The second of her two tables lists the categories receiving the highest concentration of visits from internet users in this age group:

The trends here offer interesting guidance for both newspaper publishers and prospective web site owners:

1) Leisure interests appear to outweigh professional interests when it comes to using the web. It’s not clear whether this means that 18–34 year olds are more likely to use the internet outside work hours. I haven’t done a survey, but do any newspapers provide daily in-depth wrestling coverage? The position of tennis on the list is probably misleading because of the Wimbledon tournament. It’s also a period where there’s no football (soccer), so that’s why it doesn’t figure, I guess.

2) Nonetheless, Business and Finance appears four times in the top ten categories. Proper news isn’t something to eliminate by any means. Hopkins notes, “The top sites in the News and Media category last week based on visits were BBC News, Yahoo! UK & Ireland News, Google News, and the Telegraph.”

3) While technology sites (and porn) still rule the roost when it comes to the volume of visits (which is covered in another table), the site categories that are attracting the highest concentration of visits cover very mainstream topics.

4) Newspapers might consider upping the amount of space they devote to what they’ve traditionally put on women’s pages. Weddings, beauty, health and general women’s issues are clearly exerting a big pull online.

Sounds like good news for booksellers. “Google Book Search may be facilitating sales of Books.” Well, maybe.

Heather then goes on to give a picture of the people who follow this search path: “The 55+ age group was 69% more likely to be on Google Book Search than average for the UK internet population … The Types that are most highly over-represented on Google Book Search UK are really interesting as they represent young uni students and the elderly.” One thing that links many members of those two groups together is, of course, low incomes.

Google’s book search is, among other things, a low-cost way to gain access to books and to learn more about books you might consider buying. One great feature is links from the book lists to worldcat, which allows you to see which libraries in your area stock the book. Perhaps the 16% downstream from book search to book shops represents the people who are frustrated that they can’t get the works they want as a free PDF or loan it from a local library?

Elsewhere: Students Seek Alternatives as Textbook Prices Mount

and Google’s PDFs not very usable.

It’s well worth a read. Perhaps of especial interest is what he says about training for these new journalists:

Other sites have done more extensive training, but we specifically made ours “training lite” based on earlier misgivings from interested people about doing “journalism.” Plus, we had concerns about where “citizen” ends and “journalist” begins when the training becomes more extensive (we also felt our turnout would be very light if we went beyond a half-day).

[…]

Keep it simple, short, focused and effective. Do not expect to turn your contributors into journalists; just help them learn to use your site so that they do not feel intimidated.

It’s interesting that despite pitched battles between the champions of citizen journalism and old guard media elitists, the actual practitioners of citizen journalism here felt that they were more citizen than journalist. There’s no judgement in that about the readability and relevance of the publication, it’s just that the people involved didn’t feel that they’d automatically become journalists despite their power to publish.

There’s lots of other very interesting information and advice in the guide, from the costs of setting up to the attractions and perils of hiring professionals to help to seed the content.

I need to clarify that (before the divorce papers are filed). This is the top result for the search term ‘woman’, ranked by interestingness, that I found in a search on flickr this afternoon.

The picture was taken by the very talented Babeffe.

What makes for interestingness on flickr? It’s an aggregation of the number of notes, comments, favouritedness (sorry) and links to a submitted image.

The photo itself has been annotated a number of times by users. They point to the slight inequality between the eyes, the shape of the lips and the relationship between the woman, the photographer and the second woman in the picture. The comments are nearly all in Spanish, but my tourist-level translation skills suggest that she’s thought of as very beautiful by a lot of people.

But ‘interesting’? What does that word mean? (adjective 1. arousing curiosity or attention: arousing curiosity, attracting or holding attention, or provoking thought 2. not boring: enjoyable because of being varied, challenging, stimulating, or exciting). Thank you, Encarta.

Yes, she’s interesting. But the definition gives no idea of how to rank interesting things. In fact, it appears to be an entirely subjective quality, judging from that definition. That’s true in normal life too, of course. I tell people that I am interested in Web 2.0, and they tell me to grow-up and get a life. Does the fact that the vast majority of comments are in Spanish not suggest that there is a very strong cultural weighting to the idea of ‘interesting’?

I raise this because my new pal, Tim O’Reilly, has recently written on the subject:

Google made a breakthrough in web search with its original idea of links as citations (i.e. PageRank), and they are still the undisputed leader in general web search, but they haven’t done as well in searching rich media. I think they have some things to learn from Flickr. More specifically, web search innovators all need to think through what makes results “interesting” for a given domain. I like what flickr has done in calling out “interestingness” as a quality worth searching for, and leaving it as a playground for exploration.

I kind of agree. Interestingness is a quality worth searching for. I don’t want the most popular links on the subject I search for, say “mashups”, like Google gives me. I want the most interesting and informative one or two. Oh… hang on… that’s exactly how interestingness on flickr is calculated.

We don’t have agreement on the philosophical meaning of beauty, but we do have computer algorithms that will calculate it according to most people’s criteria. Again, we have a populist interpretation of very personal values. So by that scale…

Picasso is more interesting than Mondrian. That picture of dogs playing poker is more interesting than either. Still interested?

The Bivings Group notes that while US newspapers are more likely to offer videos, podcasts and journalists’ blogs, UK papers win on message boards and forums.

The Guardian leads on technology with 13 out of the 13 technology features measured in the poll. Later to the market than papers like the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian has been fast to embrace Web 2.0, with its blog section Comment is Free, rapidly attracting established writers and bloggers.

However, it’s worth noting that some of the UK’s most conservative papers, The Sun, the Daily Mail and The Times, appear to be the some of the most keen to embrace new technologies with eight, nine and ten out of thirteen feature ticks respectively. The Sun and The Times are both owned by News International, which might partially explain this trend.

Sadly, papers with the weakest circulations, such as the Independent, seem the least likely to use any of these features, all of which are designed to increase stickiness and loyalty.

found via Stuart Bruce

The study finds that instant messaging language does mirror patterns in speech, but that teens, surprisingly, are actually using a fusion of different levels of diction. Teens are using both informal forms that their English teachers would never allow, yet they also use formal writing phrasing that, if used in speech, would likely be considered “uncool.”

“Everybody thinks kids are ruining their language by using instant messaging, but these teens’ messaging shows them expressing themselves flexibly through all registers,” says Tagliamonte. “They actually show an extremely lucid command of the language. We shouldn’t worry.”

Via slashdot