The report is packed with lots of data of both adult and youth social networking site users. Here's a quick summary of the data charts:

- Percent of US online consumers who use social networking sites, by age
- How frequently each age group visits social networking sites
- Percent of each age group that visits major social networking sites at least weekly
- What activities youth do on a social networking site
- Attitudes about social networking sites, e.g. how much they rely on social networking sites to keep in touch with friends, broken out by age and use frequency
- Interest in marketer profiles on social networking sites, by age and use frequency

I've included the last chart here as I found it very interesting that the most frequent users of social networking sites were much more likely to be open to seeing marketer profiles. I'll be publishing a follow-up report in the next few weeks on how marketers can use social networking sites effectively.

One thing to note about this data -- it was conducted in Q4 2006 which is ages in an industry that changes so quickly. The impact of recent events -- like Facebook opening up to non-college students and it's open application development platform -- are not fully captured in these results. We're going out into the field with another survey and plan to report the results in Q3.

For example, researcher danah boyd wrote recently in a blog essay that she observed the beginnings of a class division happening, with "the goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids" migrating to Facebook, while "MySpace is home to kids who "didn't play into the dominant high school popularity". The essay has initiated plenty of debate about a particularly difficult topic. I'm personally familiar with danah's research and have nothing but the highest regard for her work and for danah herself. Kudos for her to sharing her observations, controversial as they may be. As danah writes, "One of the biggest problems with studying youth culture is that it's a moving target, constantly shifting based on a variety of social and cultural forces." Absolutely agreed on that.

One last thing: MySpace recently held an event where they released a report "Never Ending Friending" about who is using social networking sites. The report divides social networking site users into six segments, grouped by how they use the sites. The report also looks at how marketing value is created on social networking sites, which I'll be looking at in my next research piece.

Tags: social networking, MySpace, Facebook, danah boyd, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

Based on the schedules that the publishing industry lives on, we need to complete a draft of Groundswell very soon. Even so, I believe we are delivering material with a high degree of quality. I thought I'd take a moment to talk about how writing a book is different now -- better, faster, more global, more collaborative -- and the technologies I use that make this all possible. This is a highly personal description from a guy who started using computers 25 years ago -- and a measure of how an old guy uses and doesn't use some of the better new technologies.

1. Collaboration with a wiki. Charlene and I have put as much as we can into a SocialText wiki. It's contains research interviews, title ideas, the latest table of contents, the elements of the proposal that got us here, everything. I just added a page which tracks all the chapters as they move through various writing, editing, and review stages. We don't generally use the Wiki to write the chapters -- the drafts still move back and forth by email, partly since SocialText can't quite handle all the formatting flexibility that MS Word can -- but copies of the chapters do live there. A bicoastal collaboration needs a wiki. We also share it with other interested parties including my boss, Charlene's boss, and our editor at HBS Press.

2. This blog for testing ideas. I can't count the ways that a blog helps. When we think we have a good idea, it goes up here. For example, the five goals of a company for social computing, which became the core of the book. We put our outline up here for your review. That post became extremely useful, because I reference it in every email I send to people I'm trying to influence or interview. People doing interesting things contact us because of the blog. And I'm not even getting to the uses of the blog for promotion, which will start after the book is written, but well before it's published.

3. Del.icio.us for gathering research documents. Every story, vendor, YouTube video, and anything else on the Web gets tossed into the del.icio.us bucket. I rarely used to bookmark things -- now I bookmark everything. These sites are even classified with our own proprietary set of tags that indicate what chapter they relate to. (We'll share this when the book is closer to done -- right now it's proprietary.) I don't believe we could have written this book without del.icio.us.

4. Email for everything -- but highly personalized. Every single contact in this book -- and there will be hundreds and hundreds -- will have been made by email. I'm sure you're not surprised that I email Charlene 10 times a day and do a few IM conversations, but I'm talking about making introductions by email. If I need to introduce myself to somebody, I send a personalized email describing the book in one sentence, linking to the blog post about the book, and telling them what I want and making it clear I have researched them and know what they are about -- and I frequently get a response the same day. This email might take 15 minutes to write, but it's worth it -- it's the opposite of mass emailings, highly personal and personalized.  (I recently invited a CEO to speak at our Forum in October and got an affirmative response within two hours -- astounding our events team.) Where do I get the email addresses? Forrester has a database that may or may not help. Easier is finding the PR email address on a company's site. Often somebody I know, knows it. Sometimes I use Zoominfo's PowerSearch. And sometimes, if I know the email address of somebody else at the company, I guess based on that format. That actually works -- recently got the CEO of an Italian company to get back to me that way.

