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bits & pieces by sotomi

The Neuroscience of Habits: How They Form and How to Change Them [Excerpt]: Scientific American

power-of-habit-book-cover BREAK THE CYCLE: People can encourage good habits, and vanquish bad ones, if they understand how habits form in the first place. Image: Random House

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business (Random House, 2012) by Charles Duhigg

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around.

I spoke to Reza Habib when I was reporting my book, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, because I was researching the case of a woman named Angie Bachmann who had lost of $1 million gambling, and then had claimed in court that she shouldn't be held accountable for her losses, because the casinos had taken advantage of gambling habits over which she had no control.

It wasn't a ridiculous claim. Just a few years earlier, a man in Britain had defended himself from murdering his wife as they slept by claiming that he suffered from 'night terrors,' and that he had strangled her while dreaming of an intruder. His self-defense habits, he argued, had kicked in, and thus he bore no blame. He was set free by the jury. Bachmann was hoping for something similar, and was hoping that experiments like Habib's would make her case.

Half of the participants in Habib's experiment were “pathological gamblers” — people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino — while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors.

Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity.

“We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in nonpathological gamblers.

“But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.”

Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses— which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit, the one that says I should quit before it gets worse.

It’s unclear if problem gamblers’ brains are different because they are born that way or if sustained exposure to slot machines, online poker, and casinos can change how the brain functions. What is clear is that real neurological differences impact how pathological gamblers process information—which helps explain why Angie Bachmann lost control every time she walked into a casino. Gaming companies are well aware of this tendency, of course, which is why in the past decades, slot machines have been reprogrammed to deliver a more constant supply of near wins.

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In fact, Harrah’s Entertainment—the company that owned the casino where Bachmann played—was known within the gaming industry for the sophistication of its customer-tracking systems. At the core of that system were computer programs that studied gamblers’ habits and tried to figure out how to persuade them to spend more. The company assigned players a “predicted lifetime value,” and software built calendars that anticipated how often they would visit and how much they would spend. The company tracked customers through loyalty cards and mailed out coupons for free meals and cash vouchers; telemarketers called people at home to ask where they had been. Casino employees were trained to encourage visitors to discuss their lives, in the hopes they might reveal information that could be used to predict how much they had to gamble with. One Harrah’s executive called this approach “Pavlovian marketing.”

And it's not just Harrah's. Gamblers who keep betting after near wins are what make casinos, racetracks, and state lotteries so profitable.

“Adding a near miss to a lottery is like pouring jet fuel on a fire,” said a state lottery consultant who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. “You want to know why sales have exploded? Every other scratch- off ticket is designed to make you feel
like you almost won.”

The areas of the brain that Habib scrutinized in his experiment—the basal ganglia and the brain stem—are the same regions where habits reside (as well as where behaviors during sleep terrors start). In the past decade, as new classes of pharmaceuticals have emerged that target that region— such as medications for Parkinson’s disease—we’ve learned a great deal about how sensitive some habits can be to outside stimulation. Class action lawsuits in the United States, Australia, and Canada have been filed against drug manufacturers, alleging that pharmaceuticals caused patients to compulsively bet, eat, shop, and masturbate by targeting the circuitry involved in the habit loop.

In 2008, a federal jury in Minnesota awarded a patient $8.2 million in a lawsuit against a drug company after the man claimed that his medication had caused him to gamble away more than $250,000. Hundreds of similar cases are pending.

“In those cases, we can definitively say that patients have no control over their obsessions, because we can point to a drug that impacts their neurochemistry,” said Habib. “But when we look at the brains of people who are obsessive gamblers, they look very similar—except they can’t blame it on a medication. They tell researchers they don’t want to gamble, but they can’t resist the cravings. So why do we say that those gamblers are in control of their actions and the Parkinson’s patients aren’t?”

But for Angie Bachmann, the arguments would become much, much more complicated.

via scientificamerican.com

BBC News - If Britain were Greece...

