australians & social media

Laurel notice this research from Nielsen (& a brief search also reveals this recent data about Australasian SNS usage). At last, data, sweet data! What can we tell:

• Kiwis are more into this stuff than Aussies (esp. in the "friend finding" area).
• The most popular kind of shared media are photos.
• Lots of people like reading blogs and wikis.
• Quite a few people update blogs (about 15%). Now the survey refers to "online consumers" as the sample population. ABS data indicates that 61% of the 11.3 million online Australians purchased something. Which might indicate* there are approximately 200,000 bloggers in the Sydney area. I feel much less special now. Do you believe that figure?

*Sydney population x (% who purchase online x % who blog x Aussies online / Total Aussie pop)

cooking the books

I like analysing data*. And I also like to cook*. It only hit me recently that these two passions may be linked.

• Both of them require an attention to detail balanced with a focus on outcome.
• Both (to an extent) involve losing yourself in another world.
• And with both, either things work or they don't. There are steps to be taken if they don't work out but ultimately you have to bin it.
• Both do not require managing or persuading other people to do stuff (once you have your ingredients).
• And both are best when the results are presented to other for appreciative consumption.

Or is that just me?

*I like it but I don't always do it well.

virtual worlds (2): damned lies

I love data & statistics so I was mightly pleased to find this article in The Economist. Marvel at the lovely feats visual rhetoric created by Florence Nightingale & co. While I think that virtual worlds have some utility for training (where the skills being taught are primarily concerned with information manipulation), I think the real action is in visualising things you can't find in the real world. If we will indeed be Competing on Analytics more and more in the future then we will need robust ways of understanding this data. Most people are more comfortable with pictures as opposed to numbers so visualisation tools will be critical.