In case you didn’t, let me share my recent findings with you. While researching social media for a client recently I discovered some interesting (and some not so interesting) facts about social media, the internet and the Chinese.  Like, if you consider yourself one in a million in China, there are 1 300 people just like you!  I started my journey on Google, as it is the worlds number one search engine and then discovered that in the very near future we will no longer search for products and services, they will find us via social media.  Nooooo!  I like saying Google just as I like saying Hoover – I will hoover up that mess as soon as I’ve finished Googling the best place to buy a vacuum cleaner.

After trawling through pages of web and blog sites I found my first really interesting fact – that You Tube is the second largest search engine in the world.  And it is here that I discovered Pandora’s Box.  I will not delve too deeply into the facts, except to tell you that all of the Top 10 jobs of 2010, not one existed in 2004.  Really!  Do what I did – type “Did you know” into the You Tube search tool and expect to be amazed.  Video upon video of (I will not say all of them are) interesting facts, all of them user generated, await to spew their often anecdotal tidbits onto your screen.  Some are interesting facts for dinner table conversation ignitors, like the one about Barrack Obama not raising funds for his election campaign in the traditional manner, instead he raised $55 million via social networks, in just 29 days! Others are great for client presentations, like 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisements.

So don’t ever get caught without an interesting fact again.  Apparently this is the Attention Age so pay attention dammit!

A survey of 16 to 24 year olds has found that 75% of them feel they “couldn’t live” without the internet.

The report, published by online charity YouthNet, also found that four out of five young people used the web to look for advice. About one third added that they felt no need to talk to a person face to face about their problems because of the resources available online. The findings were unveiled at the Houses of Parliament on Wednesday.

Despite high-profile examples of internet security breaches, such as the recent incident of phishing email scams, 76% of the survey group thought the internet was a safe place “as long as you know what you’re doing”. “Probably the middle-aged are the most vulnerable,” said Open University psychologist Graham Jones. “I think children, teenagers and people under their mid-20s have grown up with technology and they understand it deeply,” he said.

Charlie McDonnell is a 19 year old video blogger on YouTube – With 200,000 subscribers and more than 20 million hits overall, he is the third most subscribed to on the site. He started in April 2007 while “procrastinating over exam revision”. He amassed around 150 viewers until he made a tongue-in-cheek film called “how to get featured on Youtube”. His mother had no interest in the internet until he got started. Now he has shown her everything and she uses his hand-me-down old kit to make her own Youtube video logs. His use of the net illustrates how sophisticated young consumers are. “I never really look for news, I find out about stuff that interests me from blogs. I use them as a filter to find news that I find interesting. Twitter’s not very accurate – it’s one person saying they saw something on one website – but it’s good for getting information straight away,” he said.

Mr Jones thinks it is the parents who need to become more sophisticated. “One of the biggest problems for children is not that they are vulnerable but that their parents don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. It is a point Mr McDonnell agrees with. “It’s important that parents have full understanding of the internet and its risks – younger people need parental direction,” he said.

‘Digital natives’

The survey, funded by the Nominet Trust – a charity that encourages the safe use of the internet – looked at how the web influences the well-being of people aged between 16 and 24. Its author, Professor Michael Hulme of Lancaster University, names this age group “digital natives” as they have grown up in an environment rich with computer and mobile technology. “For young people the internet is part of the fabric of their world and does not exist in isolation from the physical world,” he said.

Enter JokeyPhone –  (Thanks to Mashable who found it for me, by the way.)

Jokeyphone is basically “The YouTube of Jokes”, a video site that “allows users to tell jokes, pass them along, re-tell them using the webcam and teleprompter, and create their own joke channels.” The moment you land on the page, you are greeted by a random joke to watch and then the real fun begins.

For a laugh a minute, turn on ‘Auto Play’, which allows you to watch joke after joke without interruption. Each new joke starts five seconds after the last one, giving you enough time to save or replay a joke. You can also find the best joke content by jumping to the most viewed or highest rated sections, or start your own joke channel. Meanwhile, Jokeyphone have promised to push out Facebook, iPhone and Blackberry apps in the near future so you’ll be able to waste time outside the office as well. As we do.

Finally, if you think the joke tellers you’re seeing suck – don’t you hate it when someone totally stuffs up the punchline? – you can retell it yourself by using the ‘U-Tell Joke’ feature. Just try not stuff it up yourself. I did… and ended up leaving Jokeyphone with my tail between my legs as the biggest joke of the whole site.

Speaking of YouTube, I came across a post the other day heralding ‘The Top YouTube Videos of All Time’. Go check them out at ReadWriteWeb. Just for fun.

The latest venture that really demonstrates the culture of the social web comes from Kutiman from Israel. He has mashed and mixed amateur video clips from YouTube musicians to create an almost perfect album.

“ThruYOU” has taken the Web by storm and has received over a million views since its release.

Via The Huffington Post:

What ThruYOU tells us is that all bets are off. The DNA of our media system has mutated so completely that it’s only a matter of time before our society changes as well.

In fact, that change is already happening.

In politics, economics, arts and culture, an era of privileged access is giving way to something that’s much more decentralized, participatory and personal.

We no longer passively consume media, we actively participate in it. This often means creating content, in whatever form and from whatever sources — what author Jonathan Zittrain calls “generativity.”

We no longer limit our political involvement to television ads and the polling booth. This means organizing via Facebook, “Googling” candidates to learn more, joining text-messaging lists and creating Twitter hash tags to stay ahead of our issues.

Read the original article where Timothy Karr explores how this will further impact the web and social media trends.