Job losses in the tens of thousands, drastic wage cuts, and working even further into old age - just some of the challenges that would loom in the UK if the government had to introduce austerity cuts on the scale currently facing the Greeks. For BBC Radio 4's Broadcasting House - the Sunday Times Economics Editor, David Smith, was asked to imagine what would happen if Britain had Greece's problems
via bbc.co.uk

We, the Web Kids (a manifesto-like for the web generation)

  1. Piotr Czerski
  2. We, the Web Kids.
  3. (translated by Marta Szreder)

  5. There is probably no other word that would be as overused in the media discourse as ‘generation’. I once tried to count the ‘generations’ that have been proclaimed in the past ten years, since the well-known article about the so-called ‘Generation Nothing’; I believe there were as many as twelve. They all had one thing in common: they only existed on paper. Reality never provided us with a single tangible, meaningful, unforgettable impulse, the common experience of which would forever distinguish us from the previous generations. We had been looking for it, but instead the groundbreaking change came unnoticed, along with cable TV, mobile phones, and, most of all, Internet access. It is only today that we can fully comprehend how much has changed during the past fifteen years.

  7. We, the Web kids; we, who have grown up with the Internet and on the Internet, are a generation who meet the criteria for the term in a somewhat subversive way. We did not experience an impulse from reality, but rather a metamorphosis of the reality itself. What unites us is not a common, limited cultural context, but the belief that the context is self-defined and an effect of free choice.

  9. Writing this, I am aware that I am abusing the pronoun ‘we’, as our ‘we’ is fluctuating, discontinuous, blurred, according to old categories: temporary. When I say ‘we’, it means ‘many of us’ or ‘some of us’. When I say ‘we are’, it means ‘we often are’. I say ‘we’ only so as to be able to talk about us at all.

  11. 1.
  12. We grew up with the Internet and on the Internet. This is what makes us different; this is what makes the crucial, although surprising from your point of view, difference: we do not ‘surf’ and the internet to us is not a ‘place’ or ‘virtual space’. The Internet to us is not something external to reality but a part of it: an invisible yet constantly present layer intertwined with the physical environment. We do not use the Internet, we live on the Internet and along it. If we were to tell our bildnungsroman to you, the analog, we could say there was a natural Internet aspect to every single experience that has shaped us. We made friends and enemies online, we prepared cribs for tests online, we planned parties and studying sessions online, we fell in love and broke up online. The Web to us is not a technology which we had to learn and which we managed to get a grip of. The Web is a process, happening continuously and continuously transforming before our eyes; with us and through us. Technologies appear and then dissolve in the peripheries, websites are built, they bloom and then pass away, but the Web continues, because we are the Web; we, communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.

  14. Brought up on the Web we think differently. The ability to find information is to us something as basic, as the ability to find a railway station or a post office in an unknown city is to you. When we want to know something - the first symptoms of chickenpox, the reasons behind the sinking of ‘Estonia’, or whether the water bill is not suspiciously high  - we take measures with the certainty of a driver in a SatNav-equipped car. We know that we are going to find the information we need in a lot of places, we know how to get to those places, we know how to assess their credibility. We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.

  16. To us, the Web is a sort of shared external memory. We do not have to remember unnecessary details: dates, sums, formulas, clauses, street names, detailed definitions. It is enough for us to have an abstract, the essence that is needed to process the information and relate it to others. Should we need the details, we can look them up within seconds. Similarly, we do not have to be experts in everything, because we know where to find people who specialise in what we ourselves do not know, and whom we can trust. People who will share their expertise with us not for profit, but because of our shared belief that information exists in motion, that it wants to be free, that we all benefit from the exchange of information. Every day: studying, working, solving everyday issues, pursuing interests. We know how to compete and we like to do it, but our competition, our desire to be different, is built on knowledge, on the ability to interpret and process information, and not on monopolising it.

  18. 2.
  19. Participating in cultural life is not something out of ordinary to us: global culture is the fundamental building block of our identity, more important for defining ourselves than traditions, historical narratives, social status, ancestry, or even the language that we use. From the ocean of cultural events we pick the ones that suit us the most; we interact with them, we review them, we save our reviews on websites created for that purpose, which also give us suggestions of other albums, films or games that we might like. Some films, series or videos we watch together with colleagues or with friends from around the world; our appreciation of some is only shared by a small group of people that perhaps we will never meet face to face. This is why we feel that culture is becoming simultaneously global and individual. This is why we need free access to it.

