The Guardian Zeitgeist

Trending news stories is nothing new. All the major online news sources have a "most read" section, sites like Digg run entirely on the whims of the crowd, as does Twitter. However the fact that the Guardian is experimenting is worth a mention. Their new "Zeitgeist" section visualizes the most popular stories of the day, colour coding them depending on their genre. It also seems to be doing some clever things with how it chooses the stories; taking into account popularity of articles in that section, links and comments.

At the moment it seems less advanced than Newsmap, which has been around for a while, but we are excited about the possibilities.  We also trust the Guardian to create something innovative, after being impressed with their Iphone app and data visualization. If traditional news sources are going to survive they need to start looking at the Guardian and New York Times for tips.

Ephebiphobia

Nielsen’s latest report “How Teens Use Media” aims to rid the marketing world of ephebiphobia, the irrational fear of youth, debunking the myth that teens are wildly different to other consumers.
The report challenges the popular assumptions about teens, showing that although they may be wildly different to their counterparts of generations past, they are not that different in their media use to other consumers.

A couple of things that stood out for me:

• Teens are NOT abandoning TV for new media: In fact, they watch more TV than ever, up 6% over the past five years in the U.S. Furthermore 92% of teen viewing was live TV.
• Teens love the Internet…but spend far less time browsing than adults: Teens spend 11 hours and 32 minutes per month online—far below the average of 29 hours and 15 minutes. Not surprising when you consider teens spend much of their day in the classroom.
• Teens spend 35% less time watching online video than adults 25–34, but recall ads better when watching TV shows online than they do on television.
• The average US teen sends/receives 96 text messages EVERY DAY! This is up 566% in just 2 years. With this increase in mobile usage it’s not surprising that 62% of US mobile teens say that their parents have placed at least one restriction on their mobile use.
• It’s a myth that teens consume media 10 screens at a time. In reality 77% of the time teens are consuming media they are using just one at a time compared to 69% for adults.
  

Read the entire report HERE.