There are many ways to discover new music online but one of my preferred services is last.fm – the desktop app is easy to use. By ’scrobbling’ my tracks from my iPod to my online profile, last.fm then learns my music preferences and knows to *never* play Hootie and the Blowfish but recommends new artists and bands that I’d probably be interested in.

last.fm is a social network so it means I can also check out what my friends are listening to and recommend and share tracks with them…..everything is better when it’s shared

I was interested to discover today that YouTube houses the biggest collection of music on the web (like facebook holds the biggest collection of photos.) With this in mind Muziic has launched – The YouTube media player promises millions of songs in your desktop media player, all legal, all there for you to listen to. They also offer an advanced music encoder so that you can upload your own original mp3’s and it won’t sound like your band is recording in your mom’s bathroom.

Facebook

• There are more than 14 million photos being uploaded to Facebook each day
• There are 6 million active user groups
• Segment of users who are 25 years or older are the fastest growing segment
• There are more than 250,000 new registrations per day since January of 2007
• There are more than 859 million installations of 20,000 applications
• Super Wall by Rock You! is the most popular application with 28 million installs on Facebook
• 2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily
• 100 – number of friends the average user has
• 140 – number of new applications added per day

World Internet users

• 35.6% of internet users are Asian (389 million unique users each month)
• In Africa, 3 out of 100 surf the Internet
• In Asia, 10 out of 100 surf the Internet
• In Europe, 38 out of 100 surf the Internet
• In Middle East, 10 out of 100 surf the Internet
• In North America, 70 out of 100 surf the Internet
• In Latin America, 16 out of 100 surf the Internet
• In Australia, 53 out of 100 surf the Internet
• Only 16.6% of world population surf the internet
• 1 billion users around the globe are surfing the Internet every month
• The amount of internet surfers in Asia is 11 times the population of Australia
• 19% of internet users are from United States
• Around 18 countries still doesn’t have Internet connection

Porn

• 33% of all search engine requests are porn related
• 40% of all internet downloads are porn in nature
• Every second, $95.00 is spent on internet porn
• Everyday, 320 new porn sites appear on the internet
• “Sex” is the most searched word on the internet
• Estimated US revenue from internet porn in 2008 – $3.44 Billion
• 72% of internet porn users are men, 28% are women
• 70% of internet p0rn traffic occurs during the 9-5 workdays
• There are an estimated 450 Million porn web pages

Blogs

• Over 12 million American adults currently maintain a blog.
• The highest amount of blog readers are Canadian.
• 46% of bloggers are women.
• 54 % of bloggers are men.
• The most popular blog in the world is that of Chinese actress Xu Jinglei.
• 133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002
• 346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs
• 900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period
• 1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch

Browsers as of Jan 2009 (global)

• MSIE 7    42%
• MSIE 6    34%
• FireFox 17%
• Safari         4%
• Opera        1%

Google

• One trillion – approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index
• Two billion – very rough number of Google searches daily
• $110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button
• 24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)
• 68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year
• $39.96 – the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords
• 5,540,000 – the number of Google results for “Amorphous”

Twitter

• 1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date
• 3,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2008)
• 165,414 – number of followers of the most popular Twitter user (@BarackObama)
• 86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)

Youtube

• 70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube (March 2008)
• 200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)
• 100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day
• 112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has
• 2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video
• 412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)
• 26.57 – average age of uploader
• 13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006
• $1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day

Sources:

Kreuzner’s Korner
The MoneyAc.com
Rose DesRochers
The Counter
Wikipedia
HongKiat

Diesel have experimented and set the trend with this cutting edge technology during their ‘Liquid Space‘ Holographic Fashion Show.  Forget the models kitted out in the latest Diesel attire, what really stole the show were the CGI characters.

While regular human models paced up and down the runway, a host of polyp-like CGI characters appeared in mid-air to interact with them in an underwater landscape. In a unique twist, the animated holograms were entirely viewable from both sides of the stage.

The visuals are projected through a series of ‘foils’ into mid-air. Plastic foils were placed at 45 degree angles so that the projected light from the ceiling goes onto a foil, and is reflected on to another and then into the air. The animations were done with standard CGI animation software but were made for a 15m by 2.5m screen. It’s all rendered in HD too so was quite demanding as it’s 30 frames per second.

You can read more here.

Check out the show on YouTube (it’s a bit long but is really amazing from about 9 min)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCcTRjxP-Fc

Some of the most successful advertising campaigns in history have utilised the medium creatively to further enhance the message; the medium becomes the message.

Nintendo took the digital lead here by rearranging a YouTube page to launch a video for the game ‘Wario Land; Shake It’. The ’shaking’ causes the footage to ‘escape’ from the viewer into the whole YouTube screen page. Clear message, great creative, effective product communication.

Check out the ad here.

The newest service, Mixtube, takes advantage of all the music stored on YouTube and allows users to create ‘mixed tapes’ using audio on YouTube videos. It takes over where now dormant Muxtape left off.

Although the YouTube sound quality isn’t always great it gives users and opportunity to discover and mix songs that they otherwise may not have been able to find. Of course as always, music rights and other permission issues are always in question with regards the web but until that conflict is resolved new audio services like this keep it interesting.

The Google Labs team continues to innovate and amaze, with the new GAudi service you’ll be able to search for audio clips from various channels of YouTube video. If you’ve heard a specific line of a politician’s speech then type in some of the words and you’ll be directed to that specific part of the video.

As the web becomes more and more video focused the GAudi service will allow users to search audio within video, broadening the search giant’s service offering. The offering is in labs stage and is limited at the moment but will prove more valuable as more and more video content is indexed.

From the Google Blog: “We just launched Google Audio Indexing (aka GAudi) in Google Labs. The dedicated site offers more features, such as “search within video” and “sharing,” and a more robust user interface.”