TIME Person of the Year: You

Yes You, the Internet user who actively generates content on the websites you visit (comments, uploads, posts) or on your own website or blog.

You are leading this digital age revolution. TIME and every other smart business reporter in the world agrees.

As do knowledgable marketers who realize that the future holds so many challenges to their brands, because every one of you will have a say!

TIME simply recognized the importance of the user generated content revolution. This comes following the massive successes, and buyouts, of YouTube- a video uploading site, MySpace- a blog and social network- and others. The recent announcement that MySpace has overtaken Yahoo in traffic, and the huge growth in the number of blogs worldwide, as anyone can see on Technorati.com- the world’s blog directory- which claims there are 55 million blogs.

And there are new trends emerging like Vlogs (video blogs), mobile blogging - yes on your mobile while you’re on the move- and so much more.

TIME says platforms for content generation, like YouTube and MySpace are "seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game."

To win this coveted honor, 'YOU' beat some tough competition this year for Person of the Year from the likes of Iran's President Ahmandinejad, China's President Hu Jintao, North Korean's Kim Jon Il, and President Bush.
In fact, on CNN.com and Time.com they were conducting a vote on these personalities. There was no sign of ‘You’, which made it such a pleasant surprise this week.

As TIME put it “Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion.

But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person.”

The article goes on to say you “made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. You blogged about your candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. You camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.”

TIME editors are so excited about the prospect of an “explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.”

Very inspiring. I’m going to post on my blog now, then comment on blogs of some friends, then upload some photos on Flickr and a video on YouTube.

It’s just another day in the life of me and you.

Published in The Star
zanasser@gmail.com

The ‘Instant Messaging gap’ between young and old

I was reading a report by the Associated Press about the ‘instant messaging gap’.
Apparently, there is a massive gap between adults and teenagers regarding the use of instant messaging (IM) to communicate.

The older the person, the less likely he/she has ever chatted through IM! Specifically, the generation American marketing researchers call baby boomers- those born from the mid-Forties to the late-Fifties as part of a boom in population witnessed across the world.

Almost half of teens, 48 percent of those ages 13-18, use instant messaging, according to the poll. That's more than twice the percentage of adults who use it.

The study also shows that the average teen, sitting near a computer at home, exchanges over 100 instant messages, with the total time spent messaging exceeding two hours. Adults, especially those over 35, prefer to use email and telephone.

Which brings us to the interesting comparison of email vs. IM. Three-fourths of adults use email more than IM, while three-fourths of teens send instant messages more than e-mail.

It’s like they come from absolutely opposite worlds in the ‘email-IM continuum’. So, obviously, teens cannot imagine life without IM.

Lifestyles come into this issue. Teens are socially active. In the US, 20% of teen users have turned to IM to ask for or accept a date, while 16 percent, have used it to break up with someone.

Watch out for the follow up to the movie “You’ve Got Mail”, which will be called ‘Dumped by IM’.

Still, this doesn’t mean adults won’t become more avid IM users. They’re learning from their children or younger co-workers and friends. An adult the Washington Post spoke to about this topic boasted discovering the joy of IM and sometimes having two IM conversations at once!

Teens can even can keep half a dozen conversations or more going at the same time. That’s multitasking for you!

Thankfully, the good old telephone still has its place even in the life of teens: when sharing serious or confidential news.

Sometimes we all feel a generation tech-gap between ourselves and teenagers! Then, we remember the very advanced uses of Internet, telecommunications and gadgets our work involves, and then we’ll feel it’s just the fact that different ages use different technologies and tools.

That’s probably the case with instant messaging. Who has time to chat online, with a job during the day and family and friends during the night. School age teenagers and tweens, that’s who!

In ten years, it’s worth talking to those same teenagers and asking them how much they use IM in their mid to late twenties. Surely, the teens of the future will exceed the IM habits of the teens of the past. Maybe by that time IM will have been replaced by three-dimensional, holographic imaging conversations between friends. Who knows!

(Published in The Star)
zanasser@gmail.com

YouTube blocked, controversy follows!

"This site is blocked, because is does not comply with the cultural and social values of our country"

This is the kind of message that Jordanians, thankfully, don't have to put up with. Sure, there must be some blocked sites- to be honest I haven't heard of any recently- but all the most popular sites are accessible in Jordan.

It seems authorities have decided to monitor who accesses what, rather than prevent people from accessing certain sites. Blocking is a practice which causes an uproar and bad publicity.

YouTube has been at the center of such practices across our region.

This is what happened when Etisalat blocked access to YouTube in the UAE. It was shocking that the supposed beacon of media in the region was preventing its metropolitan, multicultural population from viewing the world's best shared videos!

An uproar followed in the press and in blogs; and the site has been unblocked recently.

Many other sites still remain blocked, but the majority of them are pornographic sites.

After all, the UAE is part of the Arabia Gulf, a traditionally conservative area. Imagine what kind of site blockage you'll get in Saudi Arabia! Which brings us to the latest story regarding Iran blocking access to YouTube.

For a country like Iran, it seems completely understandable and expected that a site like YouTube would be banned. After all, there are some 'mature' videos on it.

The message users in Iran get when trying to access the site is the following: "On the basis of the Islamic Republic of Iran laws, access to this website is not authorized".

But, one must wonder why on earth was Wikipedia, an Internet encyclopedia, blocked by Iranian authorities last week. Apparently, it was only temporary, but such erratic blocking practices have caused concerns amongst users that authorities are acting on certain complaints, prior to checking the authenticity of such complaints.

In fairness to Iranian authorities, only sites deemed to have offensive sexual content suffer from blocks, whereas Western news sites, which criticize the Iranian government are fully accessible. That is a fact worth noting.

But, on the other hand, a report by the Washington Post suggests that Iranian authorities blocked YouTube because of "videos from the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq and other Iranian opposition groups". And, on a lighter note, other offensive videos include "Iranian pop music videos".

A study by censorship watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, says that the top 13 Internet censoring countries in the world are Belarus, China, Cuba, Iran, Egypt, Myanmar, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

So far, Jordan is not on the list. But who knows what will happen in the future!

zanasser@gmail.com