  21. This does not mean that we demand that all products of culture be available to us without charge, although when we create something, we usually just give it back for circulation. We understand that, despite the increasing accessibility of technologies which make the quality of movie or sound files so far reserved for professionals available to everyone, creativity requires effort and investment. We are prepared to pay, but the giant commission that distributors ask for seems to us to be obviously overestimated. Why should we pay for the distribution of information that can be easily and perfectly copied without any loss of the original quality? If we are only getting the information alone, we want the price to be proportional to it. We are willing to pay more, but then we expect to receive some added value: an interesting packaging, a gadget, a higher quality, the option of watching here and now, without waiting for the file to download. We are capable of showing appreciation and we do want to reward the artist (since money stopped being paper notes and became a string of numbers on the screen, paying has become a somewhat symbolic act of exchange that is supposed to benefit both parties), but the sales goals of corporations are of no interest to us whatsoever. It is not our fault that their business has ceased to make sense in its traditional form, and that instead of accepting the challenge and trying to reach us with something more than we can get for free they have decided to defend their obsolete ways.

  23. One more thing: we do not want to pay for our memories. The films that remind us of our childhood, the music that accompanied us ten years ago: in the external memory network these are simply memories. Remembering them, exchanging them, and developing them is to us something as natural as the memory of ‘Casablanca’ is to you. We find online the films that we watched as children and we show them to our children, just as you told us the story about the Little Red Riding Hood or Goldilocks. Can you imagine that someone could accuse you of breaking the law in this way? We cannot, either.

  25. 3.
  26. We are used to our bills being paid automatically, as long as our account balance allows for it; we know that starting a bank account or changing the mobile network is just the question of filling in a single form online and signing an agreement delivered by a courier; that even a trip to the other side of Europe with a short sightseeing of another city on the way can be organised in two hours. Consequently, being the users of the state, we are increasingly annoyed by its archaic interface. We do not understand why tax act takes several forms to complete, the main of which has more than a hundred questions. We do not understand why we are required to formally confirm moving out of one permanent address to move in to another, as if councils could not communicate with each other without our intervention (not to mention that the necessity to have a permanent address is itself absurd enough.)

  28. There is not a trace in us of that humble acceptance displayed by our parents, who were convinced that administrative issues were of utmost importance and who considered interaction with the state as something to be celebrated. We do not feel that respect, rooted in the distance between the lonely citizen and the majestic heights where the ruling class reside, barely visible through the clouds. Our view of the social structure is different from yours: society is a network, not a hierarchy. We are used to being able to start a dialogue with anyone, be it a professor or a pop star, and we do not need any special qualifications related to social status. The success of the interaction depends solely on whether the content of our message will be regarded as important and worthy of reply. And if, thanks to cooperation, continuous dispute, defending our arguments against critique, we have a feeling that our opinions on many matters are simply better, why would we not expect a serious dialogue with the government?

  30. We do not feel a religious respect for ‘institutions of democracy’ in their current form, we do not believe in their axiomatic role, as do those who see ‘institutions of democracy’ as a monument for and by themselves. We do not need monuments. We need a system that will live up to our expectations, a system that is transparent and proficient. And we have learned that change is possible: that every uncomfortable system can be replaced and is replaced by a new one, one that is more efficient, better suited to our needs, giving more opportunities.

  32. What we value the most is freedom: freedom of speech, freedom of access to information and to culture. We feel that it is thanks to freedom that the Web is what it is, and that it is our duty to protect that freedom. We owe that to next generations, just as much as we owe to protect the environment.

  34. Perhaps we have not yet given it a name, perhaps we are not yet fully aware of it, but I guess what we want is real, genuine democracy. Democracy that, perhaps, is more than is dreamt of in your journalism.

  36. ___
  37. "My, dzieci sieci" by Piotr Czerski is licensed under a Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa-Na tych samych warunkach 3.0 Unported License:
  38. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

  40. Contact the author: piotr[at]czerski.art.pl

 

How Pinterest Will Transform the Web in 2012: Social Content Curation As The Next Big Thing

The most interesting wave hitting the social web in 2012 is social curation.  This was kicked off in 2011 as Pinterest's growth was noticed by Silicon Valley and a number of companies quickly followed suit - Snip.It launched as a social information curation platform, Quora adopted boards for a similar purpose, and Fab.com launched a structured social commerce feed.

