Online Media Cultist

Lots of fun stats to pick through from a recent Universal McCann report on social media (found via ReadWriteWeb).

Some quick takes:

83% watch video clips, up from 62% in the last study in June 2007

The maturation of social media tools based around video has just begun. This is going to be an area of experimentation, funding, and entrepreneurship for years to come. Video advertising and video metrics is in its earliest stages as well.

78% read blogs, up from 66%

A remarkable figure, particularly in the face of those who dismiss the blogosphere. It’s here to stay kids.

RSS consumption is growing rapidly up from 15% to 39%

Many inside the web-obsessed folk take RSS for granted these days, but we see that it’s really starting to tip over into mainstream consumption for the first time. That’s great news for innovative plays like Readburner, which harnesses RSS feed reading and story sharing and creates community features around it.

China is the world’s largest blogging market with 42m bloggers versus 26m in the US

Social media is worldwide and growing. It will be fascinating to see if and how social media and blogging adoption in China will affect government policies and reaction.

Overall, it’s easy to conclude that the social media monster is growing with no signs of slowing anytime soon.

It’s always fascinating to take a look at what’s going on beyond your own country’s borders. Here in the U.S. we have a tendency to not do that enough, I think.

No doubt the Internet is having a profound impact on countries around the world, and it’s interesting to look at how non-Western governments are reacting to tremendous shifts in the ability of people to communicate, collaborate, and organize with one another.

As you might imagine, the reaction isn’t always glorious and benign on behalf of some governments. Just over the last few days, we see that Turkey blocked a website that insulted Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, “the founder of modern Turkey,” and Indonesia has enacted a law that will restrict access to “pornographic and violent sites” under the guise of a scarily-termed “information bill.” And not surprisingly in Bhutan, a country that saw the introduction of both television and the Internet only nine years ago, access to “foreign influences” is limited by the current government.

There are signs though that countries and nations and cultures – just like here in the U.S. and in Europe – are grappling with how best to deal with this new era. And it’s not all negative news.

China, a country well known for throwing down the hammer on journalists and publications that it doesn’t like, has opened up access to BBC News online after years of blocking its access. Hilariously, the Chinese government denied both the blocking and unblocking, noting that the “connection was reset.”

I can’t help seeing governmental intervention in how the Internet is accessed and used as a rearguard action, at least in the grand scheme of things.

For any web community, it’s worthwhile to debate the point at which you “force” a visitor to register for your site or login. Can people see all of your content, for example, without logging in? Many times, the right place to force the registration/login is when the visitor wants to interact with the website, such as when leaving a comment.

In some places, like Xiamen, China, the government makes up the rules for you. It seems that after the Internet was used to help organize a protest against a chemical plant, the government has laid down the hammer in banning anonymous online postings and censoring online chatroom conversations.

The new rule goes something like this: “The names registered must be the same as the ones on your identity card.”

That’s some crazy Big Brother kind of stuff right there. It’s incredible to think about the parts of the world with teeming billions who have grown up in the Internet age (and can kick all of our American bottoms in games such as World of Warcraft and run rings round us in science and math in their spare time) but who are actively stifled in the ways they can communicate, collaborate (not such a good word in some places!), and express themselves.

If we are to believe a new string of reports streaming in from all corners of the real world globeosphere, people are hopelessly and helplessly addicted to the Interwebs and must be legislated or bullwhipped back into proper and productive offline working submission.

From the United Kingdom today we learn that workers spend too much time “wilfing” online, which is short for “what was I looking for?”

I’m going to stop right there and be the first to proclaim the hope that wilfing does not become a part of the international web lexicon. Okay, onward.

In any event, according to yet another new study on this kind of thing, it was discovered that “two out of three British Internet users lose significant portions of their time to irrelevant web browsing,” with shopping sites in particular being a culprit. Again, I would argue here as I’ve done in the past that if workers want to goof off at work, they will. Whether it be Solitaire, Mindsweeper, gossiping on the phone, or chitchatting with Harvey and Chip about the back nine at the corporate country club, there are any number of ways for workers to be unproductive if they so choose.

Can the Interwebs be a distraction? Of course, but so can any number of things, including the delightful glint of the sun on dust that just settled atop yon teeming pile of accounts receivable slips.

Meanwhile, China is laying down the hammer on its teeming hordes of gaming kids by commanding that game companies “develop a system that cancels half a minor’s earned gaming credits if they remain online for more than three hours a day.” In the era of gold farming, MMOs, and WoW, this is a serious edict in a country where 123 million are online.

Of course, this kind of statute that is a hacker’s dream, so I suspect that those who want to stay online more than three hours a day will figure out a way to do so without getting docked.

Should online addiction cause people to get worked up to a state of worldwide hysteria? I’m thinking there are probably other things to worry about. But then again, I’m an online media cultist.