College trends

What gives with all the facebook talk? I've had college aged friends that have mentioned it too, but had never heard of digg or delicious or newsvine (as your data suggests). That is odd IMO.

What's so good about facebook and how are these people getting their info?!

Adam: the word of mouth network is hyper efficient now. Watch out for the next big thing: Second Life.

Well, I don't know how useful I'll be as a data point, but as a college student, I fall into the following groups:

- I don't have a MySpace profile, but I don't buy into that. I have a leased server in a datacenter that I use instead.
- I have a FaceBook profile, but only because you must have one to read others.
- I subscribe to the Digg RSS feed and read it nearly daily
- I subscribe to the BoingBoing RSS feed as well and occasionally visit some of the other places
- I've never heard of the Artic Monkeys, though they're pretty popular according to Wikipedia. (I don't watch tv or listen to the radio)
- I've bought music via the iTunes Music Storage and SharpMusic, which enables the purchase of AAC songs without a DRM wrapper, so that I can do things like listen to them on my Xbox
- I've heard of the Sony DRM scandal

Sure, while we're doing individual data points for students:

I don't have a MySpace profile.

I do have a Facebook Profile; it's nice for Birthday reminders and catching up with people I've lost track of from high school. Also, it's nifty to be able to put a face to a name sometimes (especially when you've got a position in a student government and get e-mails from people you're not sure if you've ever seen in real life or not).

I've heard of digg and subscribe to the RSS feed.

I've heard of all of BoingBoing, Del.ico.us, memorandum and NewsVine but don't regularly use any of them.

I haven't even heard of the Arctic Monkeys.

I haven't bought any music in the last month (I've taken to listening to Pandora.com or the local student-run radio station that has a shoutcast stream setup).

I've definitely heard about the Sony DRM scandal.

This is my second semester of grad school. I agree with the stats, that everyone in my class (~70 ppl) use Facebook obsessively. However, RSS, Digg, Del.icio.us, and any other Web 2.0 is only on my laptop--I'm the lone one plugged in to all of this around here.

As a bunch of future bureaucrats, that is probably (sadly) par for the course.

Not sure on music knowing or buying stats—-probably too glued to political news to bother with it is my guess.

I heard about SecondLife first on BoingBoing a year ago or maybe earlier. What has changed since that it should be a big thing? Evil Scoble joining?

As a first-year college student, I find that most people know about and use facebook and either zanga or myspace. I use facebook because I wanted people to feel like they could approach me since I wouldn't see them. It backfires, unfortunately, because most of the other women here forget that I didn't/can't see their pictures. I think filesharing is still pretty big on college campuses.

Even though I've been a full-time Microsoft employee for the past two-and-a-half years, I'm still younger than--or the same age as--quite a few undergrads out there; I turn 24 this summer. I've heard of facebook, never understood the appeal, bought the Arctic Monkeys' debut album the day it came out, have a myspace profile, stopped reading BoingBoing about six months ago, and have a Digg RSS feed subscription in NewsGator ;-)

oh yeah, and I own a few hundred CDs :)

Well, not only knowing boingboing, digg and the rest but how to use it shows one thing then: You are old and not any more connected with 'youth'.

I have to admit, I am kind of scared of what comes out of those colleges and I start realizing what our parents ment when they complained about my degenerated generation as in not reading as much as they did etc.

Probably Patrick will rebel soon because blogging is so 'mature'? :))

I think you'd be lucky if a quarter of any tech-oriented office (i.e. developers etc.) outside of SF/Silicon Valley/whatever it's called had heard of BoingBoing, Delicious, Memeorandum or NewsVine.

del.icio.us is useful on a personal scale, but the others? nah. They're all for people with too much time.

how do any of those points indicate their prepardness for the corporate world? What would me more interesting would be to understand what tools they use to interact and be productive. For example, I imagine email is rarely used.

I wonder how the knowledge/use of blogs, social media tools and the like differ by school. We spoke recently at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business to both the full time and part-time MBA students about the topic. When we polled the younger full-time students, not many read blogs or participated in Facebook, etc. In fact, after showing examples of blogs including Hacking Netflix and Scoblizer, one young 20-something exclaimed, "who are these bloggers? do they have real jobs?"