In this blog post I will discuss the evolution of social media from long-form to push-button, the emergence of social curation on sites such as Twitter and Tumblr, and the move to structured sets of curated content on Pinterest and its brethren.

But first, the meta-trend....

...Social Media: Evolving From Long Form To Push Button
In the evolution of social media over the last decade, the trend has been a move from long form content, which has high friction of participation (both on the production and consumption side) to ever lower requirements placed on a user to participate in a conversation.

1999-2004 Blogging Platforms.
Blogger (launched in 1999) and other early social media sites were longer form blogs.  The bar to write content was reasonably high.  These sites effectively had two separate users bases: people who wrote the content (1% or less of users) and people who read or consumed the content (99% of users).  Yelp (2004) is basically a food blogging platform where reviewers will go on about how their boyfriend was mean to them during dinner, before actually reviewing the food.

2004-2007 Status Message Networks.
Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006) transformed social media by moving from long form blogging to short form social snippets in the form of photos (Facebook) and status updates (Twitter).  This decreased the friction to both producing as well as consuming content, leading to extremely broad participation by a global user base. 

2007-2010 Push Button Interactions.
Some interesting organic user behavior emerged on Twitter, as users would "re-tweet" content as a way to re-broadcast another person's content to their own network.  Similarly, Tumblr (2007) mixed long, medium, and short form content with an additional affordance "re-blog".  Re-blogging allowed a user to repost a blog with a single button, allowing users to essentially curate content without producing any original content. 


Twitter and Tumblr made it easy to re-tweet and re-blog other's content - the first step in social curation of the web (red arrow above indicates re-blog feature on Tumblr)

In parallel, push button private content curation emerged as Instapaper (2008), Evernote(2008), Read It Later (around the same time) all launched applications to allow users to collect and later read content.  However, none of these services had a strong social component.

Foursquare (2009) was one of the first networks to generate social content more or less entirely off of push button interactions.   By checking-in, you broadcast your location to your friends, creating content without actually needed to type a single word.

However, all of the social services continued to serve content as a time ordered stream.  Moving from a stream to a structured collectible set of content was the next innovation in social media.... 

2010-Now Structured Sets And Social Curation.
Pinterest (launch 2010) was one of the first sites to take push button content generation (via bookmarklets and "re-pinning") and structure it into sets of curated content called "boards".  This allowed users to collect content from across the web, as well as from other users on the site.  In some sense it took what a site like Tumblr had been doing but transformed blog-like streams into structured, curated collections users could share.  Importantly, it was easy for new users to consume these sets of content visually as structured sets, and to share these sets with others.

David King has pointed out an interesting insight - by constructing content in a structured set versus a stream, sites such as Pinterest and Snip.It have prevented stream-based sites such as Facebook from becoming a compelling place to consume the Pinterest or Snip.It content (which contrasts with e.g. Instagram or other stream based sites).

Pinterest boards are not as consumable on Facebook as stream-based sites such as Instagram, carving out a large new social media market for this behavior.

This new affordance is currently being adopted by other sites leading to all sorts of interesting behavior including:
  • Collecting news and information.  Snip.It (2011) was an early product to allow for social curation and structured sets of news and information based content.  Recently Quora (launched boards end of 2011) entered this market by adding "boards" for curating content from across the web to its core Q&A product.
  • Commerce.  Nils Johnson (one of the smartest social commerce guys out there) has pointed out how Fab.com recently used a Pinterest-like affordance in its "feed" to drive social curation of products.  (See image below on how closely the Fab UI mimics Pinterest).  It is similarly likely Pinterest will monetize in a number of interesting ways on the product discovery and commerce side.
  • Social media.  Storify (2011) has added an additional structured curation layer on top of Twitter.

Pinterest UI above, Fab.com UI below.

As you can see the Fab UI has followed the Pinterest one.

Summary: 2012 Will Be The Year of Curated Sets
2012 will likely see an acceleration of structured, push button, social curation across the web.  Why?  Because most users don't want to take much effort to produce content, and consuming content in a structured manner (especially photos) is also much faster.  Just as the first wave of social media has transformed the consumption of information, this next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time.

Many thanks to Nils Johnson and David King for conversations that led to some of the insights in this post. 

via http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/12/how-pinterest-will-transform-web-in.html?spref=tw#

Ο πρώτος κυβερνοπόλεμος της ιστορίας είναι γεγονός!