At first I had big spreadsheets full of contacts I was pursuing on Google docs but I've found a better way. I just flag all incoming and outcoming mail that relates to contacts. The yellow flag means I've pinged somebody and need them to get back to me. Then I just check all those flags when I'm in followup mode. It's not ACT, but it works for me!

5. A big monitor in a quiet office. When I am ensconced in my home office with my high-speed Internet, VOIP phone line, home network, and big flat monitor, I am highly productive. The big monitor has made a big difference -- I no longer feel cramped and squeezed by my laptop screen, and I frequently have one thing up on the laptop (like a Web site, or edits I need to address, or an interview) while I write on the big monitor. When I'm not at home, my productivity goes down. My home office, while it's in the basement, also has a window out onto my lawn, a fireplace, a hardwood floor, big whiteboards filled with the stuff I'm working on and my kids' artwork, and quick access to the kitchen and my family when I need to decompress. Makes all the hours possible.

6. A phone line that follows me anywhere. Forrester has an Avaya phone system with a cool little feature -- an Internet app I can run on my laptop that turns any phone into my office phone. At my home office, I can call Japan using Forrester's phone system, conference people together, transfer them to other Forrester extensions -- everything I can do at my desk. And if I go anywhere else, I can do this with any phone line -- my mobile, Forrester's Foster City office, or my parents' house. People see my caller ID as if I were calling from Forrester, and my voicemail is one click away. I find this far better than giving everyone my mobile phone number.

7. Firefox and Netvibes. I use Firefox for everything possible, because the tabbed browsing and the bookmarklets make it very efficient for me. I cannot survive without tabbed browsing since I am typically browsing 4 or 8 things at once to build a chapter. (I know IE has tabbed browsing now but it's too late, I'm happy with Firefox.) I use Netvibes to track a surprisingly small number of blogs including Micropersuasion, The Church Of The Customer, The Long Tail, Blog Maverick, and Seth Godin. I also have up TechCrunch, GigaOm, TechMeme, and TechDirt, but they post so frequently that I don't read them unless something catches my eye.

There are lots of other tools from Technorati to Google Search but we all use them so why even bother talking about them?

Interestingly, I do not read email on a mobile phone -- I have a positively anachronistic Moto Razr -- I don't twitter, and I don't IM except with other Forrester analysts. And I don't check email every 10 minutes. These activities are interruptions for the most part and interfere with writing and interviews I need to do. If I had to rank what I use most -- and what has changed the way I work most since I became a writer -- it would be personalized email, del.icio.us, tabbed browsing, and that big monitor.

What are your favorite productivity tools, and what tools waste the most of your time?

Tags: del.icio.us, SocialText, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

The San Jose Mercury News, among others, is reporting that Google's YouTube will begin checking content for copyrights, specifically in a test with Disney and Time Warner's content. They finally admitted they are using Audible Magic's clever system for checking copyrighted music, which the Merc reported earlier but Google wouldn't confirm.

Now Google is asking copyright holders to send them copies of videos to check against. Mark Cuban, ever the copyright defender and YouTube attacker, cried foul at that one.

Now I'll tell you what's really happening here (in my analyst's opinion).

Google will indeed start "fingerprinting" and indexing any video copyright holders send it. It will even get around to using this to block video content that it can identify that way, just as it is promising. This blocking will be poor at first -- it's hard to recognize video content -- but it will get better over time. (It won't stop the Viacom suit, though.)

In the meantime, Google will start to assemble an (internal) collection of copyrighted video. No, they won't steal it or publish it. But as they develop algorithms for identifying video by machine, they can use this collection as a test. Does our algorithm correctly identify the last episode of "The Sopranos," the "Daily Show" from last Tuesday, the evening news from WMUR Manchester for April 1, 2007? Can we really tell when Cameron Diaz was the guest on the Tonight Show using our face recognition algorithm? And so on.

There are hundreds of thousands of hours of professional video produced every day all around the world. This adds up to way more than the 10 million or so music tracks Audible Magic is collecting -- by orders of magnitude. Audible Magic has a great asset -- all the music labels send it all their music for indexing. If Google gets its way, all those video producers will pipe their video into Google, with descriptions, every day. Every movie and all the DVD extras. Every TV show. Every commercial. Every baseball game and cricket match. Every music video. Everything. And that, my friends, is a pretty good repository to test your video search on.