More here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChurchOfTheCustomer...

Was this such a surprise? Basic common sense says this, as Facebook and MySpace are clustered-environment social outlets (and just like pure democracies, they work on the small scale) -- all the rest is but geek fluff rot. Facebook is High School popularity games gone College Digital, MySpace is more trendy singles-bar meat-market, and that will always be a play, as sure as the thousands of dancey clubs that cater to that demographic. The geeks try and high-mind all the tech up, earnestly spinning their self-appointed self-important wheels, but it always ends up getting the largest audiences at the lowest common denominator point.

And with the iPod phenom, not hard to see that trend, embrace it and go licensee-style over fighting the format. But since he's 'Records', he missed asking the bigger, and far more ominous and less tractionable, question, that is, of the Media Centerish XVID/DIX/RMVB Torrent/Usenet movie download trend, which is seeing real mainstream uptick, beyond the usual geeks.

No suprise sherlock. The digerati self flatulation society of Silicon Valley - Winer, Curry, Scoble, Arrington, Battlelle, Canter etc - have got so myopic in their views they have started to believe their own PR. At least Winer and Scoble have relised this and either stopped blogging or reading the same rehashed stuff via memorandum, digg, etc. Memorandum is a geek club for geeks just as MySpace is a teenage club. Most teenagers are not Geeks and therefore do not frequent Geek sites.

As for the Artic Monkeys they are the biggest band out of the UK right now. Why are they interesting to Geeks. Well they launched their band through MySpace using word of mouth only at their Gigs and from MySpace friends. As the UK Charts now includes download tracks to decide on the chart positions - the Artic Monkey's reached No1 purely on the number of downloads they achieved prior to them even releasing a single or album.

Sam: first paragraph: spot on. Second: You are buying into just as much hype thinking the Arctic Monkey's were a success ONLY because of viral marketing. They did have a record company, are seeking more distribution and had plenty of side marketing hype generated through traditional media outlets.

The Artic Monkeys success is just as much of a marketing success via traditional means as it is via viral means.

Like I told the class at UCSB: record companies still do something for bands. It's just a matter of us adapting to a market place that expects us to do things differently. It is also why I was hired 9 months ago :)

have got so myopic in their views they have started to believe their own PR.

Yeah, and then go burnout, when their cries are not heeded, pity party de jour. JetSetting and lunching with Gates, yet going 'woe is me'. Crying a river. And Dave, taking his ball and going home. About time.

Artic Monkeys success? Bit too early for that, per se. Ramp up one-hit wonders come and go, never mind, viral or traditional. NME overhype de jour. Irony that Ethan, is claiming "traditional" when everything has been indie about them, from the offering demos on the net to now -- the one in the million, that broke through, and I mean Domino is pure oddball indie.

PS - Anyone going to NAB by car (and near Chicago)?

@16 "one young 20-something exclaimed, “who are these bloggers? do they have real jobs?”

Ding! Ding! We have a winner!!! Refreshing that they realize time to business value of blogging is still way out of whack

I'm a college student as well. I'd like to know how many people were in that audience.

One thing that may have skewed the results slightly is that they were looking at UCSB, a well known "party" school. I'm sure results would be slightly different if they traveled north to Berkeley. Just like the general population, the stats will vary depending upon the interests of the audience.

That being said, Facebook is far more popular among university students. Myspace is the annoying little brother of Facebook, crowded with teens and fake profiles, something which I, and many college students, am fed up with. A Facebook account can only be obtained by students with university email accounts. This eliminates any spam, porn, etc profiles. Oh yeah, and the youngn's.

Those stats are not that surprising to me. It is easy to get caught up in the "bigness" of your own little world, no matter how small it is. When you are surrounded bu others that know what you're talking about, you think everone does. The truth is they don't. This applies to any group of people with similar interests.

How many tech companies are based in Santa Barbara?
How many tech companies are based in Seattle?
How many tech companies are based in Mountain View?

It would be interesting to see how all of this affecting radio play. In past eras, songs were recorded to tape or CD straight from the radio (included pesky DJ voiceovers). Today everyone simply downloads what they want for free or pennies.
Are people listening to the radio less? Are stations with pre-recorded music programs and little talk still bringing in advertisers?