Μια ημέρα μετά τις διαμαρτυρίες και την παγκόσμια απεργία κατά των νομοσχεδίων SOPA και PIPA στην Αμερική, άγριος πόλεμος ξέσπασε στο διαδίκτυο ανάμεσα στις αρχές και στους χάκερς Anonymous.

Έτσι το FBI έκλεισε τα ξημερώματα Παρασκευής το γνωστό site streaming ταινιών και σειρών megaupload, το οποίο κατά καιρούς έχει δεχθεί την υποστήριξη καλλιτεχνών. Το megaupload.com είχε καθημερινά 50 εκ. επισκέπτες, ενώ ήταν το 72ο site σε επισκεψιμότητα στον κόσμο.

Οι Anonymous οι οποίοι είχαν προειδοποιήσει για αντίποινα, απάντησαν στις συλλήψεις που πραγματοποιήθηκαν και στο κλείσιμο του site, με μια άνευ προηγουμένου μαζική επίθεση σε μεγάλες ιστοσελίδες της Αμερικανικής κυβέρνησης (μεταξύ των οποίων και του ίδιου του FBI), καθώς και δισκογραφικών εταιρειών που υποστηρίζουν την ψήφιση των επίμαχων νομοσχεδίων που στοχεύουν στον έλεγχο του internet. 

Συγκεκριμένα, με την επιχείρηση operation megaupload, οι Anonymous 'έριξαν' δημιούργησαν προβλήματα στα ακόλουθα sites :


Department of Justice (Justice.gov)

Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA.org)

Universal Music (UniversalMusic.com)

Belgian Anti-Piracy Federation (Anti-piracy.be/nl/)

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA.org)

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI.gov)

HADOPI law site (HADOPI.fr)

U.S. Copyright Office (Copyright.gov)

Universal Music France (UniversalMusic.fr)

Senator Christopher Dodd (ChrisDodd.com)

Vivendi France (Vivendi.fr)

The White House (Whitehouse.gov)

BMI (BMI.com)

Warner Music Group (WMG.com)

universaldown

fbidown

 

Παράλληλα όλο το βράδυ μέσω Twitter ενημέρωναν για τις επιθέσεις τους και τις κινήσεις τους, ενώ ανέβασαν και ένα βίντεο ανακοινώνοντας ότι ''δεν πρέπει να τα βάζει κανείς μαζί τους'':



Το hashtag #opmegaupload έγινε αμέσως θέμα σε όλον τον κόσμο μέσω του Twitter.


3685100-5423604

Εικάζεται ότι συνολικά 5,365 άνθρωποι πήραν μέρος στις μαζικές επιθέσεις που χαρακτηρίζονται σήμερα από τα διεθνή μέσα ως ο πρώτος πόλεμος του διαδικτύου!

Σύμφωνα με τους Anonymous το «κλείσιμο» του megaupload.com αποδεικνύει τελικά ότι η ομοσπονδιακή κυβέρνηση δεν έχει ανάγκη από νομοσχέδια για να παρεμβαίνει στο internet...

Η συνέχεια αναμένεται φυσικά με πολύ ενδιαφέρον.

 

Διαβάστε επίσης:

Μαζική επίθεση από τους Anonymous – Έριξαν και τη σελίδα του FBI



Αν θέλετε να μαθαίνετε παράλληλα όσα σημαντικά διαδραματίζονται στα ελληνικά και ξένα media κάντε like στην σελίδα του mediagate.gr στο Facebook πατώντας εδώ.
via mediagate.gr

Internet 2011 in numbers | Royal Pingdom

So what happened with the Internet in 2011? How many email accounts were there in the world in 2011? How many websites? How much did the most expensive domain name cost? How many photos were hosted on Facebook? How many videos were viewed to YouTube?

We’ve got answers to these questions and many more. A veritable smorgasbord of numbers, statistics and data lies in front of you. Using a variety of sources we’ve compiled what we think are some of the more interesting numbers that describe the Internet in 2011.