This is just what Google needs to make a video search that doesn't suck. And since everybody's else's video search sucks, that will be an incredible edge for Google.

Tags: YouTube, copyrights, Viacom, Google, Audible Magic, video search, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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By Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

Well, it’s not out yet. But we’re excited – we have a publisher! Harvard Business School Press will be publishing Groundswell in Spring of 2008.

We couldn’t be more pleased. First, the HBS Press imprint stands for a high degree of quality around the world. And second, we’re very excited to be working with the quality editorial team they’ve assembled for us.

Third, HBS Press shares our enthusiasm for tapping the groundswell itself to help research and promote the book, from collecting and vetting ideas on this blog to connecting with all of you to help with promotion as we publish.

For more on the book, click here.

To join our mailing list for information on the book, send an email to groundswell @ forrester.com.

Gotta go . . . back to writing!

Tags: Forrester Research, Groundswell

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by Josh Bernoff

Satellite trucks line up outside the spin room.

During the debate, the spin room is quiet. Most of the reporters are in the "filing center" (another gym next door). The candidates' spokespeople wait around listlessly.

Gather.com's bloggers blogged live on these bleachers while watching the debate on a monitor.

Once the debate is over, reporters and camera crews flood into the spin room. Here, a huge scrum of reporters broadcast an interview with a Hillary Clinton spokesperson.

After a few minutes, candidates themselves show up in the spin room. The first ones to arrive are long shots. Former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel showed up pretty quickly.

New Mexico governor Bill Richardson followed.

US Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio appeared with his wife by his side. (Yes, she really is that much taller than he is.)

Senator John Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, gave interviews as an Edwards surrogate.

A camera on a huge crane delivered images from way above the proceedings.

by Josh Bernoff

I spent last night in the spin room at the Democratic Presidential debate put on by WMUR-TV and CNN at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. WMUR is a Manchester TV station, owned by Hearst-Argyle.

Gather.com and WMUR teamed up to recruit bloggers to write about the debate. Only about 25 people signed up, probably because they didn't  give the promotion enough time. Gather.com's members chose the 15 best -- five democrats, five republicans, and five independents, all New Hampshire residents.

While this sounded like a good idea to me, when I saw the original blog postings I wasn't all that impressed. But that all changed last night.

I sat in the "spin room" with the bloggers as they covered the debate. First, let me set the stage. The spin room was a college gym with little platforms belonging to each candidate (photos here). During the debate, which happened in a hockey rink right down the street, the bloggers and I watched on a monitor in the spin room. (At one point they showed a shot of us on CNN.)

From the blogging perspective, what I found interesting was how the gather.com bloggers rose to the occasion. These were some pretty typical and ordinary people, moms, a student going back to journalism school -- not your hard-core political types at all. But partly because the spotlight was on them, and partly because they got to react to each other, some nice insights came out. Fred Hollander, an engineer whose question on earmarks was posed to the candidates during the debate, found most of their responses unsatisfying -- "Sounds like the democratic frontrunners would continue with the traditional corruption." (How cool is it that a blogger gets his question answered on national TV?) Rebecca Lavoie has a very  nice summary of the emotional style each candidate demonstrated, which is at least as important as issues and positions. Keith Ballingal pointed out that there seems to be an unnatural affinity between the Edwards and Obama campaigns -- and as soon as I read it, they backed each other up again on another point. And David Mirsky, who sat next me, seemed the most prolific with insights during the event.

Seth Godin has complained about the shortcomings of live blogging and I agree -- there's an inverse relationship between speed and value. But these regular old people that Gather has selected are getting better. I can't wait to see what they do with the Republicans.

After the debate was over, the spinning began. The room, which had been mostly empty, filled up with about thirty or forty film crews along with hundreds of print reporters. These proceeded to swarm around the surrogates on the platforms, giving interviews to "spin" their candidate's performance. Eventually most of the candidates showed up, roughly in reverse order of their popularity. Mike Gravel was first, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich and Bill Richardson soon after. Naturally, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards didn't show by the time I left, about 45 minutes after the debate ended.

Tags: WMUR, Democratic debate, liveblogging, gather.com, bernoff, Forrester Research, Groundswell

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