pop-up” adverts.
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A new Tufts University study sees the emergence of a “digital skills divide” based on socioeconomic status. The study, published in the March/April issue of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, finds that wealthy, educated Americans are more capable of identifying untrustworthy information about child-rearing on the Internet than poor, uneducated Americans.
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Published by rwatstein March 29th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
As of January 2008, the US accounted for 21% of Internet users worldwide, or 173 million Internet users according to comScore. This figure does not include users accessing the Internet from public computers or mobile phones. While growth in the Internet audience has slowed in the US and other developed countries, it has accelerated in other regions of the world, particularly Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe
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Published by rwatstein March 23rd, 2008
in demographics.
Slowly but surely searching, online shopping and social networking are becoming part of mothers’ daily routines. Being a parent makes going online almost a necessity. Today, more than 40% of all women who go online in the US—approximately 35 million of them—are mothers who have children under 18 at home.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in demographics and books.
Every Monday at 4 p.m., Stephen King fans gather at 2100 Lakeside Men’s Shelter. So do readers of Louis L’Amour, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. One recent afternoon, they spotted fellow King devotee Donna Kelly as she rounded the corner by the front desk. They followed her down a brightly lit hallway to a locked room, where she dropped her cases of sodas and snacks before backtracking to the shelter office to find a key and announce the start of the book club over the public address system. Newcomer Marc Zak, a young man wearing thick glasses and work boots, waited outside the door, eager to start talking about books. “That’s all I do,” said Mr. Zak who has been at the shelter for two months and favors mysteries, science fiction, and adventure titles. “I just read.”
At a time when book
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All those hours spent watching videos about cats with 1000 faces have obviously paid off, with YouTube now the most popular social networking site in Britain, knocking Wikipedia off the prestigious perch. During the month of January, YouTube had a 56% increase in traffic compared to January 2007, with 10.4 million unique users from the UK, and Wikipedia managing to attract a paltry 9.6 million. Nielsen Online claims that Facebook had 8.5 million from the UK, as well.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 showed two dogs at a computer, with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”That may no longer be true.A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more than ever about the gritty details of what people search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.
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Published by rwatstein March 16th, 2008
in demographics, internet and Canada.
The idea that Canadian teens are Internet-savvy, constantly-wired early adopters may not be true, according to a study by Ipsos Reid. The online survey of Canadian youth (ages 12 to 17) found that teens spend an average of 13 hours per week online, compared with 19 hours for adults.
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Published by rwatstein March 3rd, 2008
in Pew Research and demographics.
Pew Research canvassing of longtime internet users shows that the things that first brought them online are still going strong on the internet today. Then, it was bulletin boards; now, it’s social networking sites. Then, it was the adventure of exploring the new cyberworld; now, it’s upgrading to broadband and wireless connections to explore even more aggressively. Yet there are changes in their activities and motives. In the early days, most internet users consumed material from websites. These days they are just as likely to produce material. One common refrain is that they think more change lies ahead and they are eager to watch and participate.
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Academic librarian Julie Artman says that to mine your millennials, use their young blood—and tech know-how—to “brainstorm ‘what if’, implement ‘what is,’ and review ‘what was.’”
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From politicians to film stars, anyone who was anyone had a Facebook profile. But the social networking phenomenon may have peaked now that the number of British users of the site has fallen for the first time. Analysts are speaking of “Facebook fatigue” after figures showed a 5 per cent decline from 8.9 million unique visitors to the website in December to 8.5 million last month. The fall could be a seasonal dip - Facebook’s audience is still 712 per cent higher than it was a year ago and 9 per cent higher than three months ago.
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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008
in podcasts and demographics.
They don’t all listen to the same programs, they don’t all use iPods, and they don’t all come from the same background. They are podcast users, and they defy clear-cut connections between usage and factors such as gender, age and income level.
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Published by rwatstein February 25th, 2008
in demographics and internet.
2007 was another boom year for the Internet in the United Kingdom. Almost 37 million people went online in an average month—that’s over 60% of the population. This year looks like more of the same, and by 2012 eMarketer estimates that the Internet will reach roughly 70% of all UK residents.
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