Consider that the average American household consists of 2.7 persons and contains 2.9 television sets, in front of which we sit for record-setting spells, according to Nielsen figures. In the quarter ended Sept. 30, the typical American watched 142 hours of television monthly, up about five hours from the same quarter the previous year.
— NYT.com
While most of the discussions around a Facebook sentiment engine have referenced the collection of data through active engagement in polls, there’s also a whole lot of passive discourse that could be mined in interesting ways.
— NYT.com
In an attempt to finally monetise the social networking site, once valued at $15bn (£10.4bn), it (facebook) will soon allow multinational companies to selectively target its members in order to research the appeal of new products. Companies will be able to pose questions to specially selected members based on such intimate details as whether they are single or married and even whether they are gay or straight.
userfly is a new start up looking to help bloggers and companies understand their site visitors’ behavior much better. I love it. They record a persons’ actions on a site then allow it to be played back as a video.
Typically I do this through in-person sessions, but this has application at a much grander scale (even though this could also augment more traditional 1on1 interviews as well).
Animal researchers believe that play serves as a kind of training for the unexpected. “Play is like a kaleidoscope,” says evolutionary biologist Marc Bekoff of the University of Colorado at Boulder, in that it is random and creative. The bottom line, he posits, is that play encourages flexibility and creativity that may, in the future, be advantageous in unexpected situations or new environments.
“PR disasters mounted. One Comcast cable guy fell asleep on a customer’s couch; the customer filmed it and put it on YouTube. In Virginia, a 75-year-old woman got so fed up with the company’s rude service and unreliable house calls that she smashed up a local Comcast office with a hammer.”
The survey of ten-year-old children found no evidence to support claims in Nintendo’s advertising campaign, featuring Nicole Kidman, that users can test and rejuvenate their grey cells. “The Nintendo DS is a technological jewel. As a game it’s fine,” said Alain Lieury, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Rennes, Brittany, who conducted the survey. “But it is charlatanism to claim that it is a scientific test.
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Next we’ll learn that the Wii Fit actually won’t help us substantially lose weight. And we’ll all be devastated.
Cuts in air pollution in US cities over recent decades have added an average of five months of life to their inhabitants, research suggests.
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For all the hype, we only get an average of five months?
Some 61% of those interviewed in the UK and US said setting up a new handset is as challenging as moving bank accounts.
— Via BBC. I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that mobile phone manufacturers might need to focus more time and energy on making their devices easier to use, rather than locking its customers into inane contracts.
Internet users viewed 12.7 billion online videos during the month, representing an increase of 34 percent versus year ago.
In this TED Talk, Benjamin Wallace explores some of the world’s most luxurious products all the while asking the question, “Can happiness be bought?”
His findings are interesting and suggest that if we perceive something to be more expensive we will in fact enjoy it more than something less expensive.
This is a pie chart from a recent Ad Age article regarding how much consumers would pay to visit their favorite website advertising free.
Before I get critical of this research (err, propaganda), I do think most people find viewing a few ads in order to see their favorite content online a nominal price to pay as:
Now, on to the critique. I think they would have received a completely different response had they made the choices 10 cents a day or 15 cents a day. Psychologically a few cents a day (even though it adds up to the same amount per year) feels more approachable.
Also, I would love to see an alternate model tested: what if people were allowed to give a tip in whatever amount they deemed appropriate at whatever frequency they so desired? How would that have tested in their research?
Regardless, doesn’t this research just seem a bit too self-serving (given the source)?
Recently I came across the site We Feel Fine, which from the site:
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day.
I read this and was intrigued, so I figured I would test it out. Below is my test. I compared the year 2007 to the year 2008 for the US. The list goes on even though I’ve only listed the top 5.
I’m amazed that 2007 and 2008 are so different. What’s most interesting to me is that overwhelmed is number 1 in 2008, even though it’s not even in the top 5 in 2007 (or in the top 16). I think that is actually a very accurate word to describe how people feel in 2008. Also, the fact that used pops up in 2008 is also very telling (it is also not on the list in 2007).
We are feeling overwhelmed and used.
Most representative feelings from 2007
Most representative feelings from 2008
I thought this was an interesting incentive to take a survey from Hulu, and it actually inspired me to participate, which I rarely, if ever, do.
I couldn’t care less that it is “from” the CEO, but I do like that his email address is listed.
I also like that it clearly tells me the length of the survey, the estimated time it will take me to finish, and, most importantly, that for my time they will offer free advertising on their site for a charity of my choice.
That’s way better than the usual “chance to win a free iPod” crap that is floating around the Net. What an inventive approach to convincing me to provide them with useful information.