Email

  • 3.146 billion – Number of email accounts worldwide.
  • 27.6% – Microsoft Outlook was the most popular email client.
  • 19% – Percentage of spam emails delivered to corporate email inboxes despite spam filters.
  • 112 – Number of emails sent and received per day by the average corporate user.
  • 71% – Percentage of worldwide email traffic that was spam (November 2011).
  • 360 million – Total number of Hotmail users (largest email service in the world).
  • $44.25 – The estimated return on $1 invested in email marketing in 2011.
  • 40 – Years since the first email was sent, in 1971.
  • 0.39% – Percentage of email that was malicious (November 2011).

Websites

  • 555 million – Number of websites (December 2011).
  • 300 million – Added websites in 2011.

Web servers

  • 239.1% – Growth in the number of Apache websites in 2011.
  • 68.7% – Growth in the number of IIS websites in 2011.
  • 34.4% – Growth in the number of NGINX websites in 2011.
  • 80.9% – Growth in the number of Google websites in 2011.

Domain names

  • 95.5 million – Number of .com domain names at the end of 2011.
  • 13.8 million – Number of .net domain names at the end of 2011.
  • 9.3 million – Number of .org domains names at the end of 2011.
  • 7.6 million – Number of .info domain names at the end of 2011.
  • 2.1 million – Number of .biz domain names at the end of 2011.
  • 220 million – Number of registered domain names (Q3, 2011).
  • 86.9 million – Number of country code top-level domains (.CN, .UK, .DE, etc.) (Q3, 2011).
  • 324 – Number of top-level domains.
  • 28% – Market share for BIND, the number one DNS server type.
  • $2.6 million – The price for social.com, the most expensive domain name sold in 2011.

Internet users

  • 2.1 billion – Internet users worldwide.
  • 922.2 million – Internet users in Asia.
  • 476.2 million – Internet users in Europe.
  • 271.1 million – Internet users in North America.
  • 215.9 million – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
  • 118.6 million – Internet users in Africa.
  • 68.6 million – Internet users in the Middle East.
  • 21.3 million – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.
  • 45% – Share of Internet users under the age of 25.
  • 485 million – Number of Internet users in China, more than any other country in the world.
  • 36.3% – Internet penetration in China.
  • 591 million – Number of fixed (wired) broadband subscriptions worldwide.

Social media

  • 800+ million – Number of users on Facebook by the end of 2011.
  • 200 million – Number of users added to Facebook during 2011.
  • 350 million – Number of Facebook users that log in to the service using their mobile phone.
  • 225 million – Number of Twitter accounts.
  • 100 million – Number of active Twitter users in 2011.
  • 18.1 million – People following Lady Gaga. Twitter’s most popular user.
  • 250 million – Number of tweets per day (October 2011).
  • 1 – #egypt was the number one hashtag on Twitter.
  • 8,868 – Number of tweets per second in August for the MTV Video Music Awards.
  • $50,000 – The amount raised for charity by the most retweeted tweet of 2011.
  • 39 million – The number of Tumblr blogs by the end of 2011.
  • 70 million – Total number of WordPress blogs by the end of 2011.
  • 1 billion – The number of messages sent with WhatsApp during one day (October 2011).
  • 2.6 billion – Worldwide IM accounts.
  • 2.4 billion – Social networking accounts worldwide.

Web browsers

Mobile

Videos

  • 1 trillion – The number of video playbacks on YouTube.
  • 140 – The number of YouTube video playbacks per person on Earth.
  • 48 hours – The amount of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
  • 1 – The most viewed video on YouTube during 2011 was Rebecka Black’s “Friday.”
  • 82.5% – Percentage of the U.S. Internet audience that viewed video online.
  • 76.4% – YouTube’s share of the U.S. video website market (December 2011).
  • 4,189,214 – Number of new users on Vimeo.
  • 201.4 billion – Number of videos viewed online per month (October 2011).
  • 88.3 billion – Videos viewed per month on Google sites, incl. YouTube (October 2011).
  • 43% – Share of all worldwide video views delivered by Google sites, incl. YouTube.

Images

  • 14 million – Number of Instagram accounts created during 2011.
  • 60 – The average number of photos uploaded per second to Instagram.
  • 100 billion – Estimated number of photos on Facebook by mid-2011.
  • 51 million – Total number of registered users on Flickr.
  • 4.5 million – Number of photos uploaded to Flickr each day.
  • 6 billion – Photos hosted on Flickr (August 2011).
  • 1 – Apple iPhone 4 is the most popular camera on Flickr.

What’s in store for 2012?

