CWA New Media: Our Blog

Large numbers can attract the attention.   These figures come from a BBC report, and it advises that this is a 41% growth since last year.    Included in the report was that 117.6 million people accessed the internet using their mobile phones last year, up 133% from 2007.

Students are the main strength of mobile internet users, the study said: 43.5% of them use their mobile phones to read online news, download music, check email and perform a variety of other tasks.

At the end of 2008, the number of net users in China, which has a population of 1.3 billion, was almost the same as the entire population of the United States.

wow!

The wonderfully distributed web 2.0 world  has been accelerating over the past few years and many of us have little bits of our content, ideas, creations  and identity scattered across 2.0 places like Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, Flickr, You Tube, Photobucket, Google docs, Live Journal et al.

But this year could be shaping up as a shakeout year for some of the less famous of these online spaces.

While these sites are free to us, there is a cost for someone somewhere in terms of their staffing, server infrastructure and traffic costs.  As the recession hits their owners may  start to look more closely at whether the hoped-for returns on their investment are being realised.

I guess the best approach is to ensure that when we publish onto these sites we also keep copies of whatever is precious to us – just in case someone hits the off-switch.

I can’t imagine life without email, but others can.  This article touches on the possibility that millennials have moved on.

Web 2.0 activity became frenetic in 2008 and while many web services came and went in the flurry of choices, others weathered the snowstorm to emerge as popular and  influential connectors.

Technorati is one these.

The site explains its purpose – founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, we index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.

From a learning perspective, its amazing to know that people around the world are sharing their knowledge and unique insights through their blogs, but finding the good stuff that serves a learning purpose out there is the challenge.  Technorati helps to bring a little bit of order to the wonderful chaos.

It is ironic, perhaps, that it is  the ‘happening right now’ sites that can lead to some of my most serious lost in time experiences when online.  Mysterious gaps can appear in my day if I drop in on Twittervision and watch the world fly back and forth to reveal the latest ‘what I had for breakfast’ type comments from people in faraway places.   And time seems to stand still as I await the  latest contribution to the modern day version of ‘photos from my holiday’ – as shared by the cyber-fuelled tourists of Flickrvision.

It definitely isn’t the content that holds my attention – it is the fascination of seeing the power of a web-enabled and connected world demonstrated in real time by these sites.

It is a little ironic, maybe, that it’s the “what’s happening right now’ services of the web are the ones that