For 2012, there’s every reason to think that the Internet, by any measure, will keep growing. As we put more of our personal as well as professional lives online, we will come to rely on the Internet in ways we could hardly imagine before. For better or worse, the Internet is now a critical component in almost everything we do.

We will be back again early next year to wrap up 2012. In the meantime, you may also want to check out our annual summaries for 2008, 2009, and 2010.

via royal.pingdom.com

Why Do B-Schools Still Teach The Famed 4P's Of Marketing, When Three Are Dead? | Co.Design

The digital revolution has rewritten the laws of marketing. So why do B-schools insist on teaching outmoded notions of price, place, and promotion?

In 1960, Jerome McCarthy got a bright and amazingly resilient idea. All the components of a marketing strategy could be reduced to just Four P’s (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion), the 32-year-old marketing professor claimed.

There's a new golden rule in our hyper competitive markets.
And he was right, at least at the time. Those Four P’s have since become a tremendously influential guide in marketing programs. Although the world of marketing has changed significantly since the '60s, all MBA students, marketers, and strategy consultants are still expected to know and apply the Four P’s as if they were laws of nature. Some would argue that the digital revolution has yet to radically change the teachings of the Four P’s.

But a closer look at some of today’s fastest-growing brands shows that time has buried the Four P’s. Companies can no longer use them to gain a competitive advantage and meaningful differentiation. In fact, they more and more look like the roadmap to failure.

The Three Dead P's

Let’s look at promotion. In recent years, we have seen the explosive growth of companies that don’t do any advertising at all. Zara, one of the largest and fastest-growing fashion brands, never advertises. Facebook didn’t grow to 800 million users through any type of promotion. And although the company thrives off advertising, Google only recently started to advertise.

In the Plex, a new book about the rise of Google, Steven Levy tells the story of how Google’s first VP of marketing Scott Epstein suggested an elaborate marketing plan based on the Four P’s. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page rejected his plan outright, and Epstein left the company shortly thereafter. “It really came down to this,” a Google employee told Levy, “do we want to put money into the technology, into the infrastructure, into hiring really great people? Or do we want to blow it on a marketing campaign we can’t measure?”

Google didn’t need marketing; the search engine was so good that it spoke for itself. Few companies are lucky to have such a powerful product, but the essential rationale is the same for everyone: A penny spent on campaigns is a penny less spent on creating user value. In a transparent, digitally empowered world, only the best offerings survive, so companies that spend on promotions have a cost disadvantage.

Importantly, the decline of promotion does not mean that brands don’t matter; it just means that their value hinges less on costly marketing campaigns.

The other P’s are just as dispensable. Place is obviously becoming less and less important as more commerce moves online. And price is also less of a potential strategic marketing advantage. With price, comparison sites like Tripadvisor.com, Pricegrabber.com, and Bizrate.com, many companies are forced to let raw market forces determine the price of their products.

A penny spent on ads is a penny less spent on user value.

Only Product Matters

So what is today’s marketer left with as a way to build a strategic advantage? The product. The only real way for a company to build a growing brand is to design products and services that are so good that they become marketing vehicles in and of themselves. Or put in broader economic terms: The golden rule for today’s hyper competitive and information-rich markets is this:

The only way you can increase the value of your brand is by increasing the value of your offering.

That value isn't defined solely by greater usability, though that's a part of it; value is to a greater and greater degree determined by the emotional connection a user has to a product. Great design creates emotional value. Bold social actions by a company and great, or even free, services do the same. But in the post-advertising world, there is no simple formula for creating emotional value--apart from producing an outstanding product.

This One-P marketing rule will have profound ramifications for how companies organize their marketing, split their marketing budget, and integrate product development, design, and brand building--not to mention for the $450-billion-plus/year marketing industry. But at least one “P” will be easier to learn than four.
***

Written by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen.


Rasmus Bech Hansen is London-based strategy director at Venturethree, a global brand consultancy. He writes on how brands can do well by doing good and has helped to re-launch the United Nations Global Compact brand, the world’s most successful CSR initiative.


Skibsted Ideation

Skibsted Ideation

Skibsted Ideation is a design agency created by Jens Martin Skibsted, the founder of bicycle company Biomega. In 2009 he co-founded the product design super-group KiBiSi ... Read more

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